Some poems of Solon were recited by the boys. They had not at that time gone out of fashion, and the recital of them led someone to say, perhaps in compliment to Critias, that Solon was not only the wisest of men but also the best of poets. The old man brightened up at hearing this, and said: “Had Solon only had the leisure which was required to complete the famous legend which he brought with him from Egypt he would have been as distinguished as Homer and Hesiod.”
PLATO, Timaeus 21c1
Compared with Theognis, his sour-faced neighbour and near contemporary, Solon of Athens could talk and walk. He wrote verse, but he also was offered power and exercised it with prudence. One of his laws established that at a time of civil strife a citizen who did not take sides would lose his citizenship. Every man had an unshirkable responsibility to choose what he regarded as the good, and to bear the consequences of his choice. This was a non-negotiable civic expectation in an evolving democracy.
Solon’s was one of the rare moments in history when a poet was an acknowledged legislator. Shelley, defending a nineteenth-century corner for the unacknowledged poet-legislator, might have approved of Solon’s kind of leadership. What made it extraordinary was Solon’s instinct for balance and counterbalance, his understanding of the perspectives not only of his own class but of all classes. He also had a responsible eye for the medium and long term: expediency played only a small part in his calculations. He was a man of self-effacing integrity.
This, at least, is the version of Solon that originates in his own writings and that historians, including Herodotus and Plutarch, believed to be true.2 Solon may not have bequeathed sculpture, painting or architecture to the city, but he helped to restore its balance and gain, or regain, contested Salamis. Also, he reformed its written laws in a radical way. And finally, he was the first poet of Athens.
It is not possible to separate his poetry from his political and civic activities. Solon is the Hesiod of the city-state, using poetry to address social husbandry, the ills, needs, and aspirations of his city. He reflects on power and its effects, but also finds room in verse for the sensual man. Plutarch’s Life quotes the verse at large. In tone, texture and even in phrasing it recalls Hesiod’s. Urban and rural values are not so profoundly at odds as they would be when, later on, city and sustaining countryside became divorced.
I long to prosper, but to thrive by dishonest means
I do not wish. Justice may be slow, but it’s true.3
No cutting corners, on the farm or in Council. In Solon’s Athens a citizen had fields and orchards; the city was small enough for every man who lived on a street to have crops and pastures along a lane. His eunomia, the order of good laws which harmonise the lives of citizens, is not unlike the eunomia Hesiod applies to the rural and the divine order. Hesiod personifies it: Eunomia is daughter of Themis, a Titaness, herself a daughter of Uranus and Gaia. She wedded Zeus and bore him several children and is the source of some of the key ordering principles of the universe.
A long fragment of Solon sets out, for the first time, to harmonise two quite disparate conceptions. On the one hand stands fallible and limited man, vain and paltry, ambitious and myopic; on the other is an ordered and potentially just society. The latter ought to take the former, provide him a place, a structure within which to work and achieve, and goals which dignify and extend him and those like him. We have human hubris and its unmitigated aftermath and, set against it, we have the mitigation of a just order, eunomia versus dysnomia. A wise moderation leads towards a shared golden mean.4
The Suda tells us that Solon’s father was Execestides.5 It was a matter of pride to Critias that his great-grandfather, grandfather or father, Dropides (there are variant versions), had been a lover of Anacreon, and was often mentioned in Anacreon’s poetry. Solon and Dropides may have been brothers, their father being Execestides.6 And Plutarch adds: “Solon’s mother, says Heraclides of Pontus, was a cousin of the mother of Pisistratus,” the man who was to become tyrant of Athens when Solon went abroad. Solon and Pisistratus “were great friends to begin with, in part because they were related, in part because of the youthful handsomeness of Pisistratus. According to some writers, Solon was passionately devoted to him.” His is among the earliest poetic testimony of love between boys and men.7 Solon, who was to become the great meter of judgement and lawmaker, could write:
As soon as there’s a bloom on him, one loves a boy,
Thighs, and sweet lips, objects of desire …8
Pisistratus is said to have had a boy lover called Charmus and to have dedicated a statue to love in the academy, where runners in the sacred torch race lit their torches. Solon, similarly inclined, could not resist gazing upon good looks. He adopted his sister’s son Cybisthus. Plutarch says, “The truth is that each man’s soul has planted in it a desire to love; it is as much its nature to love as it is to feel, understand, and remember. It clothes itself in this desire. If it finds nothing to love at home it will fasten on some alien object.” The love of a boy or a young man is the noblest form of love. There is no record of Solon having married or produced an heir. When he came to draft his famous laws, he explicitly forbade boy love to slaves, reserving and dignifying such activities for “reputable men.”
