resigned
themselves at once to the voluntary sacrifice of conquest and
ambition.

Upon the sole condition of recovering their children, Hippias and his
partisans consented to surrender the citadel, and quit the territories
of Attica within five days. Thus, in the fourth year from the death
of Hipparchus (B. C. 510), and about fifty years after the first
establishment of the tyranny under its brilliant founder, the dominion
of Athens passed away from the house of Pisistratus.

V. The party of Hippias, defeated, not by the swords of the enemy,
but by the soft impulses of nature, took their way across the stream
of the immemorial Scamander, and sought refuge at Sigeum, still under
the government of Hegesistratus, the natural brother of the exiled
prince.

The instant the pressure of one supreme power was removed, the two
parties imbodying the aristocratic and popular principles rose into
active life. The state was to be a republic, but of what
denomination? 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. But, unable to attain the sole
power of the government, Clisthenes and his party were unwilling to
yield to the more numerous faction of an equal. The exile and
sufferings of the Alcmaeonids had, no doubt, secured to them much of
the popular compassion; their gallant struggles against, their
ultimate victory over the usurper, obtained the popular enthusiasm;
thus it is probable, that an almost insensible sympathy had sprung up
between this high-born faction and the people at large; and when,
unable to cope with the party of the nobles, Clisthenes attached
himself to the movement of the commons, the enemy of the tyrant
appeared in his natural position--at the head of the democracy.
Clisthenes was, however, rather the statesman of a party than the
legislator for a people--it was his object permanently to break up the
power of the great proprietors, not as enemies of the commonwealth,
but as rivals to his faction. The surest way to diminish the
influence of property in elections is so to alter the constituencies
as to remove the electors from the immediate control of individual
proprietors. Under the old