the Spartan king Cleomenes I to help him expel Cleisthenes. He did so on the pretext of the Alcmaeonid curse. Consequently, Cleisthenes left Athens as an exile, and Isagoras was unrivalled in power within the city. Isagoras set about dispossessing hundreds of Athenians of their homes and exiling them on the pretext that they too were cursed. He also attempted to dissolve the Boule (βουλή), a council of Athenian citizens appointed to run the daily affairs of the city. However, the council resisted, and the Athenian people declared their support of the council. Isagoras and his supporters were forced to flee to the Acropolis, remaining besieged there for two days. On the third day they fled the city and were banished. Cleisthenes was subsequently recalled, along with hundreds of exiles, and he assumed leadership of Athens. Promptly after his instatement as leader, He commissioned a bronze memorial from the sculptor Antenor in honour of the lovers and tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, whom Hippias had executed. Reformations and governance of Athens Political Reorganization After this victory, Cleisthenes began to reform the government of Athens. In order to forestall strife between the traditional clans, which had led to the tyranny in the first place, he changed the political organization from the four traditional tribes, which were based on family relations, and which formed the basis of the upper-class Athenian political power network, into ten tribes according to their area of residence (their deme,) which would form the basis of a new democratic power structure. It is thought that there may have been 139 demes (though this is still a matter of debate), each organized into three groups called trittyes ("thirds"), with ten demes divided among three regions in each trittyes (a city region, asty; a coastal region, paralia; and an inland region, mesogeia). D.M Lewis argues that Cleisthenes established the deme system in order to balance the central unifying force that a tyranny has with the democratic concept of having the people (instead of a single person) at the peak of political power. Another by-product of the deme system was that it split up and weaken his political adversaries. Cleisthenes also abolished patronymics in favour of demonymics (a name given according to the deme to which one belongs), thus increasing Athenians' sense of belonging to a deme. This and the other aforementioned reforms had an additional effect in that they worked to