Violent dissensions prevailed among the inhabitants of Attica, who were separated into three factions—the pedicis, or men of the plain, comprising Athens, Eleusis, and the neighbouring territory, among whom the greatest number of rich families were included; the mountaineers in the east and north of Attica, called diacrii, who were on the whole the poorest party; and the paralii in the southern portion of Attica from sea to sea, whose means and social position were intermediate between the two. Upon what particular points these intestine disputes turned we are not distinctly informed; they were not however peculiar to the period immediately preceding the archontate of Solon; they had prevailed before, and they reappear afterwards prior to the despotism of Pisistratus, the latter standing forward as the leader of the diacrii, and as champion, real or pretended, of the poorer population.
But in the time of Solon these intestine quarrels were aggravated by something much more difficult to deal with—a general mutiny of the poorer population against the rich, resulting from misery combined with oppression. The Thetes, whose condition we have already contemplated in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, are now presented to us as forming the bulk of the population of Attica—the cultivating tenants, metayers, and small proprietors of the country. They are exhibited as weighed down by debts and dependence, and driven in large numbers out of a state of freedom into slavery—the whole mass of them (we are told) being in debt to the rich, who were proprietors of the greater part of the soil. They had either borrowed money for their own necessities, or they tilled the lands of the rich as dependent tenants, paying a stipulated portion of the produce, and in this capacity they were largely in arrear.
All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor,—once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world,—combined with the recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself as well as that of another man to buy him. Every debtor unable to fulfil his contract was liable to be adjudged as the slave of his creditor until he could find means either of paying or working it out; and not only he himself, but his minor sons and unmarried daughters and sisters also, whom the law gave him the power of selling. The poor man thus borrowed upon the security of his body, to translate literally the Greek phrase, and upon that of the persons in his family; and so severely had these oppressive contracts been enforced, that many debtors had been reduced from freedom to slavery in Attica itself, many others had been sold for exportation, and some had only hitherto preserved their own freedom by selling their children. Moreover, a great number of the smaller properties in Attica were under mortgage, signified, according to the formality usual in the Attic law, and continued down throughout the historical times, by a stone pillar erected on the land, inscribed with the name of the lender and the amount of the loan. The proprietors of these mortgaged lands, in case of an unfavourable turn of events, had no other prospect except that of irremediable slavery for themselves and their families, either in their own native country, robbed of all its delights, or in some barbarian region where the Attic accent would never meet their ears. Some had fled the country to escape legal adjudication of their persons, and earned a miserable subsistence in foreign parts by degrading occupations. Upon several, too, this deplorable lot had fallen by unjust condemnation and corrupt judges; the conduct of the rich, in regard to money sacred and profane, in regard to matters public as well as private, being thoroughly unprincipled and rapacious.
The manifold and long-continued suffering of the poor under this system, plunged into a state of debasement not more tolerable than that of the Gallic plebs—and the injustices of the rich in whom all political power was then vested—are facts well attested by the poems of Solon himself, even in the short fragments preserved to us, and it appears that immediately preceding the time of his archonship, the evils had ripened to such a point and the determination of the mass of sufferers, to extort for themselves some mode of relief, had become so pronounced that the existing laws could no longer be enforced. According to the profound remark of Aristotle, that seditions are generated by great causes but out of small incidents, we may conceive that some recent events had occurred as immediate stimulants to the outbreak of the debtors—like those which lend so striking an interest to the early Roman annals, as the inflaming sparks of violent popular movements for which the train had long before been laid. Condemnations by the archons of insolvent debtors may have been unusually numerous, or the maltreatment of some particular debtor, once a respected freeman, in his condition of slavery, may have been brought to act vividly upon the public sympathies—like the case of the old plebeian centurion at Rome (first impoverished by the plunder of the enemy, then reduced to borrow, and lastly adjudged to his creditor as an insolvent), who claimed the protection of the people in the forum, rousing their feelings to the highest pitch by the marks of the slave-whip visible on his person. Some such incidents had probably happened, though we have no historians to recount them; moreover it is not unreasonable to imagine, that that public mental affliction which the purifier Epimenides had been invoked to appease, as it sprung in part from pestilence, so it had its cause partly in years of sterility, which must of course have aggravated the distress of the small cultivators. However this may be, such was the condition of things in 594 B.C., through mutiny of the poor freemen and Thetes, and uneasiness of the middling citizens, that the governing oligarchy, unable either to enforce their private debts or to maintain their political power, were obliged to invoke the well-known wisdom and integrity of Solon. Though his vigorous protest (which doubtless rendered him acceptable to the mass of the people) against the iniquity of the existing system, had already been proclaimed in his poems, they still hoped that he would serve as an auxiliary to help them over their difficulties, and they therefore chose him, nominally as archon along with Philombrotus, but with power in substance dictatorial.[b]
For the life of Solon we can do no better than turn to Plutarch, keeping the very translation, by North, that Shakespeare read, but modernising the spelling.
THE LIFE AND LAWS OF SOLON ACCORDING TO PLUTARCH
[ca. 638-558 B.C.]
He was of the noblest and most ancient house of the city of Athens. For of his father’s side, he was descended of King Codrus: and for his mother, Heraclides Ponticus writeth, she was cousin-german unto Pisistratus’ mother. For this cause even from the beginning there was great friendship between them, partly for their kindred, and partly also for the courtesy and beauty of Pisistratus, with whom it is reported Solon on a time was in love. But Solon’s father (as Hermippus writeth) having spent his goods in liberality, and deeds of courtesy, though he might easily have been relieved at divers men’s hands with money, he was yet ashamed to take any, because he came of a house which was wont rather to give and relieve others, than to take themselves: so being yet a young man, he devised to trade merchandise. Howbeit others say, that Solon travelled countries, rather to see the world, and to learn, than to traffic, or gain. For sure he was very desirous of knowledge, as appeareth manifestly: for that being now old, he commonly used to say this verse:
“I grow old learning still.”
Also he was not covetously bent, nor loved riches too much: for he said in one place: