Of all the tyrants of the seventh and sixth centuries none are so well known to us as those who reigned at Athens. No other city has left us so clear a picture of the state of things not only during the tyranny but also immediately before and after it. Solon lived to see Peisistratus make himself supreme. Herodotus, born a Persian subject about 484 B.C., must have had opportunities of questioning first-hand authorities on the later years of the Athenian tyranny, while his younger contemporary Thucydides was in a particularly favoured position for getting information on this subject through his relationship with the Philaidae, of whose rivalry with the Peisistratidae there will be occasion to speak later in this chapter^[180].

This comparative abundance of information is the reason why Athens has been made the starting-point of this enquiry. But even so our knowledge is meagre enough. And there is a special reason for using it with caution. So far in the history of the world there has been only one Athens. The developments that took place in the city during the first two centuries of the democracy are without parallel. Can we be certain that Athens was not already unique in the period immediately preceding? One point in which the Athenian tyranny was exceptional meets us at the first glance. "Athens before the establishment of the tyranny." With the single exception of Samos, all the other famous tyrannies of the earlier type, at least in the Aegean area, arose in the seventh century. But apart from this fact it will be found that the tyranny at Athens in the sixth century followed the same course as it appears to have done at places like Corinth and Argos, Sardis and Miletus in the seventh. The more highly developed an organism is, the longer it takes to reach maturity. This is perhaps the reason why Athens in the sixth century appears in some respects to be a hundred years behind some of the cities whom she was destined so completely to eclipse.

Athens was not exclusively commercial. Her large territory made her partly agricultural. To this fact may be due her failure to compete commercially in the seventh century with cities like Aegina and Corinth^[181]. Hence too the late rise of the tyranny. It appears only when the commercial and industrial element had got the upper hand. There was indeed the attempt of Cylon, who conspired to make himself tyrant within a generation of the first appearance of tyranny on the mainland of Greece^[182]. But Cylon failed because, though wealthy (???p???????) and influential (d??at??), he could not possibly, in the Athens of his day, be the leader of any dominant organized commercial activity. He was merely an ambitious member of the aristocracy (t?? p??a? e??e???), connected with the great band of merchant princes only by marriage^[183]. The attempt and its result are both what might have been expected from the position of Athens at the time.

Soon after Cylon’s attempt Athens began to rival Corinth in the pottery trade, and the influence of the rich city merchants and exporters doubtless increased. But even in pottery the great vogue of Attic ware was still to come, and Solon’s measures for encouraging the growth of olives and the export of olive oil also belong to this period^[184]: the importance of the landed aristocracy who owned the olive yards must have increased almost equally. No merchant therefore attempted by means of the wealth that he had amassed or the labour that he employed to seize the tyranny. The landed aristocracy were also wealthy and they too employed much labour, and it so happened that the best part of the Attic plain, where lay their estates, was situated round the city, as Cylon discovered to his cost when he seized the Acropolis. Tyranny was almost impossible.

The leading man at Athens was not a mere millionaire, as in the more exclusively trading states. Solon had indeed some experience of trade^[185], but he was essentially a politician with a gift for finance, not a financier or merchant with political ambitions. He became not a tyrant but a lawgiver.

Solon tried to provide for the difficulties that he saw resulting from the existence of two evenly matched parties, the landowners of the plain and the traders of the coast. The tyranny arose from the political organization of a new interest by Peisistratus, who, to quote the exact words of Herodotus:

While the coast men of Athens and those of the plain were at strife... having formed designs on (?ataf????sa?) the tyranny, proceeded to raise (??e??e) a third faction^[186].

Some ancient writers represent Peisistratus as owing his tyranny to his gifts as an orator or demagogue^[187]. Reasons are given in Chapter I for not accepting this view, and also for not believing that it was mainly as a successful soldier that Peisistratus secured the throne^[188]. It was as founder and leader of the “third faction” of Herodotus that Peisistratus made himself tyrant, and he seems largely to have built up his influence with them by rendering them aid, doubtless financial^[189].

To understand the position of Peisistratus and to ascertain the basis of his power it is obviously of the first importance that we should know who precisely were the men who made up this third faction. Unfortunately this question cannot be answered directly from the information that has come down to us. So before sifting the evidence that bears on it, it will be well to examine some later and better known phases of the tyrant’s career.

