Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/182

164 HISTORY Of GREECE. pronounced in common Attic life, connected with one of ten heroes whose statues he now for the first time saw in the agora, and associating him with fellow-tribemen from all parts of Attica. All these and many others were sensible novelties, felt in the daily proceedings of the citizen. But the great novelty of all was, the authentic recognition of the ten new tribes as a sover- eign demos, or people, apart from all specialties of phratric or gentile origin, with free speech and equal law ; retaining no dis- tinction except the four classes of the Solonian property-schedule with their gradations of elegibility. To a considerable proportion of citizens this great novelty was still farther endeared by the fact that it had raised them out of the degraded position of met- ics and slaves ; and to the large majority of all the citizens, it furnished a splendid political idea, profoundly impressive to the Greek mind, capable of calling forth the most ardent attach- ment as well as the most devoted sense of active obligation and obedience. We have now to see how their newly-created patriot ism manifested itself. Kleisthenes and his new constitution carried with them so completely the popular favor, that Isagoras had no other way of opposing it except by calling in the interference of Kleomenes and the Lacedaemonians. Kleomenes listened the more readily to this call, as he was reported to have been on an intimate footing with the wife of Isagoras. He prepared to come to Athens ; but his first aim was to deprive the democracy of its great leader Kleisthenes, who, as belonging to the Alkmasonid family, was supposed to be tainted with the inherited sin of his great-grand- father Megakles, the destroyer of the usurper Kylon. Kleom- enes sent a herald to Athens, demanding the expulsion "of the accursed," so this family were called by their enemies, and so they continued to be called eighty years afterwards, when the same manoeuvre was practised by the Lacedaemonians of that day against Perikles. This requisition had been recommended by Isagoras, and was so well-timed that Kleisthenes, not ventur- ing to disobey it, retired voluntarily, so that Kleomenes, though arriving at Athens only with a small force, found himself master of the city. At the instigation of Isagoras, he sent into exile seven hundred families, selected from the chief partisans of Kleisthenes : his next attempt was to dissolve the new Senate of