READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WEST

CHAPTER II

THE REFORM OF THE ATHENIAN STATE

I.

CYLON

During the first half of the seventh century BC Attica was an obscure corner of Greece. It had achieved one thing—unity; the farmer of Eleusis, Marathon or Sunium felt himself an Athenian. There was one central government and when its word went out to levy men for war or cattle for sacrifice, it was obeyed. This government was aristocratic and the Attic peasant left high affairs of state to his betters, while he busied himself in farming or learning to plant olives. As yet there was little overseas trade. Athenians went down to the sea in ships, for the paths of the sea are easier than the roads of Greece, and many scholars see in the naucraries evidence for a navy on a small scale, while Attic vases of the Dipylon style often display what may be Athenian galleys guarding against pirates. Athens herself belonged to the Amphictyony of Calabria, a religious league of the cities which lay around the Saronic Gulf, but across her way farther afield lay Aegina the jealous island of merchants, while nearer home, within sight of the city, was Salamis, now in the hands of the Megarians, who had their neighbourly feuds with the city of Pallas. As yet, indeed, there was little enough to export and little power to win markets. Other states had made the venture of colonization and they had their reward. The one Attic industry of note was pottery but the day of its dominance was yet to come and Corinthian, Sicyonian and Chalcidian ware held the field as pottery de luxe. The greater part of Attica was poor land from which the peasantry could hardly earn a living. The good land lay chiefly in the plain behind the city and most of this belonged to nobles, whose clans gave their names to many places in this area. Enriched by this fertile land the nobles were learning to livein some kind of splendour which may still be seen depicted on Attic vases of the time. They spent their substance like gentlemenin competing at the athletic festivals of Greece and so the name of Athens was sometimes heard at Olympia. In neighbouring states, Corinth, Megara and Sicyon, there were brilliant tyrannies, and the Athenian gentry learned at these courts ambitions and desires alien to the home-keeping peasantry of Attica.

It is thus not surprising that the first event we know of in the political history of united Attica is the attempt of a noble to copy his friends abroad and sef up a tyranny. A young aristocrat Cylon had brought glory to Athens and himself by winning a victory in the footrace at Olympia (640 BC) and had added to his athletic distinction the social triumph of marriage with the daughter of Theagenes the tyrant of Megara. The marriage implies that there was peace between Athens and Megara at the time, but the relations of the two states were not friendly and Theagenes himself might well feel more secure if Athens was ruled by a tyrant and a kinsman. Sure of Megarian support, Cylon found nobles of his own age ready to help in the overthrow of the governing aristocracy. The attempt was made in the year of an Olympian festival when Cylon’s chief claim to distinction might be remembered. It Iis likely that his marriage and his coup d’état were not very long removed in time from his victory in the foot race, and that the conspiracy was a young man’s adventure. The plot was at first successful and Cylon and his friends helped by Theagenes’ hoplites seized the Acropolis. But the archon of that year was Megacles the Alcmaeonid, the first of a long line of determined, tenacious aristocrats. He sent out word through the naucraries—the local districts of Attica—and the levies poured into the city under their headmen, the prytaneis. Tyranny found its best soil in commercialized states, and the Athenian peasantry and farmers were still loyal to their aristocracy. The Acropolis was blockaded and its defenders were starved into surrender, though Cylon himself and some of his followers escaped into exile. The remainder trusted for their lives to the terms of the surrender and the protection of the gods. But Megacles and his followers, possibly already at feud with the nobles who followed Cylon, massacred their opponents, some even, it was said, at the altar of the Eumenides near the Areopagus.

The state was saved, but this massacre stirred the conscience of the Athenian peasantry which had more superstition or a deeper moral sense of guilt than the more sophisticated aristocrats. Possibly, too, other nobles resented the high-handed action of Megacles. The result was dissension in Attica aggravated by the feeling that the land was polluted by this bloodshedding. An inevitable consequence of Theagenes’ support of Cylon was that Megara and Athens came to open war in which the Megarians held at least their own. The Alcmaeonidae, though the taint of bloodguiltiness clung to them, maintained temselves for a time, but were at last forced to submit to judgment. They were tried before a court of nobles, the living were banished, the bones of the dead cast outside the Attic border. Their accuser was Myron of Phlya; the fact that his name is preserved suggests that he wasa man of note, perhaps the head of a rival noble house. There was a tradition that Epimenides, a Cretan seer, was brought in to conduct the formal purification of the city. Later writers however give contradictory accounts of the date of Epimenides and it islikely enough that he really lived a century later. But a formal purification must have taken place. There is another tradition that it was Solon who persuaded the Alcmaeonidae to submit to trial. But it is not likely that the trial was so long after the massacre that Solon would have become eminent enough to intervene. Nor is there anything in the history of the Alcmaeonid family to suggest that they would yield to the moral persuasion of any statesman however respected. By the banishment of the guilty the land had peace but the moral ascendancy of the nobles was shaken.

II.

DRACO

In consequence of all this the Athenians realized the need for a lawgiver to put an end to this lawlessness and fix and make accessible in a code the practice of the judges, the Thesmothetae. The nobles were to be bound by their best judgments. Accordingly in the closing decades of the seventh century—the traditional date is 621 BC—Draco was given powersto make a code of laws. There was a belief that the penalties in his code were unduly harsh according to the notions oflater times, so that ‘Draconian’ became a synonym for ‘severe.’ Otherwise hardly a trace remains of most of Draco’s work. For his laws were superseded by the code of Solon and we have no means of disengaging from Solon’s laws any part which he may have inherited from his predecessor. There is one exception. Draco’s lawgiving about homicide was important and permanent. The troubles of the state had been largely caused by blood feuds and the new code sought to set definite bounds to this evil. The conscience of the Athenians had been roused by their domestic troubles and no less by their growing enlightenment, and Draco’s laws about homicide are significant of the moral atmosphere of his day.

If the intervention of Solon is not historical the banishment of those responsible for the Cylonian massacre may be set before the legislation of Draco as above, but me evidence does not admit of certainty.

The blood feud was deeply rooted in Attic sentiment. It arose from the belief that the spirit of a man killed cries to his kin for vengeance and cannot be appeased until blood has had blood. If the injured spirit is not thus set at rest, it remains hostile and has for its allies the powers of the earth, which refuse fertility to a land tainted with guilt. The son inherits the feud as he inherits his father’s goods and has no choice but to seek revenge. This was the belief which clung to the soil of Greece proper, where the close bond of the family was strongest. In the society of the Homeric poems, a society uprooted from its mother country, these ideas appear shadowy. There killing is an injury which gives the kin of the deceased the right to vengeance or to compensation. Killing is hardly murder; the dead man is little more than a chattel with a sentimental value; it is not discreditable to take goods in place of the son lost by murder. The state has no direct interest in the matter which is a diplomatic incident between families.

But in Greece proper the old belief continued and was strengthened by the teaching of the Delphian Shrine, which, probably from the eighth century onwards, had declared that killing involved the defilement of the killer and of his city until vengeance had been taken and rites of purification performed. The moral quality of the act did not at first challenge inquiry. The spirit of a man killed by accident was no less angry, his kin no less injured than if the killing was wanton and deliberate. The duty of vengeance, the pollution of the act was just as great. Where the killer was unknown so that the next of Ian could not pursue the feud, the state was obliged to step in. Thus at Athens the Basileus and the four Tribal Kings, the representatives of the state in its earliest form, meet outside the Prytaneum and solemnly pronounce their ban on the unknown homicide and thus the land is cleared of guilt. So in the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the King standing at the doors of his palace in Thebes bans the unknown slayer of Laius:

That man, whoe’er he be, from all the land

Whose government and sway is mine, I make

An outlaw. None shall speak to him, no loof

Shall shelter. In your sacrifice and prayer

Give him no place, nor in dnnk-offenngs.

But drive him out of doors...for it is he

Pollutes us, as the orade Pythian

Of Phoebus hath today revealed to me.

