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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
The political significance of Ephialtes’ reforms as a constitutional watershed in Athenian history is a theme stressed in much of the later source material. He is presented as a man who significantly changed the nature of the existing, Cleisthenic, constitution in the direction of a more radical form of democracy.
1. This is of course very much the implication of Isocrates, Areopagiticus 50–1 (dated c. 355).
2. ‘The death of Ephialtes’, CQ 32 (1982), 227–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Wallace, R. W., The Areopagus Council, to 307 B.C. (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 87–93Google Scholar.
4. Rhodes, P. J., The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), pp. 203–7Google Scholar makes a reasonable attempt to answer this much disputed question.
5. Dover, K. J., ‘The Political Aspect of Aeschylus’ Eumenides’, JHS 11 (1957), 230–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6. Podlecki, A. J., The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor, 1966), pp. 96–100Google Scholar.
7. This point has been emphasized by Macleod, C. W., ‘Politics and the Oresteia’, JHS 102 (1982), 124–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as, as one might expect, Podlecki, , Aeschylus, Eumenides (Warminster, 1989). p. 19Google Scholar.
8. ‘He removed all the accretions (ta epilheta) through which it had been the guardian of the constitution (hē tēs politeias phulakē)’ (Ath. Pol. 25.2). Despite the doubts expressed (from exactly opposite standpoints!) by Wallace, (op. cit., pp. 86–7)Google Scholar and Cawkwell, G. L., ‘Nomophylakia and the Areopagus’, JHS 108 (1988), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, it seems not unreasonable to take this expression as a campaigning slogan in contemporary democratic propaganda, reproduced without properly understanding it by the author of the Ath. Pol. What the democrats claimed were epitheia the conservatives called patria (so, e.g., Rhodes, P.J., A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia [ Oxford, 1981], p. 314)Google Scholar.
9. On this point see Dover, , art. cit., 235Google Scholar, Podlecki, , op. cit., pp. 82–3Google Scholar. The relevant passages are lines 287–91, 667–73, and 762–74. The repetition and strong emphasis are not justified simply by the requirements of the plot.
10. So, rightly, Podlecki, (op. cit., p. 83)Google Scholar; Wallace, concurs (op. cit, p. 92)Google Scholar.
11. Most influentiaUy by Dodds, E. R., ‘Morals and Politics in the Oresteia’, PCPS 186 (1960), 19–31Google Scholar, reprinted in his The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays (Oxford, 1973), pp. 45–63.
12. This seems also to be the view of Sommerstein, A. H., Aeschylus, Eumenides (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 30–2Google Scholar. He distinguishes sharply (but in my view unjustifiably) between Aeschylus' attitudes towards the external and the domestic spheres.
13. e.g. by Rhodes, , Commentary, p. 486Google Scholar.
14. Herodotus 5.72.1 supplies a precise parallel for this use of kataluein. When Cleomenes intervened in the political struggle at Athens in 508 he banished seven hundred family supporters of Cleisthenes. ‘Having done this he next attempted to abolish the council (tēn boulēn kataluein epeirāto) and tried to transfer power to a body of three hundred supporters of Isagoras.’
15. art. cit. (note 8), 3.
16. Could the existence of an extremist group with such a programme be the grain of fact underlying the unlikely story (indignantly rejected by Plutarch, Pericles 10.6) that it was Pericles who had Ephialtes murdered?
17. Little or nothing is said about Ares in the play. For Aeschylus' apparently novel etymology of the name Areopagus (685–90) see Wallace, , op. cit., p. 88Google Scholar.
18. Cimon was probably recalled from exile before the ten-year period of his ostracism had fully elapsed -possibly at the instigation of Pericles. He subsequently proved his loyalty to the constitutionally established ‘Ephialtic’ democracy by serving as an elected strategos in the Cyprus campaign on which he was killed (Plutarch, , Cimon 17.6, 19.1Google Scholar, Pericles 10.1–5).
