3. The Solonian Revolution

It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often repeated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, without any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaosbut established a new and more generous political and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens’ independent career. Solon’s peaceful revolution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.

His father was a Eupatrid of purest blood, related to the descendants of King Codrus and, indeed, tracing his origin to Poseidon himself. His mother was cousin to the mother of Peisistratus, the dictator who would first violate and then consolidate the Solonian constitution. In his youth Solon participated lustily in the life of his time: he wrote poetry, sang the joys of “Greek friendship,”⁵⁰ and, like another Tyrtaeus, stirred the people with his verses to conquer Salamis.⁵¹ In middle age his morals improved in inverse ratio to his poetry; his stanzas became dull, and his counsel excellent. “Many undeserving men are rich,” he tells us, “while their betters are poor. But we will not exchange what we are for what they have, since the one gift abides while the other passes from man to man.” The riches of the rich “are no greater than his whose only possessions are stomach, lungs and feet that bring him joy, not pain; the blooming charms of lad or maid; and an existence ever in harmony with the changing seasons of life.”⁵² Once, when a sedition occurred in Athens, he remained neutral, luckily before his own reputed legislation making such caution a crime.⁵³ But he did not hesitate to denounce the methods by which the wealthy had reduced the masses to a desperate penury.⁵⁴

If we may believe Plutarch, Solon’s father “ruined his estate in doing benefits and kindnesses to other men.” Solon took to trade, and became a successful merchant with far-flung interests that gave him wide experience and travel. His practice was as good as his preaching, for he acquired among all classes an exceptional reputation for integrity. He was still relatively young—forty-four or forty-five—when, in 594, representatives of the middle classes asked him to accept election nominally as archon eponymos, but with dictatorial powers to soothe the social war, establish a new constitution, and restore stability to the state. The upper classes, trusting to the conservatism of a moneyed man, reluctantly consented.

His first measures were simple but drastic economic reforms. He disappointed the extreme radicals by making no move to redivide the land; such an attempt would have meant civil war, chaos for a generation, and the rapid return of inequality. But by his famousSeisachtheia, or Removal of Burdens, Solon canceled, says Aristotle, “all existing debts, whether owing to private persons or to the state”;*⁵⁵ and at one blow cleared Attic lands of all mortgages. All persons enslaved or attached for debt were released; those sold into servitude abroad were reclaimed and freed; and such enslavement was forbidden for the future. It was characteristic of humanity that certain of Solon’s friends, getting wind of his intention to cancel debts, bought on mortgage large tracts of land, and later retained these without paying the mortgages; this, Aristotle tells us with a rare twinkle in his style, was the origin of many fortunes, that were later “supposed to be of immemorial antiquity.”⁵⁷ Solon was under suspicion of having connived at this and of having profited by it, until it was discovered that as a heavy creditor he himself had lost by his law.⁵⁸ The rich protested unanswerably that such legislation was confiscation; but within a decade opinion became almost unanimous that the act had saved Attica from revolution.⁵⁹

Of another Solonian reform it is difficult to speak with clearness or certainty. Solon, says Aristotle, “superseded the Pheidonian measures”—that is, the Aeginetan coinage theretofore used in Attica—“by the Euboic system on a larger scale, and made the mina,*which had contained seventy drachmas, now contain a hundred.”⁶⁰ According to Plutarch’s fuller account, Solon “made the mina, which before passed for seventy-three drachmas, go for a hundred, so that, though the number of pieces in a payment was equal, the value was less; which proved a considerable benefit to those that were to discharge great debts, and no loss to the creditors.”⁶¹ Only the genial and generous Plutarch could devise a form of inflation that would relieve debtors without hurting creditors—except that doubtless in some cases half a loaf is better than none.†