But the state must do more. If the family vengeance falls on the innocent and the guilty goes free, the dead man is still hostile, the land is still cursed. And so the Areopagus was made a sanctuary whither a man might flee before the feud and declare his innocence of the act. Standing at the rock of Offence facing the pursuer of blood on the stone of Implacability he swears to his innocence and the Council of the State judges if his plea is true, and if it acquits, the avenger of blood must turn elsewhere. The homicide may, if he will, abandon his plea and, if he can, escape into exile. The state protects itself and also the next of kin, who must run down the actual killer and no one else. But presently reason began to struggle against the doctrine that the moral quality of the action was indifferent. It was realized that when a man wantonly attacks another’s life or goods or honour and in doing so meets his death, he is himself the true cause of his killing and his spirit has no claim to be avenged. In the old Greek formula ‘his death is without blood-price.’ From the idea that the guilt of the killed implies the innocence of the killer may have arisen the conception of justifiable homicide, and this conception, no doubt already put into practice, was made law by Draco. It is laid down that where a man has killed in defence of himself, his goods, or his honour, he may flee to the sanctuary of Apollo Delphinios and there a court of Ephetae decides if his story is true and, if it is judged to be so, he is admitted to purification and protected.

A further advance was made by the setting up of a legal distinction between premeditated and unintended homicide. This is a greater break with the old ideas and, as Draco expressly makes it retrospective, it may not have been the regular practice until his code was published. Where a homicide could plead that he had not intended to kill his neighbour, he might take refuge at the sanctuary of Pallas outside the city. There the court of Ephetae judged his story and, if they judged it true, the kinsmen of the dead man must allow him to go into exile to remain there until the kinsmen, or, failing them, representatives of the dead man’s phratry granted him pardon. This is a compromise between the anger of the dead man, the guilt of blood and themoral ideas of a more enlightened time. Further, so as to restrict the area of the vendetta, Draco gave the protection of the law to, the homicide in exile so long as he avoided the frontier markets and the general meeting-places of the Greeks. If the returns to Attica still unpardoned he may be killed or haled to judgment, but not mutilated or held to ransom. Thus private vengeance is restricted to the duties of religion, and neither is cruelty allowed on the one hand nor cynical blackmail on the other.

The exclusive right of the family to prosecute for murder is expressly stated and, in the absence of relatives, the right falls to the phratry of the dead man. In the fragmentary inscription which contains a part of the law of Draco about homicide the Ephetae are found elaborately described as ‘the Fifty-one, the Ephetae,’ which suggests that a regular court of Fifty-one members had been instituted by Draco to supersede other bodies which bore the same name. The word probably meant those who ‘admitted’ to trial or to purification and the earliest Ephetae may have been priests at the several sanctuaries, for whom the Athenians, ever jealous of priestly authority, now substituted civil officials, who went in circuit to these asyla to judge the cause of suppliants. The Ephetae were presided over by the Basileus, the old tribal kings probably sitting as assessors with him. There was yet another court, at Phreattys near the haibour of Zea, where men in exile for unpremeditated homicide might defend themselves against a subsequent charge of deliberate murder. They pleaded their cause from a boat so as not to forfeit the protection of the law by setting foot on Attic soil. But as this court seems to imply some experience of the operation of Draco’s other laws, it may have been set up later, possibly by Solon.

These laws of Draco are a skilful compromise between the claims of the family and of older religious ideas on the one hand and a more enlightened morality and more active intervention by the state on the other. They became a permanent part of Athenian jurisprudence and when Plato wrote his Laws he accepted for his model state the statutes which Draco had laid down lor Athens.

III.

FROM DRACO TO SOLON

Towards the end of the century Athens appears to have pursued a vigorous foreign policy. Her nearest enemy was Megara, and the possession of Salamis by the Megarians was a constant menace to Athens and a check on Attic sea-going trade. Unfortunatelythe ancient traditions about the wars over Salamis are vitiated by the absence of any clear chronology and by the disturbing attraction of the personality of Solon For in periods without fixed chronology events gravitate towards the leading personality of the time. It may be taken as likely, though no more, that not long before the year 600 BC the Athenians had gained possession of Salamis and so made more possible a certain naval activity. This activity was directed towards the mouth of the Dardanelles, to wrest from the people of Lesbos the town of Sigeum in the Troad. Tradition records the name of the Athenian commander, one Phrynon, who had won a victory at Olympia in 636 BC. The war may be set in the last decade of the seventh century. After a prolonged struggle which speaks well for the tenacity of the Athenians, the war ended in the arbitration of the Corinthian tyrant Periander about the year 600. In accordance with his award the Athenians remained in possession of Sigeum but the Lesbians took advantage of Athenian weakness later to retake the city. The motive of this Sigeum adventure can hardly have been to secure a market for export trade. At least there is no evidence that Athenian products found a sale in these regions at this time. It had been suggested with some probability that Athens had already begun to import Black Sea corn to supplement her own scanty crops and that this war was an attempt to secure the free and unchallenged passage of these supplies. Whatever the motive, the city could hardly have committed herself to so distant and arduous an enterprise unless her own borders were secure, so we may suppose that she had successfully asserted herself against Megara, where the tyranny of Theagenes had collapsed. Thus at the beginning of the sixthcentury Athens was beginning to make herself felt in Greek affairs and was pursuing a spirited foreign policy. Athenian merchants were learning to engage in overseas trade and to travel abroad even as far as Cyprus and Egypt.

But at this very time the internal condition of Athens had become steadily worse and there was impending an economic crisis which the strain of these enterprises helped to hasten. The Athenian small farmers, though ready to fight their neighbours in times of need, may have resented being taken from thear farms to distant wars—especially if these only resulted in easier importation of foreign and competing corn.

In the days of Hesiod in Boeotia the small peasant led a hard and anxious life, but on his own plot of land, excluded from political power, but his own master. Between the days of Hesiod and the days of Solon lies a great change due to the invention and spread of coined money. The old days of barter were now coming to an end and the peasant must more and more exchange his produce for corn, while the prices are fixed by powers beyond his understanding and control. If he lacks the new medium of exchange he must buy it or borrow it. The great noble and the merchant who buys his way into the nobility has at his command the luxuries of the world, fine cups and vasesfrom Corinth, handsome cloaks from Miletus, purple from Laconia, metalwork from Chalcis the city of bronze. But theit peasant discovers new needs without the means of satisfying them and upon him falls the chief stress of the new epoch. In any case Attica was bound to find the strain greater than mostG reek states, for the balance of trade was against her. The country had not yet reached its full production of oil, wine or pottery; it grew no more corn than was needed at home, the silver mines of Laurium were as yet hardly touched. The needs of Attica grew with a growng population in a country where the good land was limited. Had all the Athenians been content to remain primitive and simple, it might have been a second Arcadia, happy and distinguished But the nobles were not content. Wealth seemed so worth while at any cost. This is the significance of the thought that recurs in poems of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, that  ‘money makes the man’, that if a man attains wealth he attains everything, that men will do anything, even go far out to sea, to win  wealth and avoid poverty.

The Athenian nobles were to keep abreast of their neighbours, they must put away the idea of modest contentment, forget the Delphic lesson of moderation and wring out of Attica the last drops of wealth. They must find ever more things to sell abroad for money, even the corn the Athenians needed to eat, even, if need be, Athenians themselves. Draco’s code had stereotyped harsh laws protecting property and had failed to meet a grievance still not clearly formulated. While it marked an advance in restrinting the blood feud, in other ways the codification of law had stood in the way of progress. The nobles were the judges and without wrenching the law they might make it their tool.

