Solon

Greek statesman

• Born: c. 630 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Probably Athens, Greece
• Died: c. 560 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Probably Athens, Greece

Through his law code, Solon averted a civil war at Athens and established the political and social foundations for the development of Athenian democracy.

Early Life

The ancient sources include many details about the life of Solon (SOH-luhn) before 594 b.c.e., but most of these are probably romantic inventions about what the life of a great man ought to have been like. The fragments of Solon’s poems tell little about his early life. Plutarch, in his biography of Solon (in Bioi paralleloi, c. 105-115; Parallel Lives, 1579), writes that Solon’s mother was the cousin of the mother of Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens who ruled between 561 and 527 b.c.e. This is one of many probably spurious attempts to link Solon’s and Pisistratus’s families. There is a stronger argument that Solon’s father was Execestides, a member of one of Athens’s noblest families. Execestides could trace his ancestry back to Codrus, a semilegendary king of Athens, and even to Poseidon, a wholly legendary god. Plutarch maintains that Execestides exhausted his wealth through lavish gift giving and that Solon traveled widely as a trader to recoup his fortunes, even though there were many Athenians who would have repaid his father’s gifts. Another possibility mentioned by Plutarch is that Solon traveled solely to visit foreign lands.

Solon won a reputation as a poet, and several of his works are quoted at length by Plutarch and in the Athenaiōn politeia (335-323 b.c.e.; The Athenian Constitution, 1812), attributed to Aristotle. Many early Greek statesmen were poets; poetry had an important role in politics, and Plutarch writes that Solon used his verse to catapult himself into political prominence, probably around 610. Plutarch further relates that Solon used a ruse to be put in charge of a war against Megara to win back the island of Salamis. The Athenians were so humiliated by their defeat some years before that they passed a law forbidding anyone even to mention their claim to Salamis. Solon circumvented this restriction by feigning insanity and then publicly reciting poems urging revenge. The Athenians were inspired by this act and soon won the island back. Like many other incidents in Solon’s early life, however, this story may be attributing to Solon events that really happened later in the sixth century.

According to a second story, around 600 Solon had the Alcmaeonid family put on trial for the massacre of the followers of Cylon, who staged an unsuccessful coup in Athens in the 630’s. The murders had ritually polluted Athens, and Solon supposedly brought in the semilegendary seer Epimenides of Crete to help purify the state. It is quite likely that this event was made up to provide a Solonian precedent for the expulsion of the Alcmaeonids during political strife around 500. A third account links Solon to the possibly fictitious First Sacred War in the 590’s, fought for control of the oracle at Delphi.

Life’s Work

Whatever the truth of these stories about political crises, one thing is certain: Around 600, Athens was torn by social unrest. In the words of Aristotle:

For a long time there was strife between the rich and the poor. For the state was oligarchic in all ways, and the poor, along with their wives and children, were enslaved to the rich. And they were called “clients” and “sixth-parters,” for it was at this rate that they worked the fields of the rich. All the land belonged to a few people; and if the poor did not render these dues, they and their children could be sold overseas. And before Solon, all loans were made on the security of the person; but he became the first champion of the people.

Fearing civil war, the Athenian nobles elected Solon chief magistrate (archon) in 594, to draw up new laws to avert the crisis.

Other than Solon’s poems, which are often obscure, the earliest source for his laws is Herodotus’s Historiai Herodotou (c. 424 b.c.e.; The History, 1709), which simply mentions that “at the request of his countrymen he had made a code of laws for Athens.” Solon’s laws were publicly displayed on wooden boards, and it is believed that these boards survived for later writers such as Aristotle to consult. The laws fall into three main groups: economic reforms, political reforms, and other laws.

In an economic reform known as the “shaking off of burdens” (seisachtheia), Solon cancelled all debts and forbade enslavement for debt. He said he would try to bring back to Athens all those who had been sold as slaves overseas. He also addressed land tenure, removing from the soil certain markers called horoi, which probably stood on mortgaged fields. The meaning of the horoi is unclear, but by this act Solon claimed, “I have made free the dark earth, which was enslaved.” These reforms led to the disappearance of the serflike statuses of “clients” and “sixth-parters.” Solon is also credited with a reform of weights, measures, and coinage, but that is probably a later fabrication (coinage only appeared at Athens c. 550 b.c.e.).

Solon also instituted political reforms. He divided the adult male population into four groups, based on the annual agricultural production of their land. The top class, the “five hundred bushel men” (pentakosiomedimnoi), monopolized the highest political offices. The next class was called the hippeis, or “knights,” who could produce three hundred to five hundred bushels, and the third class was the zeugitai (“infantrymen,” or perhaps “yoke men”), who could produce two hundred to three hundred bushels. These two groups could hold lesser political offices. Below them were the thetes (usually translated as “laborers,” although most of these men probably owned some land), who could vote in the assembly and sit in the law courts but not hold office.

