Cleisthenes

Cleisthenes reorganised Athenian society to make democracy work and is usually called its founder. Born around 570 BC into the Alcmaeonid family, one of the most powerful and most cursed clans in Athens, he served as archon under the tyrant Hippias before the family went into exile. The Alcmaeonids financed the rebuilding of the temple at Delphi, which secured the oracle's support, and Sparta expelled Hippias in 510 BC. Cleisthenes then lost the ensuing power struggle to Isagoras and did the thing that made his name: he took the people into his party, offering political reform in exchange for popular support. Isagoras called in the Spartans, who expelled seven hundred families. The Athenian people rose, besieged them on the Acropolis, and recalled Cleisthenes in 508 BC. His reform attacked the basis of aristocratic power. Athenian politics had run on four hereditary tribes controlled by great families and on regional loyalties. He abolished them and created ten new tribes, each assembled artificially from three groups of demes — village units — drawn from the coast, the inland and the city, so that no tribe had a geographical base and no clan controlled one. Citizenship was registered by deme rather than by descent. Each tribe supplied fifty men by lot to a council of five hundred that prepared business for the assembly, and each supplied a regiment and a general. He is also credited with ostracism, by which the assembly could exile a man for ten years without charge. He disappears from the record after about 507 BC.

• Lived: 570 BCE – 508 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: ruler, statesman