Practice question · Put in order
Order the construction (and stress-testing) of the Athenian experiment.
- Pericles' law tightens citizenship as jury pay begins
- Solon cancels debt-slavery and grades rights by wealth, not birth
- Defeat by Sparta brings two brief oligarchic coups
- Democracy restored, with new safeguards against rash decrees
- Salamis: the fleet, rowed by the poorest citizens, saves Greece
- Cleisthenes rebuilds the tribes to break aristocratic power blocs
Hints
- Each reform answers a limitation of the previous one.
- Breaking the power of birth comes before breaking the clans.
Show the answer
- Solon cancels debt-slavery and grades rights by wealth, not birth
- Cleisthenes rebuilds the tribes to break aristocratic power blocs
- Salamis: the fleet, rowed by the poorest citizens, saves Greece
- Pericles' law tightens citizenship as jury pay begins
- Defeat by Sparta brings two brief oligarchic coups
- Democracy restored, with new safeguards against rash decrees
Why
Each stage answers the last: Solon breaks birth-privilege, Cleisthenes breaks the clans, the fleet gives the poor their political claim, and even catastrophic defeat only interrupts the machine for months.
Practise Classical Greece and the Polis
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Classical Greece and the Polis
- Athenian democracy paid citizens to attend the assembly and to serve on juries. What problem was the payment…
- Complete the description of ostracism.
- Sort each feature: filled by lottery or by election in classical Athens?
- An ostracism only counted if enough citizens showed up to scratch a name on a potsherd. Set the quorum.
- Why did Aristotle call the lottery democratic and election aristocratic?
- Most Athenian public offices were filled by lottery rather than election.