dent man. Only a generous soul could have communicated something of its own liberality to a whole people, and to such a degree, that the nobles and the rich were transformed from the rulers into the fellowcitizens of the poor and the lowly-born. Solon feigned himself insane when it was death to any one to speak of the Athenian claim upon Salamis, and mounted the stone on which the heralds stood, to recite, as if in frenzy, the lines he had composed to stir the Athenians to the recovery of the island.121 So, when the holy oracle at Delphi had been outraged by invasions from Cirrha, it was Solon who insisted that the Amphictyonic league should do its duty and arm itself against the guilty people.122 Descended from the old royal stock of Attica,123 but early resolved upon a life of labor and usefulness, Solon became a merchant, a traveller, and a scholar, widening his sympathies with industry and enterprise, and at the same time tempering his physical energies with the influences of poetry 124 and philosophy, to which he gave himself with real enthusiasm from his youth. The ideal and the real, with him, were capable of being one. Thus possessed of a natural and an acquired title to the confidence of his countrymen, at a time when none were too blind to perceive that either anarchy or tyranny must triumph over them, unless they who were at variance should be reconciled and they who were oppressed should be liberated, Solon, 121 Plut., Sol., 8. 122 Ibid., 11. 123 Ibid., VOL. I. 1. 21 124 He was said to have gathered together the fragments of Homer. Diog. Laert., I. 57. then at the age of forty-four, was elected to the Archonship, with the more especial charges of mediation and legislation. This was a quarter of a century after the attempt of Draco.125 From the fullest account we have of the astonishing undertaking in which Solon not only engaged, but succeeded, it would appear that he was acceptable to the rich as well as to the poor, who alike expected him to prove their peculiar champion.126 There can be little doubt that his own sympathies inclined to the poorer, if not to the poorest, classes, whose necessities he was determined to relieve, if it were only to calm their dangerous resentments. The first and the strongest impulse to reform, or to simpler efforts, must have come from the eagerness of the lower orders to be redressed against the injuries to which they were become more sensitive than their humbler ancestors. Without any willingness to be a demagogue, or any desire to introduce a democracy, Solon put himself at the head of the movement thus originated, in order to carry out the changes he saw were then inevitable. His first object, therefore, was to relieve the miseries he beheld around him; in which intent, he procured a law called then or afterwards the Discharge,127 to release the debtor from his bondage, and to abolish slavery as a punishment of debt, for ever.128 This he followed up by other measures,' 129 128 Plut., Sol., 15, 23. 129 Especially by clearing all mortgages upon land, and by depre 127 Zeiσáxoeia. Plut., Sol., 15, ciating the value of money, in order 16. Diod. Sic., I. 79. to assist those who were still needy, intended to relieve the poor of their encumbrances, and to restore some who had been dispossessed of their estates, and others who had been actually banished or sold as slaves into foreign lands.130 In these measures there was nothing so intemperate as to contradict the laws; neither the security of debts nor the force of contracts was destroyed; while such was the moderation pursued in liberating the imprisoned and restoring the outlawed, that, though the creditor or the noble might be offended, the debtors and the inferior ranks in general were scarcely satisfied." Through some means of which we are ignorant, the Athenians were finally persuaded to abide by the proposals of their mediator, as he was rightly named; and it was apparently in the first moments of their gratitude, that they again declared him their lawgiver and their reformer." 132 131 Solon might have risen to still higher authority, had he been pleased to obey the entreaties of a party that trusted in the advantages which a ruler with his intentions would leave open to themselves. He was urged, either at this time or at the beginning of his Archonship, to become the tyrant of Athens, and to employ the power he would then exclusively possess in fulfilling the enterprise to which a great resistance. was likely to be aroused. There were, besides, instan when set at liberty, to discharge their obligations, which, it is plain, continued binding. See Plut., Sol., 15. 130 Plut., Sol., 15, 19. 131 Plutarch quotes some touching lines from Solon himself, expressive of his failure, at first, to please his countrymen. Sol., 16. 132 Plut., Sol., 16. Cf. 14. ces, recent and distant, of others in his position, who, not merely from selfish, but sometimes, perhaps, from generous motives, had put themselves at the head of cities or states, which gladly submitted to any firm dominion, so that their boisterous factions might be controlled. But Solon was unmoved, either by example or by argument, to do a wrong to the freedom he loved and upheld, as we shall hereafter see, to the last. "It does not shame me," he wrote, "to have preserved my country without laying hold of a tyranny or staining its fame":133 yet he was derided by a multitude of men, unable to conceive his purity of ambition. After thus persuading his fellow-citizens to do one another justice, and facing, himself, the strongest temptation which, in his times, could well assail him, there were still a thousand things for Solon to attempt, or, at the least, to intend. Of all these, nothing was so difficult as the troubles he had already overcome; and it is pardonable in those who sincerely admire his character, that they should be hurried on to regard the Athenian institutions of a later day as the unbroken achievement of the first and the last true lawgiver whom Athens received. No one, indeed, was fitter than Solon to lay the foundations of liberty amongst his countrymen; but he was not a man to raise its towers towards the clouds, even had his people been more numerous and more prepared to aid him in a plan so really impracticable. He cer 133 Plut., Sol., 14, 15. tainly appears to have proposed the elevation of the lower classes, as his especial aim; and there was quite sufficient light to show the truth, that it was vain to strike off the poor man's fetters or restore his patch of land, if he were then to be left in the same inferior and dejected condition as that from which he was already fallen. Accordingly, Solon remodelled the whole system of divisions and ranks, upon which the aristocracy of Athens had hitherto securely rested, by introducing a new scale, adapted neither to descent nor to occupation, but to a simple census 134 of the taxes which each man paid into the public treasury. In this way, four classes, entitled equally to the lower rights of citizenship, were formed: one, whose income amounted to the highest sum assigned, being alone eligible to the Archonship and the priesthood; a second and a third, united with the first, as a body from whom the other magistracies were to be filled; and a fourth, comprising such as had not yet been regarded as freemen,135 but were now, though still unequal to any direct contributions, entitled to a 134"The census, ríunpa, which we," says Boeckh (Polit. Econ. of the Athen., Book IV. ch. 5), "shall call the taxable capital, is not to be confounded with the entire value of any individual property, nor is it at all the same with the taxes themselves." It would act, says Mr. Grote (Hist. Greece, Vol. III. p. 157), "like a graduated incometax, looking at it in reference to the three different classes; but as an equal income-tax, looking at it in reference to the different individuals comprised in one and the same class." The reader is referred to either of these works for further details. 135 Dion. Hal., II. 9. Dionysius of Halicarnassus completed his history or Archæology of Rome, where he had resided and labored for twenty-two years, in A. C. 7. |