It is difficult to uncover the details of other political reforms because of later fabrications. In 403 the Athenians were forced by the Spartans to abandon their democracy and to return to an undefined “ancestral constitution.” In the years that followed, various Athenians tried to project their own political programs back onto past statesmen, claiming that their own ideology was taken from the ancestral constitution. Solon was commonly said to have founded the democracy. According to Aristotle, Solon established the Council of Four Hundred to prepare measures to be voted on by the assembly of all citizens and set up the law courts as the central democratic organ. These institutions are uncannily like those of the fourth century b.c.e. and were possibly falsely attributed to Solon by propagandists at that time.

Solon is said to have legislated on all aspects of life, from mourning at funerals to the placing of trees near field boundaries and the digging of wells. While some of the laws attributed to him can be proved to have originated centuries later, the scope of his code reflects the general tendency of early Greek lawgivers to assume responsibility for every dimension of life.

According to his own notes, Solon had enough support to set himself up as a tyrant over Athens, but because of his moderation, he chose not to do so. This moderation made his position difficult after 594: The poor demanded a complete redistribution of land, which he resisted, while the rich believed that he had already relinquished too much power. It is said that he left Athens for ten years of travel, making the Athenians agree not to tamper with his laws while he was away. Similar stories are attributed to other early Greek lawgivers, however, and this story may be no more than a literary flourish.

Significance

Solon’s moderation probably saved Athens from a self-destructive civil war. The greatness of his achievement was recognized in his status as one of the so-called Seven Sages of early Greece. He did not resolve all Athens’ social, economic, and political troubles (unrest continued during the sixth century), but he did lay the foundations on which Athenian greatness was built. By freeing the poor from their serflike status and from the threat of bondage resulting from debt, he provided the basis of a relatively unified citizen body. His time also marked the beginning of one of the great paradoxes of Athenian society: the interdependence of democracy and slavery. Legally unable to reduce fellow Athenians to bondsmen after 594, wealthy men were forced to look elsewhere for labor to work their fields, workshops, and mines and began to import increasing numbers of non-Greeks, mainly from the Black Sea area, as chattel slaves. By the fifth century b.c.e., as much as one quarter of the resident population of Athens may have been slaves completely lacking civil rights.

Solon is one of the most important figures in Greek history, but also one of the most obscure, hidden beneath layers of later fabrications. Almost no detail in his biography is beyond question, but his overall contribution—averting civil war and setting Athens on the path to democratic rule—was a decisive one.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Aristotle: “The Athenian Constitution.” Translated by P. J. Rhodes. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984. Fine translation, with excellent introduction and notes, of one of the main sources for Solon’s reforms.

Edmonds, John Maywell. Greek Elegy and Iambus. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Parallel edition of the original Greek texts with a fairly literal translation of all the surviving fragments of several early Greek poets’ works, including Solon.

Finley, Moses I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. Reprint. Princeton, N.J.: Marcus Wiener, 1998. Brilliant discussion of modern attitudes toward ancient slavery and the logic of slave economies, including an analysis of the relationships between Solon’s reforms and the rise of both slavery and the ideology of citizen equality in ancient Athens.

Finley, Moses I. The Use and Abuse of History. New York: Penguin, 1987. Contains Finley’s lecture “The Ancestral Constitution,” which looks at the reinterpretation and invention of Solonian laws in Athens around 400 b.c.e. and compares this practice to similar distortions of past politics in seventeenth century England and early twentieth century United States.

Forrest, William George Grieve. The Emergence of Greek Democracy: 800-400 B.C. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Classic, beautifully written, and well-illustrated overview of the rise of democratic institutions in Athens, setting the Solonian agrarian crisis in the context of similar problems in a number of other states in seventh century Greece.

Gallant, T. W. “Agricultural Systems, Land Tenure, and the Reforms of Solon.” Annual of the British School of Archaeology at Athens 77 (1982): 111-124. A sophisticated discussion of the archaeological data relating to Solon’s economic reforms, drawing on comparative anthropological evidence from modern societies facing similar problems of agrarian debt. Includes bibliography.

Hignett, Carl A. A History of the Athenian Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. A detailed study of constitutional developments. Hignett works within the very critical tradition of nineteenth century German scholarship and offers penetrating discussions of the sources. He is best known for his attempt to date Solon’s reforms to the 570’s.

Murray, Oswyn. Early Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Highly readable account of Greek history from 800 to 480 b.c.e., combining the literary and archaeological evidence with judicious use of comparative material. Recommended as an introductory text.

Plutarch. Plutarch: “The Rise and Fall of Athens.” Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. Translations of nine of Plutarch’s lives, including that of Solon, along with a brief introduction. Solon was of interest to Plutarch mainly as a moral example. His writing includes many clearly fictional elements but has remained popular through the ages for its lively style and content.