The Demes of Attica, 508/7 -ca. 250 B.C.: A Political and Social Study

by David Whitehead

Overview

This work is a richly detailed study of the nature and development of the 139 Attic demes, the local units that made up the city-state of Athens during the classical and early Hellenistic periods.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691611105
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #416
Pages:	516
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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The Demes of Attica 508/7â"CA. 250 B.C.

A Political and Social Study

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By David Whitehead

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09412-0

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CHAPTER 1

BEFORE AND AFTER KLEISTHENES

"So first he distributed everyone into ten tribes instead of the (previous) four, with the object of mixing them up so that more might share in the rights of a citizen. From this arose the saying 'No prying into tribes' as a retort to those wishing to enquire into ancestry ... (4) And he divided the country, by demes, into thirty parts — ten in the city area, ten around the coast, ten inland. These he called trittyes, and he assigned three by lot into each tribe, so that each (tribe) should share in all the three regions. And he made (fellow-)demesmen of those living in each of the demes, in order that they would not, by using patronymics, expose the new citizens, but would call them after the demes; and hence Athenians do call each other after the demes. (5) He also established demarchs, with the same responsibility as that of the previous naukraroi; for he made the demes to replace the naukraries. Some of the demes he named after their localities, others after their founders, as (founders) no longer existed for all the places. (6) But he left everyone free to belong to clans and brotherhoods and to hold priesthoods as tradition dictated. He gave the tribes ten eponymous heroes, whom the priestess at Delphi chose from a pre-selected one hundred."

Since the rediscovery of the work on papyrus at the end of the nineteenth century, the twenty-first chapter of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia has represented proof positive, for most scholars, that Kleisthenes was the legislator responsible for the formal creation of the Attic deme system. Prior to that rediscovery, the only fragment of the chapter preserved in the manuscript tradition merely reported Kleisthenes' creation of the demarchs, and thus left open the possibility that the demes themselves were in official (that is, constitutional) as well as unofficial existence before Kleisthenes. The best-known version of such a view was Beloch's thesis that both the demes and the ten new phylai into which they were grouped were the brainchildren of the tyrant Peisistratos. That it was, on the contrary, Kleisthenes who created the phylai is expressly stated by Herodotus (5.68-69), for whom they were virtually synonymous with Athenian democracy itself. As regards the demes, however, Herodotus does not say in so many words that Kleisthenes created them, merely (in 5.69.2) that he "allocated the demes to the tribes." Other evidence is vaguer still. Isocrates, for example, alludes to the progonoi of the Athenians "dividing the polis by komai and the country by demes" (7.46, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). A. E. Raubitschek asserted that this gives "the substance of the Kleisthenian deme legislation." But that begs a question: no explicit subject governs the intriguing participial phrase in the passage, and one has to retreat fully thirty chapters, to 7.16, to find there two names — Solon and Kleisthenes!

Should we then regard the Aristotelian testimony, ascribing sole responsibility to Kleisthenes, as decisive? Certainly the residue of the evidence, as we shall see, puts no obstacle in the way of accepting it. Yet equally demonstrable is the fact that Kleisthenes did not conjure his political and demographic infrastructure ex nihilo. On the contrary, almost all his raw materials were ready to hand, awaiting only the new, official, systematized role in central and local government with which the reforms of the late sixth century were to invest them.

A. The Demes before Kleisthenes

"... a big area of irregular fertility, with her population here scattered, there clustered, like pebbles on a board ..." Such is L. H. Jeffery's description of seventh-century Attica, and it is borne out by both the literary and the archaeological record.

Of the size of the Attic peninsula, which came to form the polls of the Athenians, there is of course no room for doubt. Its extent of approximately a thousand square miles — modem Luxemburg would be a fair comparison — was unsurpassed amongst the poleis of mainland Greece, excepting only the special and anomalous case of Sparta. In agricultural terms much of this area was indeed mediocre, as is pointed out by the ancient authorities from Thucydides (1.2.5) onwards, but that fact did not prevent archaic Athens from becoming an agriculturally oriented polis like all the rest; and such agricultural resources as Attica did boast could not have been adequately exploited without substantial numbers of "Athenians" living not, in fact, in Athens but out in the countryside (chora). This was still true, furthermore, in the last third of the fifth century, on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. In another well-known passage (2.14-16) Thucydides describes the evacuation of Attica which that war made necessary, and he observes that the associated upheavals were all the more distressing because most Athenians had "always" been used to an independent existence in the country (2,14,2, cf. 16.1).

