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On the application of Isagoras and his party, Sparta, jealous of the growing strength of Athens, made three unsuccessful attempts to overthrow the Athenian democracy, and reinstate Hippias in supreme command. She finally abandoned the project, as she could find no allies to assist in the enterprise. "Athens had now entered upon her glorious career.
Opposed to him was Cleisthenes, of the noble family of the Alcmæonids, who had been banished in the time of Megacles, for the murder of Cylon, who had been treacherously enticed from the sanctuary at the altar of Athena. Cleisthenes gained the ear of the people, and prevailed over Isagoras, and effected another change in the constitution, by which it became still more democratic.
"And you, my son," replied the philosopher, "would never have been exiled from Athens, if you had debated in the porticos with young citizens, who love to exhibit their own skill in deciding whether the true cause of the Trojan war were Helen, or the ship that carried her away, or the man that built the ship, or the wood whereof it was made; if in your style you had imitated the swelling pomp of Isagoras, where one solitary idea is rolled over and over in an ocean of words, like a small pearl tossed about in the AEgean; if you had supped with Hyperbolus, or been seen in the agoras, walking arm in arm with Cleon.
He enters Athens to restore her liberties joins with Isagoras to destroy them; engages in an attempt to revolutionize that energetic state without any adequate preparation seizes the citadel to-day to quit it disgracefully to-morrow; invades Eleusis with an army he cannot keep together, and, in the ludicrous cunning common to the insane, disguises from his allies the very enemy against whom they are to fight, in order, as common sense might have expected, to be deserted by them in the instant of battle.
But the noble assembly he had thus violently dissolved refused obedience to his commands; they appealed to the people, whom the valour of liberty simultaneously aroused, and the citadel, of which Isagoras and the Spartans instantly possessed themselves, was besieged by the whole power of Athens.
For they affirm that there is in Samos a monument erected at the public charge, and honors there done to Archias a Spartan, who fell fighting valiantly in that quarrel; for which cause also his posterity still keep a familiar and friendly correspondence with the Samians, as Herodotus himself witnesses. He says farther, that Isagoras prostituted his wife to Cleomenes, who came to her.
The Council, however, resisted, the populace flocked together, and Cleomenes and Isagoras, with their adherents, took refuge in the Acropolis. Here the people sat down and besieged them for two days; and on the third they agreed to let Cleomenes and all his followers depart, while they summoned Cleisthenes and the other exiles back to Athens.
The nobles naturally aspired to the predominance at their head was the Eupatrid Isagoras; the strife of party always tends to produce popular results, even from elements apparently the most hostile. Clisthenes, the head of the Alcmaeonidae, was by birth even yet more illustrious than Isagoras; for, among the nobles, the Alcmaeonid family stood pre-eminent.
Thereupon Isagoras, finding himself left inferior in power, invited Cleomenes, who was united to him by ties of hospitality, to return to Athens, and persuaded him to 'drive out the pollution', a plea derived from the fact that the Alcmeonidae were suppposed to be under the curse of pollution.
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