Pisistratus

Athenian ruler (r. 540-527 b.c.e.)

• Born: c. 612 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Near Athens, Greece
• Died: 527 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Athens, Greece

As benevolent tyrant of Athens, Pisistratus prepared the way for the birth of Athenian democracy by introducing social, religious, and political reforms that raised popular expectations and possibilities.

Early Life

The family of Pisistratus (pi-SIHS-tra-tuhs) reputedly came from Pylos on the Peloponnese peninsula. His father, Hippocrates, claimed a family tie to Nestor, Homeric king of Pylos, and named Pisistratus for Nestor’s son. The family estates of Pisistratus were at Brauron, near Marathon, in the hill country outside Athens. Pisistratus’s mother was cousin to Solon, a connection that much elevated Pisistratus’s social status. During Pisistratus’s youth, Solon was the genius who guided Athens to economic and political leadership among the Greek states. Pisistratus was attractive, intelligent, and a good speaker. Solon once remarked that, except for his ambition, no one would make a more virtuous man and a better citizen.

In about 570 b.c.e., Solon won a great victory over Megara by which Athens recovered the island of Salamis. Pisistratus reportedly served Solon as commander in the capture of Nisaea, Megara’s eastern port. One of Solon’s reforms was the seisachtheia, which “shook off” the debts of Athenian farmers. These farmers, or hektemoroi (referring to the 16 percent interest they owed), had pledged their labor as a means of repayment and had become virtual slaves to their creditors. Solon had decreed that ceding their lands to their creditors would absolve them from debt. Free but landless, they now made up the Party of the Hill (the hyperakrioi), and Pisistratus became their champion. The party included downtrodden miners from Laurium and people from his hometown of Brauron, to whom were added the poorest urban Athenians (the thetes).

In 561, Pisistratus deliberately wounded himself and blamed his political enemies. Pisistratus was given a bodyguard of fifty men. With these, he seized the Acropolis and entered his first period of tyranny. Solon, who reportedly opposed the tyranny by speeches, died the same year. By 556, Pisistratus was driven out by a new coalition of the other parties. These parties, entrenched in their authority, were the Coast (Paraloi), led by the Alcmaeonids under Megacles, and the Plain (Pediakoi), under Lycurgus and later Miltiades. Megacles, though, fell out with the Plainsmen and befriended Pisistratus as a needed ally. Their families were united by Pisistratus’s marriage to Megacles’ daughter. In about 550, a clever plan was devised to trick the Athenians into accepting their tyrant. A tall and beautiful woman named Phya lived in the town of Paeonia. They dressed her as Athena and drove a chariot into Athens with Pisistratus at her side. The plan was completely successful.

Megacles later regretted his daughter’s marriage to Pisistratus and realigned himself with the Plain. Pisistratus was again driven into exile by the coalition. Operating from Eretria in Euboea, he raised money and troops and made important friends, especially Lygdamis of Naxos, Amyntas of Macedonia, and the leaders in Thessaly, Thebes, and even Sparta.

His control of the silver mines and gold deposits of Mount Pangaeus in Thrace enabled his third ascendancy. In 540, after a ten-year exile, his army landed at Marathon. His partisans flocked to him, and his enemies were easily defeated. Pisistratus entered the city unopposed and ruled Athens for twelve years until his death in 527 b.c.e.

Life’s Work

To secure his position in Athens, Pisistratus maintained a private army. While he did not alter Solon’s laws or the government, his adherents and relations usually held the highest offices, while Pisistratus presumably ruled in the background. He took hostages from the leading families and sent them to Lygdamis on Naxos. The Alcmaeonids and his other Athenian opponents fled or were exiled, leaving their estates in the tyrant’s control.

Pisistratus’s expenses were now met from the Mount Laurium silver mines of Attica as well as the Pangaean mines. It is not known how he came to control the Thracian mines; perhaps it was through King Amyntas of neighboring Macedonia, who later gave a town to Pisistratus’s son Hippias.

With this monetary base, Pisistratus arranged state support of citizens disabled in war. He strengthened Athenian tetradrachm coinage, guaranteeing its purity and metallic content, and thereby improved the commerce of the city. He gave land from confiscated estates to sons of hektemoroi for them to farm. A moderate tax was levied on all citizens to permit him to advance seed and cattle money to the new proprietors and also to refurbish the city’s defenses. By colonizing the Thracian Chersonese and recovering Sigeum, he established control of the grain routes from Pontus and secured the city’s grain supply.

It must be partially owing to Pisistratus that Attic pottery was traded all over the Mediterranean world, both east and west. Pisistratus thus oversaw the blossoming of the first great styles of Attic vase painting, black figure and red figure.

Pisistratus employed the urban poor in building projects. These included roads and the construction of the enneakrounos, or Nine-Conduit Fountain, which improved Athens’s water supply. Among his public buildings were a temple of Pythian Apollo; a magnificent temple to Olympian Zeus, left unfinished (to be completed in the Corinthian style by Roman emperor Hadrian in the second century c.e.); the stately buildings of the Lyceum garden; possibly a new and larger shrine at Eleusis for the local mystery cult; and, not least, the first temple to Athena, the Hecatompedon. Its pediment held the vigorous terra-cotta statue of striding Athena, part of a gigantomachy group. Traces of once-brilliant colors can still be seen on her skin and clothing. The Hecatompedon, predecessor of the famous Parthenon, was destroyed by the Persians in 480 b.c.e.