The law of debt, above all, framed to protect the creditor in a less avanced society, was turned into a great instrument of oppresion. In ancient societies where the rich were rather hoarders than capitalists men must be given the maximum of security before they were willing to lend. The state, controlled by the rich, used such power as it had to support the extreme rights of the creditor against the debtor. On the other hand, especially in rather primitive agricultural countries such as was Attica in the last half of the seventh century, the peasant who was forced to boirow, first cattle or seed-corn and later money, had little security to offer except himself, his family and his land. A friend might stand surety, but the bitter experience of the Greeks was distilled in the sage maxim ‘Be surety and destruction is near’. There may have been a time when even the peasant’s land was not his to pledge, as it was really the common property of his clan. This stage had passed in Attica; private property had taken its place and now the peasant’s land might be surety for him.

Land thus pledged was marked by boundary pillars, and Solon speaks of their removal as the freeing of the land in a passage which deals with the relief of debtors. These boundary pillars are commonly called ‘mortgage stones’ and such have been found in Attica, but none earlier than the fourth century. This last fact has aroused doubt whether Solon’s ‘boundary pillars’ really recorded mortgages in his day, but there is no reason to assume that the pillars were of stone indelibly inscribed, or that, once private property in land was established, anything would prevent a peasant, under stress, from pledging his farm before he pledged himself. That the rich had accumulated much land before Solon is certain. It is hard to evade the conclusion that the poor had lost some. Sentiment may have been strong, but the stress of need is stronger and law was on the side of the rich who wished to add field to field. The word ‘mortgage’ may be inexact. The form of pledge is more likely to have been something more familiar to the needy which the Greeks called “sale with a provision for redemption”. The land passed into the legal possession of the creditor at once, subject to the debtor’s right to redeem it by the repayment of the loan, so the boundary pillars marked an effective, though possibly temporary, extension of the creditor’s estate. How long the right of redemption was to last would be a matter for bargaining. But the same stress which drove a peasant to borrow might prevent him from repaying, and thus by the sixth century there was a steady expropriation of the poor, and these boundary pillars were the silent witnesses to many hard bargains.

A second form of security was for the peasant to pledge hisl abour or the produce of his labour. From being a peasant propietor working for himself he might become a serf working for his creditor. Such a condition is reflected in the name Hektemoroi which came down in Attic tradition from the times of Solon. The word means ‘Sixth-parters’ and was explained in the fourth century as meaning those who worked on other men's land, paying to the owner one-sixth of the produce and keeping the remainder for their own use. Such a condition and its origin may be well illustrated from the Book of Genesis: “Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land. And it shall come to pass at the ingatherings, that ye shall give a fifth unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones. And they said. Thou hast saved our lives”. The condition of the Hektemoroi was, however, something more grievous than that of metayers or of tenants paying a bearable rent. The name suggests some kind of state-recognized institution in that the quota was not subject to the processes of bargaining or to variation in different parts of Attica. It may be, then, that in these Hektemoroi is to be seen an incipient serfdom like that of the Helots in Lacedaemon or the Penestae in Thessaly, except that in Attica there was no difference of race or right of conquest to plead in its favour. That such a serfdom might arise from debt may be seen from the Laws of Gortyn where there are found debt-serfs who are in a position between complete freedom and absolute slavery, and are distinguished from those who have been adjudged the slaves of their creditors.

In Crete the rights of the former were defined by the law, and when the debt was paid off they resumed the full rights of citizens. It is possible that the institution began in that way in Athens but was unfairly exploited by the rich who may have usurped rights to labour which hindered repayment, and may have then gonef urther and seized the Hektemoroi as slaves if ever they failed to pay their quota at the right time. For besides this institution of the Hektemoroi there was a yet more drastic weapon in the hands of the creditor. He might impose the condition that if a debt was not repaid, the debtor with wife and children became his slaves. The poor peasant might be forced to accept such a bond if his land was already pledged, and such an arrangement suited better nobles hastening to be rich. Thus Athenians were not only losing their land and becoming bound to make over part of the produce of their labour but were being made slaves and even sold abroad, ‘some unjustly’ says Solon, as though the noble judges did not enquire too closely into the claims of the rich and the rights of the poor.

So harsh a law harshly administered in times of economic stress is in itself enough to explain the discontent of the mass of the Athenians who had suffered or feared to suffer from it. The loss of land, the loss of independence, the loss of freedom, in an age in which the divine right of the nobles was challenged and money seemed at once the root of evil and the root of power, set abroad ideas of revolution.

For there was no easy road to redress. The constitution gave no power to the poor and very little to the lower middle class. In the words of Aristotle: “The cruellest and bitterest grievance of the many against the existing order was their slavery. But they were, too, discontented with all else. For at this time they had a share in almost nothing”. The aristocracy, by absorbing those who had succeeded in the race for wealth, was becoming more and more aloof from the mass of the people. A generation before, the peasantry had flocked into Athens to defend the existing order against Cylon; now it seemed as if a revolution or a tyrant would be the result, if not the remedy, of the economic ills which were so keenly felt. What the moment demanded was one who would face boldly the problem of debt, make just and fair laws for all, and discover means of relieving Attica of the economic inferiority which was the deep-seated cause of the social crisis. Fortunately for Athens and for the generations who have gained by the greatness of Athens, such a man was found in Solon the son of Execestides.

IV.

SOLON AS ECONOMIC REFORMER

Solon is the first Athenian whose personality we can grasp. The evidence for his character lies in his poems, of which rather less than 300 lines have come down to us. He was not an inspired poet, he was a statesman with a philosophy of life who wrote in verse because as yet one did not write in prose. A travelled man of some wealth and position, he possessed, together with a genuine sympathy for the oppressed, a cool detachment from the partizan- ships of Attic politics; he was lacking in personal ambition though not unconscious of his own deserts as a statesman and reformer. The motive of his policy was a strong ethical desire to see fair dealing between the strong and the weak. To achieve this end he was bold and resolute, otherwise he was no idealist and not at all a doctrinaire. He was as bold in resisting the undue claims of the poor as in assailing the injustice of the rich. In politics he did not aim at democracy but at making a contented people and a stable government.

To secure this was needed a radical reform of the law of debt and a drastic handling of the grievances to which the old law had given rise. Accordingly Solon, appointed Archon and ‘reconciler’ in 594 bc, made these his first task. It was the practice for the Archon on entering office to declare that he would maintain existing rights of property during his rule. Instead of that, Solon made a new proclamation, his programme for healing the evils of the state. First he declared void existing pledges in land. In his own words

Best witness with me at the bar of Time

Were the great mother of the Olympian gods

Black Earth herself: for I pluck’d up the host

Of boundary marks that pierced her everywhere,

After long years of bondage, she is free.

Further, he granted freedom to all men enslaved for debt and, it is reasonable to assume, cancelled all debts which involved any form of personal servitude. For the future he declared it illegal to accept the person of a debtor as security for a loan. Thus all debt slaves or debt serfs within Attica gained complete freedom. It is no wonder that these measures were called the Seisachtheia, the ‘Shaking off of burdens’. For the new order meant freedom, and to many, what the Greeks prized almost as much as freedom, return to their country:

Many I brought back to their fatherland

To god-built Athens, who unlawfully

Or by strict right were sold, or under stress

Of debt had fled the land and wandering far

Had unlearnt Attic speech: while others here

Suffered a slave’s despite and cower’d beneath

Their masters’ humours—these I have set free.

For those who had fled or were still in Attica the proclamation of freedom was enough. There remained the Athenians who had been sold abroad as slaves. These could not be liberated by the bare fiat of the Athenian state. We may assume that they were ransomed by the Athenian treasury, by private benevolence, or by compulsion applied to the creditors who had sold them.

The grievances which Solon had to meet were agrarian or due to personal bondage for debt. That he went beyond the grievance and cancelled also commercial debts and contracts in which personal servitude was not involved is most unlikely. Solon was himself too well versed in the ways of trade to destroy such rudi­mentary credit as there was, from a desire for formal consistency. The action he did take was in itself bold and drastic enough but plainly necessary, as is shown by the fact that it was carried through without recourse to violence and without entirely destroying the power of the creditor aristocracy.

