Democracy denied: why Ephialtes attacked the Areiopagus

Abstract

Ephialtes is a rather enigmatic figure in Athenian history. On the one hand, he is widely regarded as the third and final ‘author’ of Athenian democracy; the man who finished what Solon began and Kleisthenes pushed forward. On the other hand, our knowledge of what he actually did is remarkably fuzzy. Considerable research on matters relevant to Ephialtes and his reforms has been published during the last decade, and it is my intention here to try to bring some of these results together to propose a new solution to the two principal problems concerning Ephialtes’ reforms: (i) what power(s) did he transfer from the Areiopagus to other bodies? and (ii) why did he propose these changes?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.