Thrusting dishonour aside, casting off grievous disgrace.”
The Athenians were aroused. They went with him across the narrow strait, and Salamis, the “lovely island,” thenceforward was their own, destined to serve them as refuge in their hour of greatest need. Solon used his popularity, thus acquired, in no self-seeking way. Chosen archon and virtual dictator he moulded proletariat and noble to his own noble will. Again and again his verse reënforces his pedestrian arguments. “The black earth is enslaved,” he says, and presently the mortgage stones, dotted over the farms, are mere cancelled records. Many such, of a later date, have been found. The “Penurious Man” in Theophrastus “inspects his boundary stones daily to make sure that they are in place.” Solon proudly appeals to the constituency of the future to justify his laws:—
“Be witness unto this before the bar of time,
Thou greatest Mother of the gods Olympian—
Aye witness best—black Earth, whose mortgage border-stones
Fixed here and there on every side, I took away,
And she who erst was slave is set at liberty.”
Again, even more proudly, he says:—
“I set myself as border stone inscribed betwixt
Contending factions.”