Many of the rich nobles must have lost much land which they had counted theirs, for such land as was recorded as gained by pledge was freed and restored to its former possessors. But the great estates with long-established titles were beyond the scope of Solon’s enactment and the old Athenian aristocracy remained great landowners. This fact gave rise later to scandalous reports that Solon had deliberately played into the hands of his friends among the nobles. The land taken from the rich could not be enough to re-establish as independent farmers all those who had been set free. There accordingly arose a cry for a ‘redistribution of land’. The Greeks readily invented for themselves an ideal past in which every citizen had an equal share in the land of his city state. But Solon would yield neither to the ideal past nor to the over-exigent present. Neither to win favour nor power was he willing ‘to give to base and noble alike an equal share in the rich soil of their fatherland’. And his resolution prevailed. The result was that there remained in Attica many landless men who must gain a livelihood by handicrafts or by working as labourers on the land in place of the debt slaves or serfs who had tilled the estates of the rich. Among those who had gained freedom but not economic independence a leader who made great promises might easily find a following. And there were nobles, too, who had suffered most severely from the incidence of Solon’s measures and were ready for any desperate venture to repair their fortunes. Thus the economic reform of Solon, great and permanent as were the benefits it brought to Attica, did not produce at once a millen­nium of contentment, but left behind the raw material of future discontents. It was reserved for the next generation to complete the creation of the small peasantry which made the agrarian prosperity of Attica.

Solon had achieved his first and immediate purpose but much remained to be done. The economic inferiority of Attica must be removed. To this end he sought to facilitate the growth of Athenian trade both westwards and eastwards. The carrying trade to the west was mainly in the hands of Corinth, to the east it was divided between Euboea and Aegina. Before Solon’s time Athens had moved in the orbit of Aeginetan trade, no doubt with growing reluctance. Her commercial dependence on Aegina was mani­fested and in part maintained by the fact that such currency as circulated in Attica was on the Aeginetan monetary standard. What Athens needed was a coinage of her own struck on whatever standard was most convenient for the development of her over­seas trade. This standard was that used by Corinth and later by Euboea when the cities of that island struck coins for their own use. It was believed in the fourth century that it was Solon who changed the standard of currency at Athens from the Aeginetan standard to what was called the Euboic. The effect of this would be to substitute a lighter for a heavier standard, as the Euboic didrachms contained little more than two-thirds as much silver as the Aeginetan. The democratic politician and anti­quary Androtion was naive enough to suppose that Solon’s object was to enable the debtor who had borrowed the heavier silver drachmae to clear himself by paying an equal number of the new lighter drachmae, as if a man borrowed ten half-crowns and paid back ten florins. This theory was hardly advanced when it was refuted by Aristotle who pointed out that the Seisachtheia with its cancelling of debts preceded the reform of the currency. And indeed the financial juggle assumed by Androtion did not meet the grievance of the moment. The main grievance was that Athenians had been enslaved, and a slave could no more procure light drachmae than heavy ones, and Androtion’s scheme of re­payment without tears would only mock him.

It is not necessary here to discuss the discrepancy between the details of Solon’s monetary reform as given by the two ancient accounts which we possess, the one in Aristotle, the other derived from Androtion. For, as regards the main fact, we may appeal to the numismatic evidence. It is most likely that one or both of the two ancient authorities reached their statistics by comparing Aeginetan coins with the Athenian coins bearing the owl and the head of Athena which were current in their own day. But numismatists are generally agreed that Athenian coins of this type were not struck as early as the archonship of Solon but first in the times of Peisistratus. On the other hand there remains the ancient tradition that Solon was concerned with a new currency ­standard, and laws which certainly seem Solonian imply the existence of one fixed standard of coinage recognized if not issued by the state. We must therefore assume as probable an Attic currency set up not later than the times of Solon. Such a currency is to be found in the so-called ‘heraldic’ coins, most of which have been attributed, for no very good reason, to Euboea. The coins form a continuous series: at least the combined evidence of punch­marks and of types implies that they were issued by the same mint.

These coins, which bear no letters, are stamped with heraldic badges, some of which, such as the owl and the amphora, may well be town-badges of Athens; others may be the badges of noble families. They are silver didrachms of what is called Euboic weight (approximately 8’4 gms.). There is also a small series of didrachms of Aeginetan weight (approximately 12’3 gms.) which also bear an amphora, and these are in all probability a short-lived pre-Solonian coinage which was superseded by the lighter am­phora coins when Solon made a change from the heavier to the lighter standard. As there is no tradition that coins of Aeginetan weight were ever struck in Euboea, we may suppose that both series of amphora coins were minted in Attica and, if so, the whole continuous series of heraldic coins.

The Athenians had already begun to work the silver mines at Laurium in the south of Attica though it was not till the end of the century that the rich vein at Maroneia yielded its treasures, for it has been shown that that vein would not be reached until after a good deal of mining had taken place. It is at least possible that at this time the cities of Euboea availed themselves of this series of coins produced by the Athenian mint. Perhaps of more importance was the fact that the Corinthian stater was on the same standard as these heraldic coins. It is interesting to observe that the Corinthian stater was divided into three drachmae each equivalent to a quarter of the Aeginetan stater. This looks like an ingenious device to make the best of both worlds, and in that case the Athenian break with the Aeginetan standard is more marked, in as much as Athens did not adopt this compromise but divided the stater into two drachmae. The practical result was to make easier Athenian trade both with Corinth and with Euboea and with the outer world with which those states traded both as producers and middlemen. The days of Attic mercantile subordination to Aegina were over.

Solon was also regarded as the founder of the Attic system of weights and measures. There is a fifth-century decree ‘to use the laws and weights and measures of Solon’. The commercial weights introduced by Solon were the coin weights with the addition of one-twentieth, that is a mina of produce weighed rather more than a mina of coins. There are very few extant Attic weights which can be assigned to the sixth century. As far as they go, they bear out this statement, but it is certain that Athens also used other weights including some of the Aeginetan standard. It has been suggested that the overweight given to the com­mercial mina as against the coins was borrowed, with a difference, from the overweight which kings and temples claimed in western Asia Minor and Babylon. The difference was that while in Asia the poor must give the overweight, in Attica when the peasant buys his salt or figs it is he who gets the extra fraction, thanks to the good Solon.

Of greater importance in a country which mainly produced corn, oil and wine were the measures of capacity. It was believed in the fourth century and it is probable enough, that Attica had hitherto used the ‘Pheidonian’ measures which obtained in the Peloponnese. Solon now set up measures which were larger than the Pheidonian. Here our knowledge ends, for it is not possible to establish beyond doubt the size of the Pheidonian measures. But at all events another step was taken away from the Peloponnesian system of trade. The increase in the measures, besides its superficial suggestion of Jack Cade’s promise that ‘the three- hooped pot shall have ten hoops,’ had a political effect. For it was in these measures that the limits of the Athenian property classes were to be reckoned.

V

THE SOLONIAN CODE

Like Tyrtaeus Solon had sung the praises of Eunomia, the Reign of Law. On good laws faithfully observed rested the happiness of states and people. So to make good laws was the duty of one who would serve his city, as respect for law was the higher loyalty of the city state. But besides this impulse, Solon recognized the need to modernize the Athenian laws.

He, even more than Draco, belongs to the class of lawgivers who definitely made an advance in Greek ideas of right. Such lawgivers had arisen in the vigorous and progressive colonies of the west, at Locri in Italy and at Catana. The lawgiving of Solon is a symptom that Athens was rousing herself to become a modern state. For so far as we can judge of his laws they were instinct with a sense of the future. And, just as Solon had sought to reconcile rich and poor with his economic reforms, so it was his pride to set up laws before which rich and poor should stand equal. The Athenian code, for which he did more than any other man, was destined to become as widely current as the Athenian drachma. The completeness, simplicity and flexibility which it attained were to make it the model for the codes of Alexander’s successors and a rival of Roman Law under the Roman Empire. It bore, in fact, the imprint of the Greek mind just as Roman Law embodied the spirit of Rome.