After the tyrant had first established himself he is reported to have been twice banished and twice restored. After his second restoration “he proceeded to root his tyranny with many mercenaries, and with revenues of money, of which part was gathered from the home country, part from the river Strymon^[190].”

The Strymon (Struma) flows through the famous mining district which was afterwards annexed by Philip of Macedon, and brought him his enormous wealth. It is scarcely conceivable that Peisistratus’ revenues from this region came from any other source than the mines^[191]. Hence Guiraud, in his interesting but sober account of ancient Greek industry, has already been led to suggest that Peisistratus’ Attic revenues were derived from a similar source, and that he worked the mines of Laurium^[192].

Peisistratus was not using revenues from mines for the first time in his career, when he proceeded to “root his tyranny” in the manner just described. He had already used the same means to compass his second restoration. When driven from Athens for the second time he had “proceeded to the parts round Pangaion, where he made money, and having hired soldiers he went back to Eretria, and in the eleventh year made his first attempt to recover his position by force^[193].” Herodotus appears to think that all the period of exile was spent at Eretria; but he too states it to have been spent in collecting money (???... t? ???ata ??e??e). The result was that “he now held the tyranny securely^[194].” Mt Pangaion is the name of the great mining district to the East of the lower Strymon. The mention of it confirms the view that Peisistratus had a personal connexion with the Thracian mines. Eretria, on the West coast of Euboea, is an obvious place from which to swoop down on East Attica, but on the other hand in Euboea too there were mining districts^[195], and Eretria had a settlement just to the East of Mount Pangaion, if Svoronos is right in his very plausible identification of the modern Kavalla with the “Skabala: a place of the Eretrians” of Stephanus Byzantinus^[196].

About the tyrant’s first restoration there is only a story in Herodotus which the historian himself describes as a “very silly business.” Its consideration is best left over till we have dealt with his original seizure of the throne. If for this earlier stage of his career the evidence is less specific, we must not be surprised. Like Augustus, Peisistratus was careful, especially at first, to observe the outward forms of the constitution which he overthrew, so that the realities of the situation would not be patent to everybody^[197].

The party through which Peisistratus made himself tyrant is called by Herodotus the ?pe???????^[198]. The Aristotelian Constitution of Athens calls them the ????????^[199], Plutarch sometimes ??a???e?? sometimes ?pa????^[200]. The English terminology is equally fluctuating. Hill, Mountain, and Upland have all been used.

Modern historians have mostly explained the party as made up of small farmers, agricultural labourers, herdsmen and the like, and have generally assigned them to one special district, the mountainous region of North and North-east Attica^[201]. But this view, as shown below in detail in an appendix^[202], is based on a misunderstanding of the texts that are quoted in its support, and is at variance with all the ancient evidence, whether as regards the political propensities of agricultural labourers or the state of cultivation of the Attic mountains. It takes no account of the facts just brought forward as to how the tyrant regained and maintained his power.

In a paper that I published in 1906^[203] these facts were made the basis of a new explanation of the Hillmen of Peisistratus. According to the view there put forward the most important section of Peisistratus’ followers were the miners who worked the famous silver mines of South Attica, and it was as leader of this mining population that Peisistratus raised himself to the tyranny. At the time this view was little more than a conjecture, topographically dubious. Of the only two places, Plotheia and Semachidai, known to have been situated in the Hill Country, Plotheia had been shown by tombstones to lie somewhere between Marathon and Kephisia^[204], and as this fact seemed to confirm the theory of an exclusively Northern Hill Country, Semachidai, for the site of which as within the limits of the three trittyes of its tribe no evidence was available, was placed up in the North in the inland trittys. But that this location was wrong is made practically certain by the discovery of an inscription, published in 1910 by the Greek scholar Oikonomos, that bears directly on the point. "which was certainly part of the Hill Country" It dates from 349–8 B.C. and defines the position of various mining concessions. One of them is described as near Laurium and bordered on the South by the road leading past Rhagon to Laurium and the Semacheion^[205].

