[208] Dêmosthen. cont. Timokrat. p. 746. Æschinês ascribes this oath to ὁ νομοθέτης (c. Ktesiphon. p. 389).
Dr. Thirlwall notices the oath as prescribed by Solon (History of Greece, vol. ii, ch. xi, p. 47).
So again Dêmosthenês and Æschinês, in the orations against Leptinês (c. 21, p. 486) and against Timokrat. pp. 706-707,—compare Æschin. c. Ktesiph. p. 429,—in commenting upon the formalities enjoined for repealing an existing law and enacting a new one, while ascribing the whole to Solon,—say, among other things, that Solon directed the proposer “to post up his project of law before the eponymi,” (ἐκθεῖναι πρόσθεν τῶν Ἐπωνύμων): now the eponymi were (the statues of) the heroes from whom the ten Kleisthenean tribes drew their names, and the law making mention of these statues, proclaims itself as of a date subsequent to Kleisthenês. Even the law defining the treatment of the condemned murderer who returned from exile, which both Dêmosthenês and Doxopater (ap. Walz. Collect. Rhetor. vol. ii, p. 223) call a law of Drako, is really later than Solon, as may be seen by its mention of the ἄξων (Dêmosth. cont. Aristok. p. 629).
Andokidês is not less liberal in his employment of the name of Solon (see Orat. i, De Mysteriis, p. 13), where he cites as a law of Solon, an enactment which contains the mention of the tribe Æantis and the senate of five hundred (obviously, therefore, subsequent to the revolution of Kleisthenês), besides other matters which prove it to have been passed even subsequent to the oligarchical revolution of the four hundred, towards the close of the Peloponnesian war. The prytanes, the proëdri, and the division of the year into ten portions of time, each called by the name of a prytany,—so interwoven with all the public proceedings of Athens,—do not belong to the Solonian Athens, but to Athens as it stood after the ten tribes of Kleisthenês.
Schömann maintains emphatically, that the sworn nomothetæ, as they stood in the days of Dêmosthenês, were instituted by Solon; but he admits at the same time that all the allusions of the orators to this institution include both words and matters essentially post-Solonian, so that modifications subsequent to Solon must have been introduced. This admission seems to me fatal to the cogency of his proof: see Schömann, De Comitiis, ch. vii, pp. 266-268; and the same author, Antiq. J. P. Att. sect. xxxii. His opinion is shared by K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der Griech. Staats Alterth. sect. 131; and Platner, Attischer Prozess, vol. ii, p. 38.
Meier, De Bonis Damnatorum, p. 2, remarks upon the laxity with which the orators use the name of Solon: “Oratores Solonis nomine sæpe utuntur, ubi omnino legislatorem quemquam significare volunt, etiamsi a Solone ipso lex lata non est.” Herman Schelling, in his Dissertation De Solonis Legibus ap. Oratt. Attic. (Berlin, 1842), has collected and discussed the references to Solon and to his laws in the orators. He controverts the opinion just cited from Meier, but upon arguments no way satisfactory to me (pp. 6-8); the more so, as he himself admits that the dialect in which the Solonian laws appear in the citation of the orators can never have been the original dialect of Solon himself (pp. 3-5), and makes also substantially the same admission at Schömann, in regard to the presence of post-Solonian matters in the supposed Solonian laws (pp. 23-27).
[209] See Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, book ii, c. 15.
[210] Demosthen. cont. Timokrat. c. 26, p. 731: compare Aristophanês Ekklesiazus. 302.
[211] Herodot. i, 29; Plutarch, Solon, c. 25. Aulus Gellius affirms that the Athenians swore, under strong religious penalties, to observe them forever (ii, 12).
[212] Livy iii, 34.