The situation of the democratic party had been very unstable. Its sympathies had been balanced on a razor’s edge, ready to incline to the one side or the other on the slightest shifting of the weights in the political scale. The severities of the last years of the rule of Hippias, after the murder of Hipparchos, had been sufficient to make it passively acquiesce when the intrigues of the Alkmæonidæ against the tyrant were brought to a successful termination by the agency of Sparta; but they had not wholly blotted out the memory of the fact that the triumph of Peisistratos had been in a very real sense the triumph of democracy. By the reforms of Kleisthenes, however, the Alkmæonidæ had made a strong and successful bid for popular favour; and from 509 onward the fortunes of the democratic party were closely linked with those of this powerful clan. The opposition, backed by the influence of the repentant Sparta, was dangerously strong. First one side and then the other held the upper hand; but, in the years immediately preceding Marathon, the political fortunes of the democrats seem to have been at a low ebb. There had been one great trial of strength. Miltiades had arrived in Athens in 493, an exile from his tyranny in the Thracian Chersonese, driven out by the Persians. #POSITION OF THE DEMOCRATS IN 490.# He was not likely to sympathize with any party which had shown leanings towards Persia; he seems, indeed from the moment of his return, to have set himself up and to have been recognized as the champion of the aristocratic and anti-Persian party. As such he was attacked by the democrats, being prosecuted on a charge of “tyranny” in the Chersonese. His acquittal was a great victory for the aristocrats, and a severe blow for their opponents. From 493 to 490 his party seems to have been in power. It is quite evident, at any rate, that he was the foremost man in Athens at the time of Marathon. The outlook for the democrats was gloomy. It is not strange if they began to regret the past. The “golden age” of Peisistratos gained in glory from its being far. His tyranny had been more of a blessing than a curse to the mass of the people. The yoke it had laid upon them had been light; and, in return for their submission to it, they had attained to a prosperity they had never before enjoyed. The present was full of possibilities in great contrast to that past. The reforms of Kleisthenes, that great measure, or series of measures, which had purchased their oblivion of a beneficent tyranny, seemed likely to be undone. The Demos was not bound any longer to forget, if it was like to be robbed of the price of forgetting. Thus, not unnaturally, the thoughts of a section of the Athenians, headed by the Alkmæonidæ, turned to Hippias. His restoration would be a lesser evil than a return to the old oppressions of the days before Peisistratos.