It is not possible to say exactly how far Attic Law as we know it in the fourth century b.c. is the work of Solon and how far that of the generations which followed him. Attic pleaders did not hesitate to attribute to him any law which suited their case, and later writers had no criterion by which to distinguish earlier from later laws. Nor can any complete and authentic collection of his statutes have survived for ancient scholars to consult. But the evidence of such laws alone as are undoubtedly old is enough to establish Solon’s claim to be by far the greatest Athenian legislator.

The law of Draco concerning homicide was taken over by the new lawgiver without alteration except that, possibly, he set up the court and jurisdiction at Phreattys. The rights of the family and the ideas of the past had been reconciled sufficiently with the claims of the state and the needs of the present. But the law of Solon governing bequest marked an advance. The Greeks had long outlived the stage, if it ever existed, when pro­perty was held in common by the clan and private ownership was unknown. But down to the seventh century property, especially in land, was generally considered as belonging to a family in the narrower sense rather than to an individual. The possessor at any time might be said to have a life interest in it. Then came inevitable modifications of this idea. There was no privilege of primogeniture to surround the heir with impoverished younger brothers. Without violating the idea that the family estate must stay in the family a man might divide his possessions among his sons. But the dowering of a daughter meant the alienation of property to another family, so that early lawgivers were inclined to limit the amount of a dowry. Besides, when a man died leaving no sons but a daughter, if the daughter inherited the estate, it might presently pass into another family, for a daughter is a potential alien. Hence came the rule which obtained at Athens that a daughter left heiress must marry within her own family, and thus keep the property together. A further problem would arise where a man had no children at all. In the earliest times his blood-relatives or, failing them, his phratry would then become entitled to his property. But as the differentiation of property advanced, it seemed unreasonable that the phratry should thus be the heir of the individual member. During the seventh century there grew up the practice of adoption, which was a compromise between the possessor’s right of disposal and the idea that property must remain in the family. By the adoption of a son the continuity of possession in the family was maintained. This had become the practice at Athens in the time before Solon.

Solon’s laws first laid down that where there were legitimate sons they had an indefeasible right to their father’s property, together with the obligation to provide a dowry if they had a sister. If there were no legitimate sons a man had the right to bequeath his property to whomsoever he would. Very often this took the form of adoption by testament, and, where property was left undivided, a will may be regarded as a form of posthumous adoption. That adoption was still viewed as a form of keeping property within the family may be seen from the fact that Solon excluded from the right of free bequest those who had been adopted before his archonship. For those persons were adopted in order to keep property in a particular family and so might be regarded as having only a life interest in it. At Thebes the legislator Philolaus seems to have made adoption compulsory where there were no legitimate sons. In Crete the laws of Gortyn as codified in the fifth century allowed adoption inter vivos even where there are legitimate sons, but recognized no adoption as a form of bequest.

Solon’s law is a compromise. While it is more conservative than the law of Gortyn in maintaining the rights of sons, it is bolder in allowing the free disposal of property in the absence of sons. Thus the law of inheritance was laid down once and for all in a clear and reasonable form taking account both of the claims of the family and the rights of the individual.

There is also attributed to Solon a group of laws regulating agriculture and pasturage such as might well be enacted at a time of agrarian changes. The small farmer was protected from encroachments on his boundaries or his water supply, this last so precious to the Attic peasant. According to Demetrius of Phalerum, a careful student of Attic law, Solon bound the state to pay a reward of five drachmae for the killing of a full-grown wolf, one drachma for a wolf-cub, that is, the value of an ox or the value of a sheep. More doubtful is the statement that a reward of 100 drachmae was appointed for a victor at the Isthmian games, of 500 for a victor at Olympia, and proportionate sums for victories at other festivals. The precedence first of Olympia and then of the Isthmian games may suggest that this law is early; but on the other hand, for an age when a drachma might buy a sheep, the rewards seem unreasonably high, especially in Greek states which were lavish in compliments and frugal in gifts.

That such matters should be thus regulated in a code of laws is not in itself surprising, for the Greeks believed that a lawgiver might care even de minimis. But it is hard for the historian to tell where the lawgiver has obeyed this theory and where the theory has excited the imagination of later writers. And when a lawgiver was also a sage, if he uttered a maxim, the maxim presently reappears as a legal enactment. Thus Solon is said to have made one law forbidding evil speaking against the dead, and another against personal abuse in temples, public buildings, courts of law or at festivals. The former may represent the maxim de mortuis, the latter was to the Athenians a counsel of perfection. The legend is very likely based on some wise moral saw. So too, it was widely believed in antiquity that Solon made a law punishing those who, in time of civil strife, failed to take up arms on one side or the other. Such a law could hardly be enforced or would only be an instrument of injustice in the hands of victorious partizans. More probable, because more demanded by the crisis of the time, was an elaborate regulation of expense and display at funerals. Extravagant spending had helped to cause the discontents which Solon had faced, and it is certainly true that the funerals depicted on the Attic white lecythi after Solon are far simpler than the lavish pomps of the earlier Dipylon vases. According to Plutarch, Solon also laid down laws strictly regulating the behaviour of women on the rare occasions when they appeared in public.

Of even more importance was a law granting citizenship to aliens on condition that they settled permanently in Attica to pursue some skilled craft. This law, to Greek notions so liberal, was to prove of great value to the industrial development of Attica. For instance, master-potters from Corinth presently transferred their skill to help the artistic advance of Athenian pottery. Consistent with this is the alleged enactment that a parent who failed to teach his son a handicraft had no claim to support in his old age. But Greek sentiment both about handicrafts and the claim of old age makes highly unlikely a law so sweeping.

A more probable tradition ascribed to Solon penalties against those who followed no trade or occupation, though both Draco and Peisistratus are credited with a similar enactment. If the law was made, and made by Solon, his motive may have been not so much the moral reprobation of sloth as a desire to limit the idle and dangerous retainers of the nobles. Solon realized that the chief danger to the constitution lay in the feuds and ambitions of the Athenian aristocracy, and he made any attempt to set up a tyranny involve the outlawry of the author, and excluded from a general amnesty those who had been condemned for attempted tyranny or for massacre. The first exception was presumably aimed at the followers of Cylon and their descendants, the second at the house of Alcmaeon and its followers who had slaughtered the main body of Cylon’s adherents. But this last exception failed of its object, for a member of that family is found in office at Athens soon after Solon’s archonship.

Fragments of laws and phrases preserved by the caprice of orators or grammarians show that Solon laid down penalties for crimes of passion and of violence and protected even slaves from the wantonness of their masters. Daylight theft, so easy in Greek villages where the men go out into the fields all day, was visited with fines and in some cases with imprisonment in the stocks. The right to search the house of a suspect for stolen goods was legally established as it was in early Rome, and the householder was held guiltless if he killed a nocturnal housebreaker. And while it is not possible to determine with certainty those parts of fourth­century criminal law which are Solonian in origin, it may fairly be assumed that his code was at least the foundation on which succeeding generations built. What is characteristic of this as of other codes of the time is that fixed penalties or penalties assessed according to the loss or hurt inflicted are prescribed by the laws. Thus the power of judges and juries is limited by the considered moral values of the lawgiver. The laws of a Greek city were its great possession and not lightly abandoned, and even when time brought inevitable changes these were made with all solemn deliberation and formality. The laws were not to be the arcanum of a favoured class but the common familiar heritage of all Athenians. For this good reason Solon not only inscribed his code on the famous axones which were preserved in the Prytaneum, the official centre of the state, but had copies made on pillars called kyrbeis which were placed where all citizens could see and study them.