More lasting than these economic reforms were those historic decrees that created the Solonian constitution. Solon prefaced them with an act of amnesty freeing or restoring all persons who had been jailed or banished for political offenses short of trying to usurp the government. He went on to repeal, directly or by implication, most of Draco’s legislation; the law concerning murder remained.⁶⁴ It was in itself a revolution that the laws of Solon were applied without distinction to all freemen; rich and poor were now subject to the same restraints and the same penalties. Recognizing that his reforms had been made possible by the support of the mercantile and industrial classes and signified their accession to a substantial share in the government, Solon divided the free population of Attica into four groups according to their wealth: first, thepentacosiomedimni, or five-hundred-bushel men, whose annual income reached five hundred measures of produce, or the equivalent thereof;* second, the hippes, whose income was between three and five hundred measures; third, the zeugitai, with incomes between two and three hundred measures; and fourth, the thetes, all other freemen. Honors and taxes were determined by the same rating, and the one could not be enjoyed without paying the other; furthermore, the first class was taxed on twelve times, the second class on ten times, the third class on only five times, the amount of its annual income; the property tax was in effect a graduated income tax.⁶⁵ The fourth class was exempt from direct taxation. Only the first class was eligible to the archonship or to military commands; the second class was eligible to lower offices and to the cavalry; the third was privileged to join the heavyarmed infantry; the fourth was expected to provide the common soldiers of the state. This peculiar classification weakened the kinship organization upon which the oligarchy had rested its power, and established the new principle of “timocracy”—government by honor or prestige as frankly determined by taxable wealth. A similar “plutocracy” prevailed, throughout the sixth and part of the fifth century, in most of the Greek colonies.

At the head of the new government Solon’s code left the old Senate of the Areopagus, a little shorn of its exclusiveness and powers, open now to all members of the first class, but still with supreme authority over the conduct of the people and the officers of the state.⁶⁶ Next below it he created a new boule, a Council of Four Hundred, to which each of the four tribes elected a hundred members; this Council selected, censored, and prepared all business that could be brought before the Assembly. Beneath this oligarchic superstructure, ingratiating to the strong, Solon, perhaps with good will aforethought, placed fundamentally democratic institutions. The old ekklesia of Homer’s day was brought back to life, and all citizens were invited to join in its deliberations. This Assembly annually elected, from among the five-hundred-bushel men, the archons who heretofore had been appointed by the Areopagus; it could at any time question these officers, impeach them, punish them; and when their terms expired it scrutinized their official conduct during the year, and could debar them, if it chose, from their usual graduation into the Senate. More important still, though it did not seem so, was the admission of the lowest class of the citizens to full parity with the higher classes in being eligible to selection by lot to the heliaea—a body of six thousand jurors that formed the various courts before which all matters except murder and treason were tried, and to which appeal could be made from any action of the magistrates. “Some believe,” says Aristotle, “that Solon intentionally introduced obscurity into his laws, to enable the commons to use their judicial power for their own political aggrandizement”; for since, as Plutarch adds, “their differences could not be adjusted by the letter, they would have to bring all their causes to the judges, who were in a manner masters of the laws.”⁶⁷ This power of appeal to popular courts was to prove the wedge and citadel of Athenian democracy.

To this basic legislation, the most important in Athenian history, Solon added a miscellany of laws aimed at the less fundamental problems of the time. First he legalized that individualization of property which custom had already decreed. If a man had sons he was to divide his property among them at his death; if he died childless he might bequeath to anyone the property that in such cases had heretofore reverted automatically to the clan.⁶⁸ With Solon begins, in Athens, the right and law of wills. Himself a businessman, Solon sought to stimulate commerce and industry by opening citizenship to all aliens who had a skilled trade and came with their families to reside permanently at Athens. He forbade the export of any produce of the soil except olive oil, hoping to turn men from growing surplus crops to practicing an industry. He enacted a law that no son should be obliged to support a father who had not taught him some specific trade.⁶⁹ To Solon—not to the later Athenians—the crafts had their own rich honor and dignity.

Even into the dangerous realm of morals and manners Solon offered laws. Persistent idleness was made a crime, and no man who lived a life of debauchery was permitted to address the Assembly.⁷⁰ He legalized and taxed prostitution, established public brothels licensed and supervised by the state, and erected a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos from the revenues. “Hail to you, Solon!” sang a contemporary Lecky. “You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men who, in the absence of your wise institution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the better women.”⁷¹ He enacted the un-Draconian penalty of a hundred drachmas for the violation of a free woman, but anyone who caught an adulterer in the act was allowed to kill him there and then. He limited the size of dowries, wishing that marriages should be contracted by the affection of mates and for the rearing of children; and with childlike trustfulness he forbade women to extend their wardrobes beyond three suits. He was asked to legislate against bachelors, but refused, saying that, after all, “a wife is a heavy load to carry.”⁷² He made it a crime to speak evil of the dead, or to speak evil of the living in temples, courts, or public offices, or at the games; but even he could not tie the busy tongue of Athens, in which, as with us, gossip and slander seemed essential to democracy. He laid it down that those who remained neutral in seditions should lose their citizenship, for he felt that the indifference of the public is the ruin of the state. He condemned pompous ceremonies, expensive sacrifices, or lengthy lamentations at funerals, and limited the goods that might be buried with the dead. He established the wholesome law—a source of Athenian bravery for generations—that the sons of those who died in war should be brought up and educated at the expense of the government.