What Thucydides reveals here about the distribution of the Athenian citizen population in his own day is naturally of the greatest interest, but the word always ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) marks the important point on which he — and presumably his contemporaries — must now stand corrected by the evidence of archaeology. It is now clear that, during the centuries which followed upon the destruction and collapse of Mycenaean Greece in the period ca. 1200-1150, the Attic countryside was very sparsely inhabited indeed; which is to say that numerous Mycenaean settlements outside Athens itself, many of them on or near the coast, had been abandoned. Athens itself was one of the very few Mycenaean cities to have survived the twelfth century unscathed, yet the chaos and disruption of that period and its aftermath was long-lived in its effects upon settlement patterns in Attica at large. "Two centuries after the fall of Mycenae, even though the conditions of daily life were more settled ... there was still a great concentration of people in Athens, while the Attic coasts and plains were extremely underpopulated. The men of Attica, so it seems, were still affected by a general feeling of insecurity, which deterred them from living in small villages." This remained largely true, it would appear, of the second half of the tenth century and even of the first half of the ninth. The quasi-urban center (asty) of Athens itself — in fact little more than a cluster of villages — to which the rural population had fled for refuge during the troubles, still housed the vast preponderance of the population. Otherwise there is evidence of habitation from a mere handful of the old Mycenaean sites, notably Eleusis, Haliki Glyphadas (ancient Aixone), Marathon, Menidi (Acharnai), Merenda (Myrrhinous), and Thorikos. Not surprisingly, all these outlying townships or villages survived to become incorporated, ultimately, into the Kleisthenic deme network.

During the next century (850-750), however, signs of change are increasingly plain. There begins at last a gradual repopulation of the countryside — specifically and particularly, a movement back to the coastal areas, where the old-established centers such as Eleusis and Marathon grew in size still further and others apparently sprang up to join them. Nor was this a decentralization of population only; it was also a decentralization of wealth. The richest graves of the early eighth century come not from Athens itself but from Eleusis and Anavysos (ancient Anaphlystos). To be sure, this (apparent) decline in the affluence of the denizens of "urban" Athens, when compared with the mid ninth century, was not a lasting one. There are graves from the mid eighth century which are no less wealthy than those of a hundred years earlier. More important, the sheer number of the inhabitants of the asty started to rise, during the second quarter of the eighth century, at a rate which at its full extent has been dubbed by one archaeologist a "population explosion." Yet the results of this are to be seen even more dramatically in the Attic countryside, where the surge in population over the same period was evidently more vertiginous still; and although the unsystematic manner in which rural Attica has been excavated means that the basis for such generalizations is less firm than one would like, it does nonetheless look as though many sites, both on the coast and inland, which had remained unoccupied since Mycenaean times were resettled during the second half of the eighth century.

This then was the time, seemingly, when numerous centers of population which were later given official recognition as demes came into existence. No Iron Age pottery from an earlier period has come to light at, for example, Helleniko (ancient Halimous), Phaleron, Trachones (Euonymon), or Vari (Anagyrous), of the coastal demes; nor, for example, at Draphi (?Ionidai), Kaki Thalassa (Kephale), Kalyvia Kouvaras (Prospalta), or Koropi (Sphettos), of the demes in the inland plains. This (re-) settlement of the plains is of course especially significant, as has properly been observed; for whereas the location of many of the coastal settlements is ambiguous in terms of the orientation of their inhabitants towards either sea or land, the same obviously could not be said of a site like Koropi/Sphettos, where arable farming must have been the overriding objective. Moreover the decentralization of wealth was ever-increasing as the eighth century ran its course. A veritable rural "gentry" was taking shape, and the growth in the population as a whole was being successfully absorbed by the Attic countryside itself. The Athenians, it is regularly commented, took no part in the overseas colonization movements which began in the second half of the eighth century. We can now appreciate one important reason for this: they were busy "colonizing" their own chora.

As far as Athens and Attica are concerned, then, the population growth of eighth-century Greece led above all else to a' dioecism, a centrifugal dispersal from asty to chora, At first sight this seems paradoxical, since the ninth and (especially) eighth centuries comprise the period wherein the majority of scholars would set the very opposite process, the synoecism of Attica attributed by Athenians of the classical age (e.g. Thuc. 2.15) to Theseus. But the paradox may admit of a simple resolution. First, there were two kinds of Greek synoikismos. Sometimes the process did entail a literal, physical "settling together," a centripetal human migration; in other instances, however, a more accurate term might be sympoliteia, a centralization of political and religious institutions with little or no change of actual habitation — the result, often, of the pressure of force majeure; and it is plain that the synoecism of Attica belongs in the second of these categories. Secondly, that very fact makes its date all the more difficult to determine. The principal reason for locating at least part of the Attic synoecism as late as the end of the eighth century has been the belief that Eleusis and the Marathonian Tetrapolis (Marathon, Oinoe, Probalinthos, and Trikorynthos) were still independent of Athenian control then. The evidence for this has been shown to be weak, however, and the case well argued for a synoecism in Mycenaean times. The theory is by no means implausible per se, for the remains of Mycenaean Athens are those of a city which might well have dominated all or most of the Attic townships of its period. On the other hand, such domination is unlikely, to say the least, to have survived the great twelfth-century collapse intact, so any Mycenaean synoecism will surely have had to be repeated later; and thus the problem of the date simply recurs in another form. Coldstream has recently suggested that Athenian control of Thorikos, at any rate, may go back to the mid ninth century. It seems that the silver mines at nearby Laurion were already in production then, yet there is no sign that the profits from them went to the men of Thorikos itself. Instead, the gold and other luxuries for which (the argument runs) the silver was traded turn up as grave-goods in Athens. Whatever the truth, however, of this ingenious idea — and it does unfortunately rest upon a long concatenation of assumptions — it is not, as it is claimed to be, support for the hypothesis of a prior synoecism of the whole of Attica. The view of a piecemeal process, extending through most of the ninth and the eighth centuries, remains the one which best accommodates the bulk of the evidence and is therefore; most likely to represent the historical reality.

