in antiquity, was the name of a party or faction at Athens.—That city, we read, was divided into two parties: the one favourites of an oligarchy, who would only have a few persons employed in the government; the other consisted of such as were for a democratical or popular government, wherein the whole people should have a share. The first were called diacrii, and the latter pediti; the latter inhabiting the lower, and the former the agora, or upper quarter or part of the city.—The laws of Solon imported, that Pisistratus should be chief of the diacrii; though the scholiast on Aristophanes's comedy The Walps, affirms, that Pandion distributed the quarter of the diacrii among his sons, and put Lyceus at their head.