The Semacheion is convincingly explained by Oikonomos as the shrine of Semachos, who gave his name to the deme Semachidai^[206]. From this fact he proceeds quite logically to argue that we must decide on a more Southerly position for that deme than those proposed by Milchhoefer and Loeper^[207], “since the mine to the South of which Semachidai lay, was situated in the neighbourhood of Laurium^[208].” Semachidai belonged to the tribe Antiochis^[209]. In the electoral organization of Cleisthenes the coast trittys of the tribe Antiochis occupied the Western part of the mining district, including the villages of Amphitrope (Metropisi), Besa, and Anaphlystus. Thus Oikonomos’ conclusions are confirmed by the fact that his Semacheion falls within the borders of Antiochis. But whereas technically this mining district formed the coast trittys of the tribe, we have the evidence of Philochorus, writing early in the third century B.C., that it was spoken of as part of the Epakria or hill country^[210].

How suitable this name was may be illustrated from the Semacheion inscription itself, in which the sites of mining claims are three times defined by reference to a ridge or hill crest (??f??)^[211].

As seen from C.I.A. II. 570, the Epakria of 400 B.C. was a religious organization^[212], apparently with only a local political significance. "and probably the Hill Country par excellence." This fact makes it probable that the name was already ancient, and that Plutarch and the Lexicon Seguerianum were right in equating it with Diakria and Hyperakria^[213]. There is indeed the possibility of a confusion of names. But on the other hand the names suggest a common origin. They are all compounds of ?????. It is curious that nobody in recent times seems to have asked what was the ordinary connotation of ????? to the Athenian of antiquity^[214]. There seems little doubt as to what it was.

In Attica the ????? par excellence was Sunium. Already in the Odyssey Sunium is the ????? ??????^[215]. The same phrase reappears in Aristophanes^[216]. Strabo refers to Sunium as t? t?? ?tt???? ?????^[217]. Some early scholars recognized this fact. Palmerius explained the Diakrioi as the people living between the two capes, Sunium and Cynosura, and the Hyperakrioi as those who dwelt beyond Sunium, “beyond” being used presumably from the point of view of those coming by sea from Athens^[218]. Albertus held that the Diakrioi were so called because they lived “in promontoriis Atticae^[219].”

Plato indeed in the Critias^[220] speaks of ???????? t?? ?????; but for the Athenians the peaks of Parnes are ???a with a local qualification, not simply t? ????? or t? ???a; just as we in England speak of the peaks of Snowdon or Skiddaw, but apply the word unqualified to the heights of Derbyshire. The unqualified expression applied to the Northern heights of Attica was “the land of the mountain (? ??e???)^[221],” not “the land of the ?????.” The name Diakria appears therefore to be derived geographically not from Mount Parnes but from Cape Sunium^[222].

Herodotus, as already noticed, gives the Sunium district another name. He calls the country between Sunium, Thoricus, and Anaphlystus, i.e. the Laurium mining district, by the name of the ?????? S????a???^[223]. But as in the same sentence he speaks of the ???? of this district, his allusion is less of a difficulty to regarding this district as the original Diakria than it is to the orthodox view, which identifies it with the Paralia (Coast). Especially is this so if we assume that by his days the name Diakria had spread Northward beyond the mining region, so that a new name was wanted for the Southern apex of the peninsula. This assumption is of course only a reversal of the current view, that extends the name indefinitely Southwards from Parnes.

It has sometimes been forgotten in the discussion of these names that we are dealing with common nouns that were used by the Greeks with different connotations at different places and periods like the English downs or forest^[224]. Epakria appears to have been used in more than one sense even within the limits of Attica^[225]. Possibly the name was applied at large to any region of ???a. If we prefer to assume that it spread from a single district the balance of probabilities points to the name having spread Northwards from the district round Sunium.

From yet another point of view the words Diakria, Hyperakria, Epakria favour the mining interpretation. The inhabitants of El Dorado of Greek legend, the land of the Golden Fleece, are said to have occupied the ???a of the Caucasus^[226].

