The process of ostracism was devised to guard the state against any future demagogue who might, like Pisistratus, aspire to make himself a tyrant, and perhaps also against the recurrence of such a contest for the chief power as had arisen between Cleisthenes and Isagoras. The public assembly could, without naming any person, order that on a fixed date a vote should be taken in which each citizen might write on a potsherd the name of any man who ought in his opinion to be banished. In case the name of any citizen was found to be written on six thousand of the potsherds, he went into exile for a term of years but did not suffer any further hurt[151]. [151] For the process of Ostracism see Grote, octavo edition, vol. III. p. 133, cabinet edition, vol. IV. p. 83. Local divisions and local governors had existed in Attica even before the time of Cleisthenes: the divisions were called naucrariæ and their governors naucrari. We know nothing about them except that each naucraria contributed two horsemen to the army and a ship to the navy, and that the naucrari assessed the taxation needed for these purposes and had something to do in the expenditure of it. Cleisthenes established his demes as local divisions in lieu of the naucrariæ, in each deme he set up a demarchus or president of the deme, and the demarchi took over the functions which the naucrari had hitherto discharged[152]. Beyond what I have stated we know nothing from direct testimony about the demes in the days of Cleisthenes: but there can be no doubt that even in his time the inhabitants of every deme used to meet in assembly and the assembly regulated the affairs of the deme. There had been a time when Attica was the home not of one state but of many independent commonwealths each having its own government[153] and its own divinities: and the people in the days of Cleisthenes had not forgotten the fact, for their descendants eighty years later in the time of Pericles still cherished its memory[154]. Moreover the Athenians even so late as the time of Pericles delighted in country life for its own enjoyments[155], and even then a majority of the citizens of Athens lived not in the city but in the country[156]: and if the attractions of life in the city did not draw men to desert their demes and live in Athens in the time of Pericles it is certain that nothing that the city could offer in the time of Cleisthenes would entice them from rural to urban life. From all these considerations it is clear that the rural demes in the days of Cleisthenes were well filled with a resident population: the resident inhabitants of the rural demes were citizens of Athens, and, as citizens, took part in settling great matters of state: and it cannot be supposed that they did not take part in regulating the comparatively trivial affairs of their own localities. In the time of Demosthenes about a century and a half after Cleisthenes the assemblies of the demes were fully