In connection with the worship of Athena, Pisistratus either instituted the Greater Panathenaea or enhanced a festival newly established about 566. Every fourth year, a new peplos (“shawl”) was sewn by Athenian women and was borne by them as a gift to be placed on the statue of Athena. The ceremony included a long procession of all the citizens from the agora (marketplace) to the temple, which stood close to where the present Parthenon stands on the Acropolis.

Pisistratus also initiated the Panathenaeic competitions in Homeric recitation. Each contestant memorized the texts of Homer and recited from precisely where the previous contestant had left off. Thus they were called “rhapsodists,” or “stitchers of song.” Pisistratus is thus credited as the first to have the texts of Homer’s epics written down and preserved essentially as they exist today. He also encouraged literature and literacy by collecting a library and allowing public access to it.

He created the city festival in honor of Dionysus. This cult was essentially a religion of the small farmer, and it harmonized with the popular stance of the tyrant. It was in association with this Dionysiac cult festival that Greek tragedy was first performed. The religious highlight of the festival was a hymn to Dionysus (the dithyramb) sung by a chorus of citizens. According to the Marmor Parium, a marble tablet from Paros containing a chronology of important events down to 264 b.c.e., it was in 534, not long after the inception of the festival, that the choregos (“poet” or “producer”) Thespis of Icaria introduced a soloist as interlocutor with the chorus. This new “dialogue” opened the way for the creation of individual characters and for the evolution of classical Greek tragedy as best seen in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Pisistratus endeared himself and his city to Apollo of Delos by carrying out the purification of that island sanctuary: This was achieved by removing all tombs visible from the vicinity of the god’s temple. This is but one example of the wise and moderate foreign policy that has already been suggested by Pisistratus’s cordial and peaceful relations with neighbors.

On Pisistratus’s death in 527, his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, the Pisistratidae, succeeded him in the tyranny. The brothers seem to have ruled jointly and admirably. Some scholars even believe that it was Hipparchus who actually arranged the manner in which the rhapsodists recited the Homeric poems at the Panathenaea. Several poets resided in Athens at the court of the Pisistratidae:Simonides of Ceos, Anacreon of Teos, Lasus of Hermione, and Onomacritus, who, with the support of the brothers, introduced a new Orphic religious influence in the city, as can be seen in many parts of Greece in the sixth century.

Hippias and Hipparchus, however, brought the tyranny into disrepute. After Hipparchus’s assassination, his older brother became morose, suspicious, and arbitrary in his rule. Citizens were executed, taxes were increased. The Pisistratid family was finally expelled by a force led by the rival Alcmaeonids with Spartan assistance, which was gained by trickery. The Alcmaeonids bribed the Delphic oracle to urge Sparta to free Athens from the tyranny. A Spartan army under Cleomenes drove Hippias into perpetual banishment. A monument recording the offenses of the tyrants was set up on the Acropolis.

Soon after, however, the Spartans learned of the trick and learned that the oracle had actually foretold the Athenians’ enmity against them. They therefore invited Hippias to Sparta and held a congress of their allies to form an army to reinstate him in Athens, but the idea was voted down. Hippias next went to the court of King Darius the Great of Persia, applying for his aid. It was Hippias who led the Persians to Marathon, where the story was told that, as he was now quite old, Hippias’s tooth fell out and was buried in the sand when he sneezed. This seemed to augur the failure of the Persian expedition. The Persians were defeated, and Hippias met his death on the field of Marathon. Afterward, members of Hippias’s family were back at the court of Persia under Darius’s son Xerxes I. There the known line of Pisistratus becomes lost in the sources.

Significance

Herodotus, a reliable historian and a major source for information on Pisistratus’s life, regarded him highly. Herodotus considered tyranny to be the negation of law and order and the arbitrary rule of an individual. Pisistratus, however, gave to that title a temporary respectability that was ruined by the behavior of most other Greek tyrants. Herodotus said, “He was no revolutionary, but governed excellently without disturbing the laws or the political offices.”

As if in anticipation of the Magna Carta, Pisistratus observed the laws and submitted himself before the Areopagus court. He foreshadowed Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, in founding a principate (a monarchy under the guise of a republic). For the common people, Pisistratus’s rule was a golden age.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Athenian Constitution. Translated by H. Rackham. 5th ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by H. Rackham. 4th ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932. Both works of Aristotle give details of Pisistratus’s career but draw heavily from Herodotus and Thucydides. Aristotle saw tyranny as the derogatory side of monarchical rule.

Day, James, and Mortimer Chambers. Aristotle’s History of Athenian Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. An excellent commentary on Aristotle’s treatment of Pisistratus.

Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. The primary source for Pisistratus’s political career.

How, W. W., and J. Wells. A Commentary on Herodotus. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989-1990. The authors argue that too few Athenian freemen worked in the mines to serve as a power base for Pisistratus; the main struggle was between the old landed aristocracy and the rising merchant class.

Lesky, Albin. A History of Greek Literature. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. Discussion of the literary contributions of the Pisistratidae.

Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Among the primary sources for Pisistratus. Includes introduction, maps, bibliography, and index.