Solon’s Tablets.
After Solon’s code was adopted, that it might be the better enforced, its author is said to have absented himself from Athens for ten years, visiting among other courts that of Crœsus, King of Lydia. To this visit, Crœsus owed his life; for afterward, when chained to the stake by Cyrus the Persian, the truth of one of Solon’s remarks,—that no man can be accounted happy while he still lives,—flashed upon his mind, and he thrice called upon the name of the Athenian sage. Cyrus demanded an explanation of his words, and, struck with the truth of Solon’s saying, revoked the order of execution and made Crœsus his friend.
Thales, of Miletus in Ionia (640-550 B.C.), was the founder of Greek philosophy. Water, according to his theory, was the source of all things; without this element, he truly said, his own body would fall into dust. This doctrine he is supposed to have derived from the Egyptians, who worshipped the Nile as a god, being dependent on its annual inundations for their crops.
In mathematical science and astronomy, Thales was an adept. His knowledge of the latter enabled him to predict a solar eclipse, which took place 610 B.C., and to divide the year into three hundred and sixty-five days. If he was an author, not a line of what he wrote has survived.
Fable.—An outgrowth of these practical times was the Fable, or Allegory, in which the lower animals were introduced as speakers, with the object of satirizing the follies of mankind, or of conveying some useful moral more pointedly than by means of dry argument.
Destitute of the outward form of poetry, while in a measure retaining its imagery, fable may be regarded as a stepping-stone from the early lyrics to the stately prose of a later period. It at once became popular, as did also a kindred class of humorous tales, the characters of which were inanimate objects endowed with the power of speech. An earthen pot, for example, is represented as clamoring loudly against the woman who broke it; and she, as bidding it “cease its plaints and show its wisdom by buying a copper ring to bind itself together.”
Æsop.—The great fabulist of Greece, and indeed of all time, was Æsop. Born a Phrygian slave about 620 B.C., he passed from one master to another till at last his wit gained him freedom. Thus left to choose his own course, he became a student in foreign lands. Athens was his home for a number of years; and there, in his well-known fable of “the Frogs asking Jupiter for a King,” he read a lesson both to Pisistratus the Tyrant and to the people who imagined themselves oppressed under his government.
By special invitation, Æsop spent some time at the court of Crœsus. Here he made the acquaintance of Solon, who had incurred that monarch’s displeasure by speaking lightly of his vaunted wealth; and he is said to have admonished the Athenian sage that a wise man should resolve either not to converse with kings at all, or to converse with them agreeably.”—“Nay,” replied Solon, “he should either not converse with them at all, or converse with them usefully.”
Crœsus commissioned Æsop to go to Delphi for the purpose of sacrificing to Apollo and distributing a sum of money among the citizens. But Æsop quarrelled with the Delphians, and taking it upon himself to withhold from them the Lydian gold, was seized by the enraged people and hurled from a precipice. Legend says that the murderers brought upon themselves the vengeance of heaven in the form of mysterious plagues.