During the 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.