h the _Constitution of Athens_
(_c._ 22), may perhaps indicate that his political career ended in
disgrace, a hypothesis which is explicable on the ground of this act of
treachery in respect of the attempted Persian alliance. Whether to
Cleisthenes are due the final success over Boeotia and Euboea, the
planting of the 4000 cleruchs on the Lelantine Plain, and the policy of
the Aeginetan War (see AEGINA), in which Athens borrowed ships from
Corinth, it is impossible to determine. The eclipse of Cleisthenes in
all records is one of the most curious facts in Greek history. It is
also curious that we do not know in what official capacity Cleisthenes
carried his reforms. Perhaps he was given extraordinary _ad hoc_ powers
for a specified time; conceivably he used the ordinary mechanism. It
seems clear that he had fully considered his scheme in advance, that he
broached it before the last attack of Isagoras, and that it was only
after the final expulsion of Isagoras and his Spartan allies that it
became possible for him to put it into execution.

Analysis of his reforms

The ten tribes

Cleisthenes aimed at being the leader of a self-governing people; in
other words he aimed at making the democracy actual. He realized that
the dead-weight which held the democracy down was the influence on
politics of the local religious unit. Therefore his prime object was to
dissociate the clans and the phratries from politics, and to give the
democracy a totally new electoral basis in which old associations and
vested interests would be split up and become ineffective. It was
necessary that no man should govern a pocket-constituency merely by
virtue of his religious, financial or ancestral prestige, and that there
should be created a new local unit with administrative powers of a
democratic character which would galvanize the lethargic voters into a
new sense of responsibility and independence. His first step was to
abolish the four Solonian tribes and create ten new ones.[2] Each of the
new tribes was subdivided into "demes'" (roughly "townships"); this
organization did not, except politically, supersede the system of clans
and phratries whose old religious signification remained untouched. The
new tribes, however, though geographically arranged, did not represent
local interests. Further, the tribe names were taken from legendary
heroes (Cecropis, Pandionis, Aegeis recalled the storied kings of
Attica), and, therefore, contributed