B. C. 570.
74. Solon is reckoned the greatest of the Seven Wise Men[40] of Greece, and some of his sayings have been the maxims of the best legislators of all ages. When asked how injustice could be banished from a republic, he replied, “By making all men feel the injustice done to each.” His new constitution failed, however, to satisfy all classes of his fellow-citizens. The nobles blamed him for having gone too far; the common people, for having withheld too much. He himself admitted that his laws were not the best possible, but the best that the people would receive. He obtained, however, from the government and people, an oath to maintain the constitution ten years; and then, to rid himself of perpetual questions and complaints, he departed into foreign lands.
B. C. 560.
75. On returning to Athens, Solon found that the flames of faction had broken out with more fury than ever. The Plain had for its leader Lycurgus; the Shore, Megacles; and the Mountain, Pisis´tratus, a kinsman of Solon. The latter was idolized by the people for his personal beauty, his military fame, his persuasive eloquence, and his unbounded generosity. But beneath many real virtues he concealed an insatiable ambition, which could not rest short of supremacy in the state. When his plans were ready for execution, he appeared one day in the market-place bleeding with self-inflicted wounds, which he assured the people he had received in defense of their rights, from the hands of his and their enemies, the factious nobles. The people, in their grief and indignation, voted him a guard of fifty clubmen. Solon saw the danger that lurked in this measure, but his earnest remonstrances were unheeded.
Pisistratus did not limit himself to the fifty men allotted him, but raised a much larger force, with which he seized the Acropolis and made himself master of the city. Notwithstanding his resistance to the usurpation, Solon was treated with great deference by his cousin, who constantly asked his counsel in the administration of affairs. But the aged law-giver did not long survive the freedom of Athens. After his death his ashes were scattered, as he had directed, around the island of Salamis, which in his youth he had won for the Athenians.
B. C. 560-554.
76. The First Tyranny of Pisistratus was not of long duration. For six years he had maintained the laws of Solon, when the two factions of the Plain and the Shore combined against him, and he was driven from the city. An incident which occurred during his first reign had an important bearing on the later history of Greece. A noble named Milti´ades, of the highest birth in Athens, was sitting one day before his door, when he saw strangers passing whom he knew to be foreigners by their spears and peculiar garments. With true Athenian hospitality, he invited them to enjoy the comforts of his house, and was rewarded by a singular disclosure.
They were natives of the Thracian Chersonesus—that narrow tongue of land which lies along the north shore of the Hellespont—and had been to consult the oracle at Delphi concerning the war in which their countrymen were now engaged. The priestess had directed them to ask the first man who should offer them hospitality after leaving the temple, to found a colony in the Chersonesus. They had passed through Phocis and Bœotia without receiving an invitation, and they now hailed their host as the person described by the oracle, and entreated him to come to their assistance. Miltiades and his family were regarded with especial enmity by Pisistratus, and were discontented under his rule. He accepted the invitation of his guests, collected a party of the similarly affected among his fellow-citizens, and with them planted an independent principality on the Hellespont. It was his nephew who commanded at Marathon.[41]
B. C. 548, 547.
B. C. 537.