KLEISTHEXES AND PERIKLES. 149 the fourth class of the Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in principle, was mitigated in practice thus far, that whereas Solon had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census (the Pentakosiomedimni) eligible to the archonship, Kleisthenes opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that Aristeides, assuredly not a rich man, became archon. I am also inclined to believe that the Senate of Five Hundred, as constituted by Kleisthenes, was taken, not by election, but by lot, from the ten tribes, and that every citizen became eligible to it. Election for this purpose that is, the privilege of annually electing a batch of fifty senators, all at once, by each tribe would probably be thought more troublesome than valuable ; nor do we hear of separate meetings of each tribe for purposes of election. Moreover, the office of senator was a collective, not an individual office ; the shock, therefore, to the feelings of semi-democratized Athens, from the unpleasant idea of a poor man sitting among the fifty prytanes, would be less than if they conceived him as polemarch at the head of the right wing of the army, or as an archon administering justice. A farther difference between the constitution of Solon and that of Kleisthenes is to be found in the position of the Senate of Areopagus. Under the former, that senate had been the princi- pal body in the state, and he had even enlarged its powers; under the latter, it must have been treated at first as an enemy, and kept down. For as it was composed only of all the past archons, and as, during the preceding thirty years, every archon had been a creature of the Peisistratids, the Areopagites collec- tively must have been both hostile and odious to Kleisthenes and his partisans, perhaps a fraction of its members might even retire into exile with Hippias. Its influence must have been which he lays down, but which he does not find it convenient to insist upon emphatically. I do not here advert to the ypnffi Trapavopw, the vo/ioQvZat. ec, and tha sworn vo/z6i?er<u, all of them institutions belonging to the time of Peri- kles at the eaiiiest ; not to that of KleisthenC-s.
