It is suggested that it might have been the function of the piper figured on the vase
to help the advancing unit keep their formation. The soldiers on the vase are wearing
helmets and greaves to protect their shins. It is difficult to see whether they have
breastplates, as was the case with later soldiers. All this heavy armour was expensive,
so that only the more prosperous members of the community could supply them.
Poorer people served as light infantrymen or sailors in states that had navies. While
the horse power provided for cavalry or chariot warfare sustained the rich and
aristocratic, the phalanx in its manpower was more of a middle class institution and
its development was thought by Aristotle to have encouraged democratic values
(Politics, 4, 10).
Athens
Athens is mentioned in the Homeric poems (the Athenian contingent comprises fifty
ships) but the city is not the home of any of the great heroes, as Sparta is the home
of Menelaus. The first stage in the evolution of the developed state was the unification
of Attica, synoicism, whereby Athens subdued other settlements in Attica with the
result that all the inhabitants of Attica, a region of about a thousand square miles,
whether or not they lived in the city, became Athenians. Long before written records,
this unification was associated with the mythical hero Theseus who was thought to
have established the Synoikia, apublic festival celebrated in Classical times in honour
of the goddess (Thucydides, 2, 15, 1–2). Thereafter the successors of Theseus were
supposed to have ruled as kings, but by the seventh century the leadership of the city
was in the hands of nine officials called archons (rulers) who held office annually and
then automatically became members of the council which met on the hill of Ares,
known as the Areopagus. Kingship has, therefore, become aristocracy and the history
of the Athenian constitution thereafter is the slow extension of power beyond the
confines of aristocratic families, the eupatridai, or the well-born, to the wealthy and
then more generally to the lower orders.
In the late seventh and sixth centuries the rule of the eupatridai at Athens and of
aristocracies in Greece generally was challenged by individuals aiming at tyranny by
exploiting the discontent of those excluded from power. One such attempt, and one
of the first recorded events at Athens, was by a former Olympic victor called Cylon,
perhaps in the 630s. The severe code of the lawgiver Draco (whence the term
Draconian), traditionally dated to 621–620, may have been an aristocratic response
to popular discontent. At this time laws were for the first time formally written down.
But when the Athenians looked back to their own constitutional development, the
first great name with which they associated significant reform was that of Solon, who,
according to the author of The Constitution of Athens, was appointed with special
powers as mediator between the masses and the eupatridaein his archonship of 594.
HISTORY 49