‘Es ist alles eitel Gold’ saidWilamowitz of Aristotle's treatment of Kleisthenes' reforms in the Athenaion Politeia, complaining only that there was not more of it. For Siewert the proposition that Kleisthenes divided the country into thirty parts, ten round the city, ten in the coast, ten in the inland, called them trittyes and assigned them to the tribes by lot is unequivocally false, a very casual fourth–century deduction from the names of the trittyes without inspection of their actual nature. As for the statements or implications that Kleisthenes wished to mix up the population or introduce new citizens, they do not appear to be worthy even of discussion. Herodotus' view of the nature of the reforms gets even rougher handling; the whole of v.69.2 has vanished without trace. Instead the reforms have become a largely military reorganisation, designed to improve the state's war–machine, probably in the interests of the upper classes.

That military motives were primary in the reforms has been suggested from time to time (see S. p. 9 n. 44). That they were not considered at all in Traill's fundamental Political Organization of Attica (Hesperia Supp. 14 (1973), henceforth POA) was a legitimate complaint (cf. A]A 80 (1976), 311–12 = this volume, 101). S. argues that the primacy of military motives can be deduced by a detailed study of the trittyes, in relation to the road system and in the detectable effort to ensure their numerical equality.