meant that they avoided extremes in politics (Ober 97).The laws for Athens began with Solon, but perhaps the most influential leader for democracy in Athens was Cleisthenes. In 510 Cleisthenes had managed to get the sons of Peisistratus kicked out of Athens with Spartan help (Demand 157). But now the old internal divisions, which had plagued Athens since Solons time, reasserted themselves. Herodotus says in his history of Greece that Cleisthenes decided to turn to the people (Herodotus 302). Perhaps he did so solely out of practical political reasons: he needed a powerful force on his side now that the Spartans had turned against him. Although, his major motivation may have been to produce a government that would unify Athenians by all, rich and poor alike. Unity, perhaps, rather democracy, was his immediate goal. But it was democracy that he would prove to be the means to the unification of the people of Athens.Cleisthenes began his reforms with the reorganization of the tribes. Athens, like most Greek cities, had been divided into tribes based on descent. This gave aristocratic families a natural way of securing influence, because relatives tended to stick together. The people of Attica had also often clumped in regional groupings, as in the day of Peisistratus, and this had lead to dangerous internal disorder. Cleisthenes completely reorganized the Athenian State into a new, artificial, and rather complicated system. In his system the basic unit was the deme, the village in which one lived. These demes were then put together into thirty somewhat larger units called trittyes. Cleisthenes then formed his ten new tribes by combining one trittyes from different parts of Attica, one from the coastal region, one from the city, and one from the inland (Demand 159). These tribes would form the units in the Athenian army, and the Athenian Council.According to the Athenians, the source of constitutional power rested in the hands of all the ci...
