Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/154

136 HISTORY OF GREECE. arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers. The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled according to tribes, each tribe having its own taxiarchs as offi- cers for the hoplites, and its own phy larch at the head of the horsemen. Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or generals, one from each tribe ; and two hipparchs, for the supreme command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the third archon, or polemarch, no stra- tegi then existing; and even after the latter had been created, under the Kleisthenean constitution, the pclemarch still retained a joint right of command along with them, as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Kallimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honor on the right wing. 1 The ten generals, annually changed, are thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Kleisthenean constitution, which was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city generally, while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by degree? lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side, they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the pop- ular dikasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very sure that these popular dikasteries had not been permit- ted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Peisislratids, and that the judicial business of the city must then have been con- ducted partly by the Senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons ; perhaps with a nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of office to an acquiescent ekklesia. And if we eve u assume it to bs true, as some writers contend, that the habit cf direct popular judicature, over and above this annual trial of re- sponsibility, had been partially introduced by Solon, it must liava 'HerodU. vi, 109-111.