To all of his laws Solon attached penalties, milder than Draco’s but still severe; and he empowered any citizen to bring action against any person whom he might consider guilty of crime. That his laws might be the better known and obeyed he wrote them down in the court of the archonbasileus upon wooden rollers or prisms that could be turned and read. Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, he made no claim that a god had given him these laws; this circumstance, too, revealed the temper of the age, the city, and the man. Invited to make himself a permanent dictator he refused, saying that dictatorship was “a very fair spot, but there was no way down from it.”⁷³ Radicals criticized him for failing to establish equality of possessions and power; conservatives denounced him for admitting the commons to the franchise and the courts; even his friend Anacharsis, the whimsical Scythian sage, laughed at the new constitution, saying that now the wise would plead and the fools would decide. Besides, added Anacharsis, no lasting justice can be established for men, since the strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made; the law is a spider’s web that catches the little flies and lets the big bugs escape. Solon accepted all this criticism genially, acknowledging the imperfections of his code; asked had he given the Athenians the best laws, he answered, “No, but the best that they could receive”⁷⁴—the best that the conflicting groups and interests of Athens could at that time be persuaded conjointly to accept. He followed the mean and preserved the state; he was a good pupil of Aristotle before the Stagirite was born. Tradition attributed to him the motto that was inscribed upon the temple of Apollo at Delphi—meden agon, nothing in excess;⁷⁵ and all Greeks agreed in placing him among the Seven Wise Men.

The best proof of his wisdom was the lasting effect of his legislation. Despite a thousand changes and developments, despite intervening dictatorships and superficial revolutions, Cicero could say, five centuries later, that the laws of Solon were still in force at Athens.⁷⁶ Legally his work marks the end of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, and the beginning of government by written and permanent law. Asked what made an orderly and well-constituted state, he replied, “When the people obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the laws.”⁷⁷ To his legislation Attica owed the liberation of its farmers from serfdom, and the establishment of a peasant proprietor class whose ownership of the soil made the little armies of Athens suffice to preserve her liberties for many generations. When, at the close of the Peloponnesian War, it was proposed to limit the franchise to freeholders, only five thousand adult freemen in all Attica failed to satisfy this requirement.⁷⁸ At the same time trade and industry were freed from political disabilities and financial inconveniences, and began that vigorous development which was to make Athens the commercial leader of the Mediterranean. The new aristocracy of wealth put a premium upon intelligence rather than birth, stimulated science and education, and prepared, materially and mentally, for the cultural achievements of the Golden Age.

In 572, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as archon for twenty-two years, Solon retired from office into private life; and having bound Athens, through the oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten years,⁷⁹ he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and the East. It was now, apparently, that he made his famous remark—“I grow old while always learning.”⁸⁰ At Heliopolis, says Plutarch, he studied Egyptian history and thought under the tutelage of the priests; from them, it is said, he heard of the sunken continent Atlantis, whose tale he told in an unfinished epic which two centuries later would fascinate the imaginative Plato. From Egypt he sailed to Cyprus and made laws for the city that in his honor changed its name to Soli.* Herodotus⁸¹ and Plutarch describe with miraculous memory his chat at Sardis with Croesus, the Lydian king: how this paragon of wealth, having arrayed himself in all his paraphernalia, asked Solon did he not account him, Croesus, a happy man; and how Solon, with Greek audacity, replied:

The gods, O King, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyment, or to admire any man’s happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with every possible variety of fortune; and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end do we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of life and hazard we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring.⁸²

This admirable exposition of what the Greek dramatists mean by hybris—insolent prosperity—has the ring of Plutarch’s eclectic wisdom; we can only say that it is better phrased than Herodotus’ report, and that both accounts belong, presumably, to the realm of imaginary conversations. Certainly both Solon and Croesus, in the manner of their deaths, justified the skepticism of this homily. Croesus was dethroned by Cyrus in 546, and (if we may rephrase Herodotus with Dante) knew the bitterness of remembering, in his misery, the happy time of his splendor, and the stern warning of the Greek. And Solon, returning to Athens to die, saw in his last years the overthrow of his constitution, the establishment of a dictatorship, and the apparent frustration of all his work.