In 510 BC, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow their king, the tyrant Hippias. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy headed by Isagoras. But his rival Cleisthenes, with the support of the middle class and aided by pro-democracy citizens, took over. Cleomenes intervened in 508 and 506 BC, but could not stop Cleisthenes, now supported by the Athenians. Through Cleisthenes' reforms, the people endowed their city with isonomic institutions, equal rights for all citizens (though only men were citizens), and established ostracism.
The isonomic and isegoric democracy was first organized into about 130 demes, which became the basic civic element. The 10,000 citizens exercised their power as members of the assembly, headed by a council of 500 citizens chosen at random. The city's administrative geography was reworked to create mixed political groups. Not federated by local interests linked to the sea, to the city, or to farming, whose decisions would depend on their geographical position, the territory of the city was divided into thirty trittyes.
Ten trittyes existed in the coastal region, ten in the urban centre, and ten in the rural interior. A tribe consisted of three trittyes, selected at random, one from each of the three groups. Each tribe therefore always acted in the interest of all three sectors. It was this corpus of reforms that allowed the emergence of a wider democracy in the 460s and 450s BC.
Persian Wars And Greek Unity
In Ionia, the modern Aegean coast of Turkey, the Greek cities came under the rule of the Persian Empire in the mid-6th century BC. In 499 BC that region's Greeks rose in the Ionian Revolt, and Athens and some other Greek cities sent aid, but were quickly forced to back down after defeat in 494 BC at the Battle of Lade. Asia Minor returned to Persian control.
In 492 BC, the Persian general Mardonius led a campaign through Thrace and Macedonia. He was victorious and again subjugated the former and conquered the latter, but he was wounded and forced to retreat back into Asia Minor. Later, the generals Artaphernes and Datis led a successful naval expedition against the Aegean islands. In 490 BC, Darius the Great sent a Persian fleet to punish the Greeks. They landed in Attica intending to take Athens, but were defeated at the Battle of Marathon by a Greek army of 9,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plataeans led by the Athenian general Miltiades.
In 480 BC, Darius' successor Xerxes I sent a much more powerful force across a double pontoon bridge over the Hellespont. This army took Thrace before descending on Thessaly and Boeotia. The Greek fleet dashed to block Cape Artemisium. After being delayed by Leonidas I, the Spartan king of the Agiad Dynasty, at the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes advanced into Attica and captured and burned Athens. The subsequent Battle of Artemisium resulted in the capture of Euboea, bringing most of mainland Greece north of the Isthmus of Corinth under Persian control. However, the Athenians had evacuated the city of Athens by sea before Thermopylae, and under the command of Themistocles, they defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis.