The Story of America in One Room

According to Aristotle, early in 507BCE, the Athenian Cleisthenes found himself, yet again, in exile. This situation was not uncommon. Cleisthenes was a member of the Alcmaeonid family, a clan well known in Attica for two things: being politically progressive, and being cursed. The curse, for its part, began in 632BCE, when Cleisthenes’s great-grandfather, an archon of Athens, neglected the one unbreakable rule of Classical Antiquity—don’t cross the gods—and slaughtered a group of men while they were tethered by a length of rope to a statue in the temple of Athena.