The ???a of the Caucasus are of course not capes but peaks. Trinakria on the other hand is the land of the three capes. It is important to remember that the word ????? has no equivalent in English. It means peak or height as well as cape or headland. To attempt to keep these two meanings separate is to commit a mental mistranslation. Though Sunium is the ????? par excellence, the whole S????a??? ?????? abounds in ???a, or as the inscriptions call them, ??f?? (crests, ridges)^[227]. Bursian describes the hills of Laurium (Lauriongebirge) as a continuous mountain chain, and includes it with Parnes, Brilessos, and Hymettos among the main ridges (grÖssere GebirgszÜge) of Attica^[228]. The writer has spent some days walking in the mining district. The sea is always near, and glimpses of it may be had frequently. But it is the hills that dominate the landscape, not the sea. More particularly is this the case in the district that was most mined in the sixth century, where the ground varies in height from 170 m. to 370 m. (550–1200 feet), and lies well inland^[229].

In the light of this probability that the Diakrioi occupied the mining district of Attica, and of the fact that their name means hill men, it is interesting to note that the Idaean Dactyls, who “are said to have been the first miners,” are stated also to have been men of the mountains^[230], and that in German and Welsh the words for miners (Bergleuten, gwyr y mynyddau) mean literally “hill men.”

The Greek word Diakrioi would have a peculiar appropriateness for miners. The ????? is precisely the part of a hill that the farmer has least use for. Miners on the other hand preferred to carry on their smelting operations on the hill tops, because a better draught is thus secured^[231].

It has been pointed out by Milchhoefer^[232] that the mining district is considerably broken up by the Cleisthenic division of Attica into trittyes. Milchhoefer’s arrangement of the trittyes in the mining district has been convincingly simplified by Loeper^[233], but Loeper himself leaves the mines divided between three trittyes of three different tribes. We may therefore still follow Milchhoefer in thinking that Cleisthenes took special precautions to break up this district. The same fact is noticed by Milchhoefer about the district round Plotheia, the Northern deme already noticed as belonging to the Epakria. Here too the Russian scholar has simplified, but here too only to a limited extent. “In a breaking up like this of the old hill country of the Peisistratids” Milchhoefer sees unmistakable signs of “measures directed against the Peisistratids.” Now that we have as good reason for seeing Peisistratan hill country round Laurium as round Plotheia, we must either reject Milchhoefer altogether, or, more probably, see in both districts centres of Peisistratan influence, of which the Southernmost was the more important. Mining operations in antiquity were conducted on a large scale. Forty thousand workers were employed in mines near Carthagena^[234].

Athenaeus^[235] speaks of tens of thousands of chained slaves as working in the Laurium mines and losing their lives in an unsuccessful revolt at the time of the second slave war in Sicily (103–99 B.C.). Of the 20,000 who deserted to Decelea when it was occupied by the Spartans in 413 B.C. it is not unlikely that large numbers were miners from Laurium^[236].

But what was the state of the Laurium district in the days of Peisistratus?

The mines of Laurium do not appear in history till 484 B.C.^[237], when Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to devote the profits from them to the building of a navy. The Constitution of Athens speaks of a discovery of mines in that year. This however is probably rather loose language. The writer’s words are “on the discovery of the mines at Maronea.” The “discovery” of 484 B.C. was of the mines in this particular part of the Laurium district, or rather, in all probability, of an extraordinarily rich vein in this particular part. “The disposition of the strata” (at Maronea) “is such that the richest are not those that could be first reached.... Some centuries of search and effort were therefore necessary in order to suspect their existence and to reach their level” (i.e. of the rich veins “discovered” in 484)^[238].

Plutarch says that before this time the Athenians were in the habit of distributing the Laurium revenues among themselves, and that Themistocles had the courage to persuade them to give the habit up^[239]. This agrees with Xenophon where he declares that “no one even attempts to say from what period people have tried to work them^[240].” The mines of Lydia, Cyprus, and Spain all appear to have been developed in the seventh century B.C.^[241]. The Siphnian mines were at full work about 525 B.C.^[242]. Mining operations are depicted on several Corinthian clay tablets, that cannot be later than the early part of the sixth century^[243]. One of them is here reproduced (fig. 5).

