Cyrene and Persia

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Abstract
Arkesilas III succeeded to the throne of Cyrene after the royal power had been considerably curtailed. In the reign of the previous king, Battos III, Demonax of Mantineia had carried out a tribal reorganisation and constitutional reform which was, according to Herodotus, democratic. But since the leading opponents of Arkesilas III were the nobility, it is likely that the reforms of Demonax were supported, or at least acquiesced in, by the aristocrats. As Chamoux argues, the system of tribes created by Demonax will not have diminished the local influence of the aristocratic landowners, although the more recent colonists who arrived from all parts of Greece in the reign of Battos II were given a place in the new constitution. The arrangements of Kleisthenes a generation later at Athens provide both a comparison and a contrast. He added the Athenian δῆμος to his aristocratic faction for political reasons, just as the Cyrenaean nobility accepted Demonax, and similarly the democracy of 508/7 was principally a tribal reform. But, at Athens, after the fall of the tyranny, there was a pressure towards democracy which could not have existed at Cyrene a generation earlier, and it was precisely because he had to break down the local influence of the nobility that Kleisthenes devised the system of trittues, which is not paralleled at Cyrene. The Demonax reform resulted in constitutional power for the landowning class at the expense of the monarchy.

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