Thus, "the process whereby the demes of Attica were fused into a general sympolity with Athens as the official capital and seat of government seems to have been mostly completed by c. 700." To be more precise one should perhaps say "such of the demes as were by then in existence." Many were, as we have seen; and despite the indications that Athens and Attica now experienced a relative recession, both artistic and demographic, after the eighth-century peak, it will be safe to assume that the process of "colonizing" the Attic chora continued through the seventh and sixth centuries, with the establishment of more and more deme-centers as its (for us) most important manifestation. Whether this occurred at a constant rate is another question. Archaeological evidence would be our best guide, but very little of it relating to this period has been studied and published. In the broadest of terms it would seem likely that the seventh century, with its known economic and agrarian problems, saw a relative slackening in the rate of new settlement; the sixth, thanks to Solon and Peisistratos, a relative quickening. In equally broad terms there must be a basic correlation between the size of the various demes in 508/7 — which, as we shall see, can be gauged with some precision — and the dates of their foundation. The dozen and more demes which have already been mentioned in this chapter had nearly all grown to be substantial townships by the end of the sixth century; and (to invert the argument) the many other demes which were demonstrably large then are likely, sooner or later, to be located and revealed as early settlements by the archaeological record, if this has not happened already. Phlya would be a good example and, as will emerge below, a significant one.

As to the literary evidence, the conclusions which it warrants are for the most part even less exact with regard to date, but it does at least furnish several of the demes with an individual "pre-history." Ikarion, for example, which lies beyond Mt. Pentelikon, "has a special place among Attic demes in its possession of traditions associating it with the advent of Dionysus into Attica and the beginnings of tragedy and comedy." Or there is Plutarch's account (Theseus 13.2-3) of the ancient antagonism between the demes Pallene and Hagnous: it is blatantly an explanatory aition, but apparently there was something which badly needed explanation — the fact (as it does seem to be) that families from these two communities did not intermarry. Further instances could readily be multiplied, for in fact the vast majority of demes had or laid claim to their own ancestral legends, cults, and customs (cf. Pausanias 1.14.7); and when Kleisthenes came to his task there was an abundance of such material to be exploited.

* * *

No more space need be expended upon proving that many of what became the Kleisthenic demes were in existence long before him. Evidence carries us most of the way in this, common sense the rest. However, the belief that they possessed any official standing then, as units of either central or local government, is neither necessitated nor justified.

We may consider first the use of the demotikon or deme-name. In the Aristotelian Ath. Pol., noted at the beginning of this chapter, it is stated that one of Kleisthenes' provisions was to make the demotic, rather than the patronymic, the official nomenclature for all Athenians. What this means is that the deme-name was thereafter to be mandatory and universal. What it does not mean is that any pre-Kleisthenic demotika therefore present us with a difficulty — so long as they are not found in an official context. Such a context, for instance, is not proven and perhaps not even probable for "Myron of Phlya" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), named as such by Plutarch as the man who in the late seventh or early sixth century prosecuted the murderers of the Kylonians. Whether before or after Kleisthenes, a demotic will have been employed in common usage if that was the best way of identifying its bearer. And by the same token it did not need a Kleisthenes to urge the use of their deme-name upon those who took a natural pride in it.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Demes of Attica 508/7â"CA. 250 B.C. by David Whitehead. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
• CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS, pg. x
• PREFACE, pg. xiii
• INTRODUCTION, pg. xvii
• 1. BEFORE AND AFTER KLEISTHENES, pg. 3
• 2. SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY, pg. 39
• 3. THE DEME AND ITS RESIDENTS, pg. 67
• 4. THE DEME ASSEMBLY, pg. 86
• 5. THE DEMARCH AND OTHER OFFICIALS, pg. 121
• 6. INCOME AND EXPENDITURE, pg. 149
• 7. RELIGION, pg. 176
• 8. DEME SOCIETY, pg. 223
• 9. LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT, pg. 255
• 10. LOCAL POLITICS AND CITY POLITICS, pg. 291
• 11. THE DEME IN COMEDY, pg. 327
• IV. Conspectus: The Demes and History, pg. 347
• PROSOPOGRΑΡΗY, pg. 408
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 455
• INDEX OF PASSAGES CITED, pg. 460
• INDEX OF DEMES, pg. 474
• GENERAL INDEX, pg. 478