Herodotus says nothing about the date of discovery of the Attic mines in his account of the proceedings of 484 B.C.^[244]. It would not be like him to keep silence about an epoch-making discovery, or even a phenomenal “rush,” if any had occurred just at this time. Elsewhere he tells us that the Siphnians were already distributing among themselves the money from their mines about the year 525 B.C.^[245].

Modern writers have been inclined to talk of the great “rush” of 484^[246]. But against the silence of Herodotus they can set only the reference in the Constitution of Athens to the “discovery” at Maronea, which has been discussed already. What made the great impression at this time was probably not so much the output as the employment of the output on the building of a fleet. That surely is the point of the contemporary allusion in the Persae of Aeschylus. The chorus of Persian elders tells the Persian queen about the Athenians’

just after mentioning the prowess of the Athenian troops, and just before explaining the weapons that they use.

The idea proposed in 484 by Themistocles was not original. Seven years earlier the Thasians had used the revenues from their mines to build a fleet against the Persians^[248]. It was doubtless the success of the Athenian fleet in a supreme crisis that caused the Athenians to remember with such pride this triumph of the voluntary system.

There can therefore be no question that the mines were worked in the sixth century^[249]. But if we are to understand the position of the leader of the mining interests at that period, we must learn something about the conditions and position of the miners.

The leaders of the Plain and Coast had a powerful body of citizens behind their backs. The mines on the other hand, at least from the time of Xenophon, were worked almost exclusively by slaves^[250].

In the fourth century very occasionally poor citizens worked their own allotments^[251]. Skilled work like smelting seems always to have been done by free men. The tombstone of “Atotes the miner,” carved in letters of the second half of the fourth century, declares that he was a Paphlagonian “of the root of Pylaimenes, who fell slain by the hand of Achilles,” and boasts of his unrivalled skill^[252]. But there is no recorded instance of a citizen working in a mine for wages^[253]. This however does not prove that they did not do so in the days of Peisistratus, when, as pointed out in the introductory chapter, the conditions of labour must have been very different from what they became in the fifth and fourth centuries, and industrial slavery had scarcely yet begun. A fragment of Solon suggests that it was quite usual in his days for citizens to work with their own hands, though whether for pay or on their own account is not stated and no particular occupations are specified^[254].

About ten years after Solon’s legislation the Athenians are found resolving “on account of their factions to elect ten archons, five from the nobility (Eupatridai), three from the farmers (agroikoi), two from the craftsmen (demiourgoi)^[255].” The equation of these three groups of archons with the three factions of the Plain, Coast, and Hill is more than doubtful^[256]. The farmers par excellence are naturally located in the plain: also it is doubtful whether Peisistratus had already “raised the third faction” twenty years before he became tyrant, and over fifty before his death. The two different sets of names point in themselves to two different groupings of the population. Solon’s quadruple division into pentekosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai, and thetes proves a certain fluidity and tendency to cross grouping. But in any case the two craftsman magistrates prove that craftsmen or artizans were already an important element in the free population.

In this matter of free labour in an industry such as mining, fifth century Phrygia is perhaps a better guide than the Attica of Nikias or Demosthenes as to the state of things in Attica during the sixth century. In Phrygia a generation after the Samian tyrant Polycrates, who died about 522 B.C., Pythes was working mines with citizen labour^[257]. Even in Athens in the early days of Pericles the earlier conditions seem still to have prevailed. “Each trade t???? had its body of (free) labourers organized (t?? ??t???? ????? s??teta?????)” to carry out the great public works that were financed from the Delian treasury. A long list of the trades thus organized ends with miners^[258].

Considering the evidence already adduced for equating the sixth century miners at Laurium with the presumably free Diakrioi, may we not use the notices already quoted about the latter as being of impure race and a mob of hirelings^[259], and infer that in the sixth century the mines of Laurium were worked by free men, partly of foreign extraction and mainly working for hire?

This is of course conjecture. But it produces for the first time a picture of the Diakrioi that harmonizes with the notices in question. Alien shepherds and alien small farmers are most unlikely in autochthonous Attica.