VI

THE CONSTITUTION. THE CLASSES

Solon was above all an economic and legal reformer. He swept away the main abuse of the past and equipped Athens for the commercial and social progress of the future. Besides this, he made constitutional changes which were to prove more significant than he can well have expected or intended. Many Athenians of the fourth century saw in him the authentic founder of the democracy under which they lived, while others attributed to him “the democracy of their fathers”, that is, the democracy less what appeared to be manifest evils due to empire and demagogues. A third opinion was that Solon aimed rather at the stability of a contented state than at making the commons supreme. A variant of this is the view that his work consisted in the adroit tempering together of aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic institutions. These discordant judgments betray the fact that the ancients had no means of determining with decisive certainty the exact char­acter of Solon’s constitutional achievement. Modern scholars, in turn, are and must remain at variance, as they have not only to deal with conflicting statements but are often reduced to con­jecture as to the evidence, if any, on which these statements rest. Fortunately fragments of Solon’s poems, which reveal his intentions, here and there afford a criterion of the ancient evidence. And it is to be remembered that Attica was not so cut off from the rest of Greece as to remain unaffected by the constitutional ideas which were abroad at the time. Solon himself was a travelled man who may well have seen the new democracy at Chios and the timocracies in Colophon and Aeolian Cyme or, nearer home, in Chaicis and Eretria. And a third criterion is the fact that he must have been most influenced by the crisis which he was chosen to face, the reconciliation of a people, in Aristotle’s phrase “enslaved and hostile”, with an aristocracy prepared to abandon a dangerous exercise of oppressive power. But, even after the ancient evidence has been sifted with every care, any account of Solon’s constitutional reforms must contain judgments which are sub­jective and deductions which are hazardous, and no synthesis can claim with confidence to be true in every part.

The new economic order demanded a partial restatement of social distinctions. Before Solon’s time the Athenians had been roughly divided into classes. Of these the highest as in other Greek states were the Hippes (Knights) who could afford to keep horses and serve as cavalry or mounted infantry, the second were the Zeugitai, that is, according to the most probable explanation, those who could equip themselves to fight in the ranks of the hoplite phalanx. After these came the Thetes, the labourers. This old division was rather military and social than based on any exact census. Solon took these classes and fixed definitely the property qualification of each. It is significant that he takes into account only property in land. Land is measured by its annual production in units which may be either a medimnus (about 1’5 bushels) of grain or a metretes (slightly over 81 gallons) of wine or oil. Land producing 200 units qualifies the owner as a Zeugite, 300 as a Knight. Those whose land produces less than 200 units are classed as Thetes.

We may further attribute to Solon the introduction of a division of the first class of Knights. He separated off those whose land produced 500 units or over and made of them the class called pentacosiomedimni, “the five hundred bushel men”. The word has the air of a popular name like ‘millionaire’ and may have been current before Solon made it a legal definition of status. The name too suggests that the chief product of Attica was still grain, which was measured by the medimnus. No doubt economic progress had begun to increase the number of those who counted as Knights and it would suit Solon’s idea of fair dealing to separate off the richest of these for the heaviest burdens of the state. For we may assume that some at least of the liturgies or public services performed by the richest men are as old as Solon and that the limit of the census classes would be used to make a rough grading of any taxes levied on the community. From such taxes as from military services as hoplites, the lowest class, the Thetes, would be exempt. There is however no evidence or probability to support the view that Solon went further and introduced a method of taxing according to a sliding scale. If the exact fixing of the limits was the work of Solon and not of his predecessors, it could be made after taking into account the increase of the measures which Solon had carried through. Otherwise we must suppose either that Solon rectified the existing limits and of this there is no hint in the tradition, or that, if existing limits were maintained, the increase of the measures had the effect of raising the standard of the property-classes. Such a result would be regarded as a grievance and certainly seems reactionary and out of harmony with the general tenor of Solonian legislation. This consideration, taken for what it is worth, supports the tradition followed abeve that Solon was responsible for the limits of these property-classes.

At a later time the qualification in produce was changed into a qualification in terms of money and as the value of money fell no man even moderately well to do remained in the lowest class. In Solon’s day, however, the social prestige of land still stood high, and the effect of his economic legislation would be to throw on to the market a good deal of land which though freed from obligations due to debt could not be farmed for lack of capital to provide the equipment which in the fifth century made the Athenian farms the best appointed in Greece. Thus the rich merchant might easily achieve his ambition to become a landowner. The equation of the medimnus of grain with the metretes of oil or wine is signi­ficant. In the fifth and fourth centuries a metretes of olive oil was worth up to four times as much as a medimnus of barley, the grain most grown in Attica. Solon’s equation suggests that grain was comparatively scarce and oil comparatively plentiful in Attic markets. The growth of import trade in grain and of export trade in oil accounts largely for the later change in value. Thus Solon’s law prohibiting the export of natural commodities except oil resulted in the destruction of his parity.

This definition of the property-classes was followed by important political consequences. The first of these affected the high offices of state. Before Solon’s archonship the Athenian magistrates had been appointed from those distinguished by good birth as well as wealth—and it may be assumed that office had been monopolized by the old aristocracy. Now the qualification to hold office was fixed in terms of the property-classes in which the only definition was in terms of landed wealth. Athens thus ceased to be in form an aristocracy and became a timocracy, a change which, in itself, had little practical importance at the moment but was destined to lead to the most far-reaching consequences in the future.

Of far greater immediate importance was the political enfranchisement of the Thetes, who received the right to vote in the Assembly of the Athenian people. This Assembly, which came to be called the Ecclesia, was no new invention of Solon. Such a body, the gathering of freemen, was an integral part of the oldest Greek institutions. But in what may be called the aristocratic period popular Assemblies had in many cities ceased to be popular and those outside a privileged class had lost all voice in affairs of state. So at Athens aristocratic government and the economic depression of the poor had combined to exclude the mass of Athenians from such political powers as the Assembly might claim, until, in the words of Aristotle, they “had no share in anything”. This grievance had been keenly felt and as “reconciler” Solon met it by this measure of enfranchisement. To many such a course must have appeared revolutionary, and Solon defends himself against that reproach in verses of which fragments have survived. “I have given to the people just so much privilege as is enough for them, neither diminishing their rights nor seeking to extend them”. “The commons will follow their rulers best if they are neither left too free nor are too much crushed”. These are not the words of a statesman who aimed at making the commons supreme or at laying the foundations of a democracy. And having made the concession which the crisis demanded he set himself to devise safeguards to protect the stable order which was what he prized.

As members of the Assembly the Thetes might help to elect magistrates and might vote on measures proposed to them. But under Solon’s constitution their choice was limited by the property qualification for office and no measures were voted upon until they had first been considered by a body specially appointed for that purpose. Thus, in normal times, the gain of the Thetes was rather in self-respect than in active political power, but their admission to these rights removed the sense of grievance which had helped to produce the danger of a revolution.

VII

THE CONSTITUTION. THE MAGISTRATES

It is now necessary to consider in detail the magistrates whom the Assembly might elect. The duties of the archons and lesser officials were left unchanged. The chief archon continued to be the leading executive officer in the state, the Basileus or King performed the few civil and sacred functions which were all that time and change had left him, and the Polemarch led the Athenian army in war. The other officials whom Aristotle mentions as existing at this time are the Stewards or Treasurers of the Goddess, the Poletae, the Eleven and the Colacretae. The Stewards, whose existence is attested by an inscription which may well belong to the first half of the sixth century, were officials of dignity rather than of importance. The treasures of Athena included the reserves of the state, as well as the offerings of the devout, but at this time these reserves cannot have been great. The ordinary revenues and expenditure were left in the hands of the Colacretae, who, with the local Naucrari, administered the taxes levied from the forty­eight naucraries of Attica, which like the four Ionic tribes re­mained unchanged. Associated with these officials were the Poletae, the ‘sellers’, whose primary duties would be to turn into money confiscated goods and let out contracts such as for the exploitation of the silver mines at Laurium which were already being worked. The Eleven, the keepers of the public prison, who became also a rudimentary police and a court of summary jurisdiction, may be as old as Solon though we cannot say with confidence how far their powers extended in his day. How these lesser magistrates were chosen we are not told, except that Aristotle quotes a law of Solon prescribing that the Stewards should be chosen by lot from the Pentacosiomedimni. There is no reason to doubt this statement, as the office was, in a way, sacred, did not demand any special qualifications, and was not a very proper object of competition. The other minor magistrates were presumably chosen by direct election.

