next eighty years the Athenian society gradually drifted into
the course on which it further developed in the following centuries. The
outrageous land speculation of the time before Solon had been fettered,
likewise the excessive concentration of property in land. Commerce,
trades and artisan handicrafts, which were carried on in an ever larger
scale as slave labor increased, became the ruling factors in gaining a
living. Public enlightenment advanced. Instead of exploiting their own
fellow citizens in the old brutal style, the Athenians now exploited
mainly the slaves and the customers outside. Movable property, wealth in
money, slaves and ships, increased more and more. But instead of being a
simple means for the purchase of land, as in the old stupid times, it
had now become an end in itself. The new class of industrial and
commercial owners of wealth now waged a victorious competition against
the old nobility. The remnants of the old gentile constitution lost
their last hold. The gentes, phratries and tribes, the members of which
now were dispersed all over Attica and completely intermixed, had thus
become unavailable as political groups. A great many citizens of Athens
did not belong to any gens. They were immigrants who had been adopted
into citizenship, but not into any of the old groups of kinship.
Besides, there was a steadily increasing number of foreign immigrants
who were only protected by traditional sufferance.

Meanwhile the struggles of the parties proceeded. The nobility tried to
regain their former privileges and for a short time recovered their
supremacy, until the revolution of Kleisthenes (509 B. C.) brought their
final downfall and completed the ruin of gentile law.

In his new constitution, Kleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded
on the gentes and phratries. Their place was taken by an entirely new
organization based on the recently attempted division of the citizens
into naukrariai according to residence. No longer was membership in a
group of kindred the dominant fact, but simply local residence. Not the
nation, but the territory was now divided; the inhabitants became mere
political fixtures of the territory.

The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts,
so-called demoi, every one of which was autonomous. The citizens living
in a demos (demotoi) elected their official head (demarchos), treasurer
and thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor cases. They also recei