Outlander miners on the other hand have always been familiar, wherever there have been mines to work. When mining operations were resumed at Laurium some thirty years ago, the immediate result was a very mixed population, the local supply of labour being supplemented from France, Italy, and Turkey. One of the ancient gold mines near Philippi bore the significant name of the asylum^[260]. In the Laurium district itself in ancient times the people of at least one deme, Potamioi, were famous for their readiness to admit foreigners to citizenship^[261]. Potamioi is placed by Loeper right in the centre of the mining district, well away from the sea^[262], and very near the probable site of Maronea^[263]. A member of the deme Semachidai is found sharing a tombstone with two strangers from Sinope^[264]. We have just had occasion to notice a Paphlagonian miner, though of a later date, and we shall see in a moment that in the sixth century the mines of Laurium were worked in close connexion with those of Thrace. There are no records of specific Thracians employed in the Attic mines during the sixth century. We only know that just after the Persians conquered Thrace, at the close of the reign of Hippias, there was a large Greek element in the mining population near the Strymon^[265]. But in the fifth century we have a famous case of a Thracian mine-owner settling in Athens in the person of Thucydides, whose father was a Thracian, and whose Thracian mines probably lost him his command in the Athenian navy, and turned a second-rate admiral into the greatest of historians^[266]. Nikias hired out a thousand hands whom he owned in the mines to Sosias the Thracian^[267].

This ends our examination of the various steps by which Peisistratus made himself tyrant, effected his second restoration, and finally rooted his power. In all three cases the evidence points to the conclusion that the secret of the tyrant’s power was his control of mines either in Attica or Thrace. To complete the enquiry it is necessary now to examine the accounts of his first restoration. As observed already, this event is recorded only in anecdotal form. As independent evidence it would hardly be worth considering. All that is here claimed for it is that it can be so interpreted as to corroborate the conclusions already reached.

According to the story Peisistratus persuaded the Athenians to take him back by dressing up a stately woman named Phye to personate Athena and order his recall^[268]. It is generally agreed that this story will not do as it stands. Various attempts have been made to explain it away^[269], but all of them are equally unconvincing. Perhaps the reason is that all alike are based on some single unessential detail of the story. None of them interprets it in the light of the better known parts of the tyrant’s career, and more particularly of the matter of fact accounts of his second restoration. Beloch indeed, like the Russian Hirschensohn, believes that there was only one restoration, with which the Phye story and the account of Peisistratus’ return from the Thracian mining district are both to be connected^[270]. He notes that the cause of banishment is the same in both cases; that the chronology is suspiciously symmetrical; that Polyaenus combines incidents from the two restorations; and that Eusebius^[271] and Jerome^[272] both make Peisistratus begin his second reign about the time that Herodotus begins his third, while neither of them mentions a third reign at all. Note too that corresponding to Phye in the first restoration we have in the second a “sacred procession” from the temple of Athena Pallenis conducted by an Acarnanian soothsayer^[273].

These points are not convincing. Similar improbabilities, and repetitions and chronological symmetries can often be discovered in narratives of the most unquestionable authenticity^[274]. The fact that Polyaenus combines the two accounts proves nothing, unless we assume him to be incapable of confusing two similar events. Further, Beloch is forced to make the marriage of Peisistratus with Megacles’ daughter precede his first exile, since he sees that the childlessness of the marriage led to the breach with the Coast^[275]. In this he goes dead against the tradition on a point where there is no reason to suspect it.

What Beloch’s arguments do emphasize is the fact that the situations during Peisistratus’ two periods of exile were in some ways very similar. The sameness of the two situations may in fact be the reason why so little has been remembered about the earlier. It raises the question whether the tyrant mined and coined during his first exile. There is no certainty that he did either, but the probability is that he did both. As regards Thrace we know that Miltiades, probably with Peisistratus’ permission and approval^[276], had settled in the Gallipoli peninsula soon after the tyranny was first established at Athens^[277]. Thrace is the one region that we can be sure that the tyrant must have considered as a possible place of exile. "is connected by Babelon with the Athena-head coins of Athens" As regards the coinage it has been suggested on the high authority of Babelon^[278], that the famous series with the owl on one side, and the head of Athena on the other (fig. 6), which remained for centuries the coin types of the city, was actually started to commemorate the help that the tyrant claimed to have received from his patron goddess at the time of his first restoration.

Fig. 6. Coin of Athens with Athena and owl.