Dêmosthenês (cont. Makartat. p 1071) gives what he calls the Solonian law on funerals, different from Plutarch on several points.
Ungovernable excesses of grief among the female sex are sometimes mentioned in Grecian towns: see the μανικὸν πένθος among the Milesian women (Polyæn. viii, 63): the Milesian women, however, had a tinge of Karian feeling.
Compare an instructive inscription, recording a law of the Greek city of Gambreion in Æolic Asia Minor, wherein the dress, the proceedings, and the time of allowed mourning, for men, women, and children who had lost their relatives, are strictly prescribed under severe penalties (Franz, Fünf Inschriften und fünf Städte in Kleinasien, Berlin, 1840, p. 17). Expensive ceremonies in the celebration of marriage are forbidden by some of the old Scandinavian laws (Wilda, Das Gildenwesen im Mittelalter, p. 18).
[238] Plutarch, Solon, 23. Xenophanês, Frag. 2, ed. Schneidewin. If Diogenês is to be trusted, the rewards were even larger anterior to Solon: he reduced them (Diog. l. i, 55).
[239] Plutarch, Solon, c. 23. See Suidas, v. Φεισόμεθα.
[240] See the laws in Dêmosthen. cont. Timokrat. pp. 733-736. Notwithstanding the opinion both of Heraldus (Animadversion. in Salmas. iv, 8) and of Meier (Attischer Prozess, p. 356), I cannot imagine anything more than the basis of these laws to be Solonian,—they indicate a state of Attic procedure too much elaborated for that day (Lysias c. Theomn. p. 356). The word ποδοκάκκῃ belongs to Solon, and probably the penalty of five days’ confinement in the stocks, for the thief who had not restored what he had stolen.
Aulus Gell. (xi, 18) mentions the simple pœna dupli: in the authors from whom he copied, it is evident that Solon was stated to have enacted this law generally for all thefts: we cannot tell from whom he copied, but in another part of his work, he copies a Solonian law from the wooden ἄξονες on the authority of Aristotle (ii, 12).
Plato, in his Laws, prescribes the pœna dupli in all cases of theft, without distinction of circumstances (Legg. ix, p. 857; xii, p. 941); it was also the primitive law of Rome: “Posuerunt furem duplo condemnari, fœneratorem quadruplo.” (Cato, De Re Rusticâ, Proœmium),—that is to say, in cases of furtum nec manifestum (Walter, Geschichte des Römisch. Rechts. sect. 757).
[241] Plutarch, Solon, 24; Athenæ. iv, p. 137; Diogen. Laërt. i, 58: καὶ πρῶτος τὴν συναγωγὴν τῶν ἐννέα ἀρχόντων ἐποίησεν, εἰς τὸ συνειπεῖν,—where perhaps, συνδειπνεῖν is the proper reading.
[242] Plutarch, Solon, 20, and De Serâ Numinis Vindictâ, p. 550; Aulus Gell. ii, 12.