Celebrating love of this kind was not at odds with the order of individual values he advocates in other poems (the erotic element in his surviving poems is slight, a trace among more serious concerns). Olbios, in Homer a word signifying material well-being, good fortune, in Solon comes to mean a higher blessedness, the pagan beatus of the Latin writers. It begins in a positive reputation, and it entails the love and honour of friends and the ability to terrify and harm foes.9 Olbios, in one fragment, is a man who has beloved sons, horses, hounds and a hospitable friend elsewhere, a friend one can escape to.10 Herodotus distinguishes olbios from a mere eutuches, one who enjoys superficial or momentary good fortune.
Before he found his political vocation, Solon wrote “with no serious end in view,” simply to amuse himself when at leisure. He began to philosophise in aphoristic form, using verse also as a historical record and to set down his understanding of the world and his place in it. Poetry was asked to do work which in a later age would naturally have fallen to prose: exhortation, warning, rebuke, prayer. He may have tried to draft his laws in epic verse. One fragment, as if from such an attempt, declares:
First let us pray to Zeus, royal son of Cronus
To grant my laws success and wide renown.11
Poor in his youth, Solon travelled to make his fortune, Plutarch says. In his age a person of good family could work for gain without a stigma attaching to him. Foreign trade was regarded as mind-extending, especially at a time when colonies were being planted far and wide. Both Thales and Hippocrates the mathematician engaged in trade, and Plato paid for the expenses of his stay in Egypt by selling oil. Solon the merchant succeeded in a sufficient, if not a spectacular, way and around 612 BC went home. Athens was in a singularly unhappy state when he arrived back. Among other things, citizens were not permitted so much as to mention the name of the island of Salamis, to which Athens laid claim, but which it had been unable to wrest from the control of the Megarians. This rankling defeat was a focus for wider discontents.
The twenty-eight-year-old could not abide such enforced silence on an issue of popular concern. He composed “a hundred gracefully turned verses,” of which only eight survive, committed them to memory, and then rushed into the public way, dressed for his madness “with a little cap upon his head,” reciting them with eloquence. Plutarch declares that “a great crowd swarming about him,” he climbed on to the Herald’s Stone and recited his elegy. It began with the words:
I come, a herald from delightful Salamis,
On my tongue not a speech but a carcanet of words …12
I must, he says ironically, be a native of some little island, Sicinus or Phole-gandros, certainly no Athenian: Athenians are Salamis-abandoners (Salami-naphetae). As the poem progressed, it urged fellow-Athenians to renew the war with Megara, to save the delightful island and revive Athenian honour.
Another late biographer, Diogenes Laertius, says that Solon did not recite the poem himself but hired a herald to do so, thus dissipating some of the impact of the story and the drama of madness. This second version is more in keeping with Solon’s dislike of performance and fiction, but it issues in all likelihood, as Plutarch’s does, from a traditional misreading of surviving texts. Mary R. Lefkowitz, describing how Aristotle used Solon as a source for his Constitution of Athens, shows how misreadings by biographers and critics unaware of semantic change can lead to mis-creation of past scenes. They take agore (speech) for agora (market-place) and thus create a powerful, inadvertent fiction. Did he in fact feign madness when he delivered his poem on Salamis? Was he in fact, later on, offered the tyrant’s crown and did he refuse it? Was he as virtuous as the tenor of his verse suggests?13
Plutarch tells so good a story that, though we must doubt it, we might as well listen to it all the same. Solon was applauded by many, including Pisistratus. The law against mentioning Salamis was repealed and Athens went to war again with, as commander, the poet Solon himself. To defeat the Megarians he practised a subterfuge. We are given a choice of stories. The first involves cross-dressing. Solon sent an agent who posed as a deserter and persuaded the Megarians to try to kidnap the leading Athenian women who, he assured them, were observing the rites of Demeter at Colias. As the Megarians approached, Solon had young, sparsely bearded men dress in women’s clothing; as the foe came ashore the Athenians killed every last one of them and used their ship to sail back and take the city. The second story is more conventional and Plutarch finds it more credible. It involves an oracle, sacrifices, and a feigned attack to draw the enemy out, and then the main body of men sneaking in behind and taking the city.
Athens won, but victory was not clear-cut. Conflict continued until Megara and Athens agreed to submit their claim to an arbitrator: Sparta. Solon based Athens’ claim to Salamis on Homer (poetry conferred legitimacy). The question is, were the lines he adduced originally in Homer’s poem, or were they interpolated? We are back with the forger-editor Onomacritos and Iliad II, 557–58. Homer’s great editor Aristarchus rejected both lines. They speak of Salamis’ contribution to the Trojan War as part of the Athenian contingent. It followed that Salamis belonged within the Athenian sphere. “From Salamis,” says Homer, or Onomacritos, “Ajax brought twelve ships, and stationed them where the phalanxes of the Athenians stood.” Never was so much historical weight placed upon (rather poor) lines of spurious verse. Another, Athenian, version says that Solon persuaded the Spartans that Ajax’s sons Philaeus and Eurysaces became citizens of Athens and ceded the island to the city when they settled in Attica.