It is almost certain that direct election was employed also in the choice of the nine archons, though here the ancient evidence is conflicting. Before Solon the archons were either elected by the Assembly, that is by those who were then full citizens, or were appointed by the Council of the Areopagus. That the former method was employed was the orthodox Attic tradition which Aristotle seems to have followed except in one passage. In the Constitution of Athens he says that in ancient times, that is, before Solon, the Areopagus after summoning and choosing (or judging) them according to its discretion appointed suitable persons for the year to the several offices. In its context this passage seems to describe the whole process of election, and Aristotle may be here correcting a tradition which elsewhere he accepts. But the words may mean no more than that the Areopagus tested the qualifications of candidates whom the Assembly had elected, and assigned to each that one of the archonships or other offices for which he was suited. What evidence Aristotle possessed except a firm belief that the Areopagus had been dominant in the state we cannot say. Solon’s own appointment as ‘reconciler and archon’ is described as an election made jointly by the nobles and the commons, but the phrasing may be inexact or based on no clear evidence.

Whatever was the procedure before Solon, the accepted view of the Athenian antiquarians and of Aristotle himself in the Politics and in some passages of the Constitution of Athens was that after Solon the people chose the archons by direct election. In one passage however Aristotle states definitely that Solon introduced a method of election by lot from previously selected candidates. This may be no more than a deduction from the law about the Stewards of the Goddess mentioned above which Aristotle quotes in this connection. If so, the deduction is hardly worthy of its author, and it is most unlikely that the Athenians allowed the lot to decide who should lead them in war or superintend the administration at home. And the history of the following decades is unintelligible unless the chief archonship was to be gained by influence and not by the caprice of chance even operating among a limited number of candidates. It seems then necessary to believe that until 487 bc, when the archonship lost its practical importance, appointment to this office was by direct election.

As has been said the qualification to be a candidate for this and the lesser offices of state was defined in terms of the property­classes. The Stewards of the Goddess might only be taken from the highest class and the same may possibly be true of the archons¹. We have no means of discovering what was the qualification needed for the other magistrates, but it is certain that Thetes were excluded from all offices.

VIII

THE CONSTITUTION.

THE AREOPAGUS AND THE FOUR HUNDRED

The power of the executive had been limited by the authority, if not the direct control, of the Council of the Areopagus which had been perhaps the most effective organ of government in pre-Solonian Athens. It is true that in the time of Aristotle it was widely believed that this Council was created by Solon. The powers of the Areopagus had been the subject of acute political controversy in the fifth century, and it is easy to see how those who wished to challenge its title to political power would be tempted to maintain that while Athena may have made it a court, it was only Solon who made it a Council. And a like conclusion would be reached by antiquarians who wished to attribute to Solon as lawgiver par excellence as many institutions as possible. But the evidence for this tradition was not as strong as the will to believe it. Aristotle, whose study of Greek constitutions had led him to expect an aristocratic council in an aristocratic state, declared the Council of the Areopagus to be pre-Solonian, and the evidence of Solon’s amnesty law is decisive in his favour.

After Solon, as before, the Areopagus was recruited from those Athenians who had held the high offices of state, the archonships. Thus, like the Roman Senate, it embodied the administrative experience of its time and, as membership was for life, it might pursue a continuous policy. Now that the archons were elected by the free choice of all the Athenians, the Areopagus might claim to represent the will of the people, once removed. But it need not be supposed that it would leap to interpret the people’s will. Its effect in the state would be rather conservative and oligarchical, as befitted the social position of its members, and it would look back and not forward. Its influence must have been great in a community possessed of little political education. To this body, permanent in personnel and paramount in influence, Solon gave the high duty of guarding his laws and assigned to it independent rights to ensure their application.

For more than a century after Solon the Areopagus was the public prosecutor and might step in when the machinery of the public courts was not set in motion by a private citizen. Such a power of selective intervention in the name of justice might well become an abuse, and, with a state police which did not exist to detect but only to execute criminals, might often be ineffective. Yet when these powers of the Areopagus were swept away by Ephialtes, the democratic alternatives of the Cleisthenean Council and professional accuser were hardly an improvement. If it would, the Areopagus might defend the freedom of Athens by im­peaching a would-be tyrant when no private citizen dared to assume the dangerous duty. To secure the permanent validity and even-handed application of his code was to Solon all-important, and he therefore devoted to this purpose the most august and eminent body in the state. And to this end it must, like himself, stand above the partizanships and political emotions of the day. It was withdrawn therefore from its old position as the real centre of administration, the source of political power, and in guarding the laws ceased to maintain the stability of the constitution and to direct the policy of the state.

With the Areopagus thus removed from an active share in current politics there was need of a body to control the deliberations of the enlarged Assembly. Such a body is to be found in the Council of the Four Hundred, an institution which Athenian tradition attributed to Solon, regarding it as the predecessor of the Five Hundred established by Cleisthenes to prepare business for the Assembly. This tradition was most likely accepted as early as the fifth century, for in the Oligarchical Revolution of 411 BC a Council of Four Hundred was set up as a return to ancestral practice. Herodotus, too, in his account of the events of the year 508, speaks of a Council which cannot in fact have been either the Cleisthenean Council or the Areopagus, but his evidence is weakened by the suspicion that he wrongly assumed the Cleisthenean constitution to be in existence at that time, and so misconceived the Constitutional position. The last decipherable letter of the famous Attic decree about Salamis is most likely the first letter of Boule, but the inscription itself need not be earlier than the Cleisthenean democracy.

There is no mention of this Council in our very scanty records of the political struggles in the period between Solon’s archonship and the tyranny of Peisistratus. All that is recorded of the method of its appointment is, first, that a hundred councillors were drawn from each of the four tribes, and second, that when Solon instituted it, he selected its members. This second statement appears only in Plutarch’s Life of Solon and the phrasing may be inexact, though at this point in the biography Plutarch’s ultimate source was the accepted fourth-century tradition. Scholars gene­rally assume that the whole Council changed every year like the holders of the executive offices, but this deduction is insecure because it is not rare to find in Greek states an annual executive and a permanent deliberative Council. And a primitive state could not easily contrive or practise the repeated election or sortition of so many as a hundred members from each tribe. Cleis­thenes overcame these difficulties by a species of devolution which was his invention, and so could make his Council annual, partly in order to educate the Athenians in government, partly to prevent it from being a clog on the immediate will of the people. It therefore seems safest to follow the tradition in Plutarch that Solon chose its members in the first instance and to assume that only vacancies which occurred by the death of members were filled by election from time to time. Election would be a more likely method of choice than sortition, as being more consistent with the method of the Council’s first appointment. It may fairly be assumed that membership was not open to the Thetes who are definitely said to have received no rights except to belong to the Assembly and sit as judges in the Heliaea.

Solon’s purpose in constituting this Council is described by Plutarch as to set a check on the unruly motions of the popular Assembly, emboldened as it was by the remission of debts. The Council was to deliberate before the Assembly and allow no measure to reach that body before the Council had discussed it. To the Areopagus Solon had given general oversight and the protection of the laws, and these two Councils were to be like two anchors holding the city and keeping the commons from becoming restless. It has been well suggested that the vivid proverbial phrase of the two anchors may reflect Solon’s expressed intention. In that case his intention was rather constitutional stability than progress, and this agrees with the attitude of mind reflected in his poems.

Scholars have urged with force that the business of the Assembly cannot have been so great that Solon need have instituted a special Council to prepare it. This objection, which incidentally assumes the elaborate machinery of an annual election, is weakened if the view is taken that some such body was needed to prevent hasty decisions in times of excitement. We need not attribute to Solon, what no ancient writer attributes to him, the establishment of the Four Hundred as a stepping stone to democracy, and scholars who rightly refuse to believe that Solon created a democracy need not therefore deny the existence of this Council.

As the safeguard of the property qualification for office proved vain when nobles turned demagogues, a phenomenon not rare in Greek states at this time, so this safeguard of the second Council, perhaps from lack of established prestige and inherited wisdom, is shown by the subsequent history of Attica to have been ineffective. The Areopagus maintained the prestige of the Solonian code, but the second anchor was not firm enough to hold. But Solon may well be forgiven the belief that he had given stability to the state. The effect of his limitations on the Assembly was to keep administration and the initiative in policy in the hands of the well-to-do or middle classes. It was true that years of aristocratic government had left the commons politically uneducated, the easy dupes of ambitious leaders, and Solon’s poems show him well aware of the dangers of their uninstructed hopes. But the alternative, to deny to the commons all political power, was a greater evil and a greater danger, and Solon might hope that the new economic order would keep the poorer Athenians too busy or too contented to lend themselves to faction. Given that little power which was enough, the people might not be misled into grasping at more. And both policy and justice demanded that if they did not really govern they should be protected from misgovernment and injustice. The code of Draco had been an instrument of injustice in the hands of noble judges: the new code was to be administered before the eyes and with the assent of all Athenian freemen.

IX

THE HELIAEA

With this end in view Solon established the right of the people to sit in judgment. There is no good reason to attribute to him any anticipation of the elaborately organised democratic courts of the fifth and fourth centuries. The Athenian population was still too much occupied on its farms to devote much of its time to deciding legal cases. The Thesmothetae continued to judge between citizens and administered the new laws under the supervision of the Areopagus. But Solon gave the right to every citizen to claim justice for himself or others and the right to be judged by a meeting of the citizens. This meeting of the citizens was called the Heliaea. The word means ‘Gathering’ and elsewhere, as in Argos and Epidamnus, is the name of a political assembly. It is at least likely that it is the old name for the political Assembly of the Athenian people who now became judges as well as voters, and the phrase ‘the Heliaea of the Thesmothetae’ may reflect the function of the Assembly as a Court.

Aristotle says that Solon established the right of appeal to the Heliaea, and it is tempting to compare this with the Roman ius provocationis or the Macedonian right of appeal to the army. On either analogy this right of appeal would be rarely exercised and only in serious cases. But there exists a fragment of a law clearly old in form and attributed to Solon which prescribes that in cases of theft the offender may be sentenced not only to restitution and a fine of double the value of the theft, but also to a season in the stocks “if the Heliaea add that penalty”. This implies that the Heliaea might be concerned with a trial of so unimportant a character which was rather civil than criminal in form. We may then suppose that the magistrates judged cases regularly with the help of a meeting of citizens. Possibly the judges sat on market days and their courts were attended by such citizens as had the leisure. Thus the administration of justice was popular and the sense of grievance aroused by the absolute judgment of the nobles was removed. The gradual organisation of the floating body of jurymen into panels would be a natural development. Solon’s aim was not so much the triumph of democracy as of Dike, Justice: his ideal was fair dealing. He would have men equal before the goddess of Justice though not in the counsels of the state.

By a kind of extension of this right the commons gained a retrospective control over their magistrates. It was the regular practice in Greek states for magistrates on retiring from a term of office to submit to judgment on their actions. Such a judgment was in some states conducted by special commissions or by a permanent Council. At Athens before Solon we may assume that it was conducted by the Areopagus, in the case of the archons as a preliminary to entering the dignified security of that body. This regular judgment was now transferred to the Heliaea, though the elaborate machinery found in fourth-century Athens was still far in the future. But the prospect of facing a popular court in which any aggrieved Athenian might be a prosecutor was enough to deter magistrates from flagrant oppression or misuse of power.

The verdict on the new order which Aristotle repeats is signi­ficant for his day. “There are three points in Solon’s constitution which appear to be its most democratic features; first and most important, the prohibition of loans on the security of the debtor’s body; second the right of any person who wishes to claim redress on behalf of those who are wronged; third, and this, they say, has most given power to the masses, the appeal to the jury court, for when the commons is master of the juryman’s ballot, it is master of the state”. Those words were written after generations of political trials before jealous democratic juries, and the last phrase represents the ultimate effect rather than the intention of Solon’s constitution.

Solon would have disclaimed the praises which democrats heaped on him in later times. To those who declared that he purposely made his laws obscure to ensure constant reference to the popular courts, he would have found a vigorous answer. The executive stayed in the hands of the landed rich, and the commons were rather protected from misgovernment than allowed to govern. But the timocracy which he set up, with the limits and rights of the property-classes clearly defined, was at the mercy of economic forces. As long as the census remained in terms of natural produce from land, it tended to maintain the interests of the well-to-do farmers. But as Athenian industry and trade increased, these values were presently translated into terms of money. This, together with a fall in the value of the drachma, had the result that the lower limits of the classes became so low that they were no bar to democracy, and a hundred years after Solon there were comparatively few Athenians legally excluded from any office by poverty. Thus, for reasons which Solon can hardly have foreseen, his ordering of the state, which for the time had an oligarchical air, proved in fact a stage on the road to democracy.

When all is said the greatest positive immediate achievements of Solon were a solution of the economic problem of Attica in his day, the equipment of Athens for commercial progress, and the establishment of an up-to-date and even-handed justice. These notable results were attained without violence and were permanent and of growing value. But there was a danger to Athenian peace and prosperity against which Solon made no sufficient defence, and that was the ambition of the Athenian nobles. One remedy, which lay near to hand, was for the lawgiver to set himself over nobles and commons alike as tyrant.

Solon had held for a time the most absolute control of the state. His position may best be compared with that which Pittacus held about the same time at Mitylene. Pittacus was Aesymnetes, an extraordinary magistrate with power to order the affairs of the state, such a position as Sulla held as Dictator at Rome. Alcaeus the political opponent of Pittacus declared that in setting him up the Mityleneans were choosing themselves a tyrant, and a Greek popular song spoke of Pittacus as king in great Mitylene. The possession of such power was to the Greek of the time the supreme temptation, and as at Mitylene so at Athens many men thought that Solon’s character would not stand the strain. A popular programme would have made him tyrant though very likely not for long. Solon himself speaks the language of his tempters who declared him witless and timid because he would not take the prize which the gods had placed in his reach. ‘The fish was in the net, he let it escape’. But the moderation of character which had won him power was proof against the temptation to retain it. Assailed by the hopes and the reproaches, the grievances and ingratitudes, of his friends and enemies, he stood at bay “like a wolf surrounded by a pack of hounds”. At last with a final gesture of renunciation he bound the Athenians by an oath to maintain his laws and left Athens to go into a voluntary exile for ten years.

This, almost the greatest sacrifice a Greek could make, crowns the moral dignity of his career. But it may well be doubted if it was not really the ‘great refusal,’ an act which did not serve the best interests of Athens. In his own words Solon had stretched his stout shield over both parties in the state; now the arm which held the shield was withdrawn. His economic and legal reforms persisted by their inherent merit: his constitutional work was too tentative to do more than make men able to be contented, if they were willing. Neither the executive nor the popular voice had power enough to defend the constitution against a resolute ambition. It was Athens’ fate to try both means: to see a tyrant make a strong executive, and a democrat, if a newly converted one, make Athens in practice a democracy. It was to take two generations and Peisistratus and Cleisthenes to complete Solon’s political work, and in those two generations there was much loss as well as much gain. That the gain outweighed the loss was due to the personality of Peisistratus. Athens was fortunate: it may have lain in Solon’s power to make her need no such good fortune. But Solon’s great services are certain, his failure hypothetical. His claim to fame rests on his bold economic settlement and his code which gave the Athenians that respect for law which steadied them even in the days of their extreme democracy. Athens’ neighbour, Megara, faced by such an economic crisis, failed to find a Solon, and the result was first a red terror and then a generation of civil strife. If anyone would criticize Solon, let him read Theognis on Megara.

CHAPTER III

ATHENS UNDER THE TYRANTS