The main reason apologists have found for doubting the stories of subterfuge is the character of Solon himself: would he, a man of robust and emphatic self-declared integrity, take such devious routes? Would he feign madness? Would he, Athens’ first poet, misquote the greatest poet in the world for political ends? Would he use cross-dressing as a mode of deceit in war? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” Solon is diminished in their eyes.
After Salamis, Solon was famous. His fame grew when he defended Delphi against the people of Cirrha, who threatened to “profane the oracle.” As one of the Seven Sages, his maxims “Moderation in all things” and “Know thyself” were inscribed, Pausanias reports, in an antechamber of the temple of Apollo. That they were there in Pausanias’ time proves how durable Solon’s admittedly rudimentary wisdom was. The Sages used to meet in conclave at a wooden version of the temple that burned down in the middle of the sixth century BC.
Solon was the only poet among the Seven. The Sages were wise men who performed their wisdom in some way.14 The Greek word for their brand of sagacity is metis: practical wisdom enhanced with more than a dash of cunning. Despite the Sages’ generality of expression, metis itself is highly particular, alive to the complexities of individual and social life. A man with metis “has a keen eye for the main chance, for what the Greeks called kairos—the right thing at the right time.”15 When the poet Simonides arrived in Athens, kairos had been translated and devalued: no poet ever evinced such an intensely successful form of it, and that success was wholly material.16
Membership of the ancient Sage club varies, according to the historian one reads, but Solon is always present on the list. From Plutarch’s point of view, the only genuine sage among them was Thales of Miletus. He had originality. The others, applying morality to politics, are purveyors of rather commonplace maxims. The expression (as in some of Solon’s more generalised verse) is humdrum. Other sages included Bias of Priene, Chilon of Sparta, Cleobulus of Lindos (on Rhodes), Pittacus of Mytilene and Perian der of Corinth or Epimenides of Phaestus or Myson of Chen. The geographical spread is broad. Sages were not concentrated in one place.
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates argues that “the Spartan gift for laconic and pointed comment showed that their intellectual ability was well trained, and that certain people in the past had realised ‘that to frame such utterances is a mark of the highest culture.’”17 They were echoed, for example in Plato’s tag, “Prosperity leads to satisfaction, satisfaction to insolence,” which may derive from Solon’s “Satisfaction begets hubris, whenever great wealth follows men whose minds are not sound.”18
Conflict between the old landed families, the aristocracy also known as the Eupatridae, and the various groups of common people developed, sometimes into bloody encounters. Certainly the situation in nearby cities, Megara for example, was worrying for anyone with a stake in the “old order” of Athens. Solon himself was a scion of the old order, and when in 594–93 he was appointed archon,19 it was a delicate time. He was also named diallaktes, the mediator or reconciler, to negotiate between the powerless and powerful parties. Either at that time or twenty years later (scholars are divided) he introduced his famous constitution, intended to balance conflicting interests and to promote a harmony which was at once just and stable.
Before Solon reformed the laws, Draco was the legendary Athenian legislator. In 621–20 BC, he was given authority not so much to make up new laws as to set out the existing laws in terms which answered the needs of the city. His objective was to move beyond a tit-for-tat, vendetta-based tradition of common law and to replace it with authority at a remove, a public justice, an “objective” standard. To give such justice legitimacy and impact, the punishments he proposed needed to be—Draconian. Solon’s task was more subtle and urgent. He had to unstitch laws which served the ruling interests and frame a new system in which equity rather than retribution was the governing dynamic. From Draco’s system he preserved only the homicide laws.
His laws were known as “axles” (axones: “pivot boards”), the turning wooden blocks on which they were inscribed. They were also called kyrbeis after the bronze tablets where they were written down. A fifth-century visitor to Athens could have conned them right up to 461 BC on the Acropolis. At that time they were moved to the Agora, and “sections were later published on stone.” Many of the laws postdate Solon, but his name remains in place to legitimise them.20 In Aristotle’s (or his philosophical atelier’s) Constitution of Athens Solon declared that his laws should stand for a hundred years. Then he went abroad, ostracising himself like the Duke in Measure for Measure, vowing not to return for a decade. He saw himself, after a few years in power, as the cornered quarry of a hunt: “I turned and was held at bay, like a wolf among a pack of hounds.”21
Herodotus says he left Athens for another reason: “He was on his travels, having left Athens to be absent ten years, under the pretence of wishing to see the world, but really to avoid being forced to repeal any of the laws which, at the request of the Athenians, he had made for them. Without his sanction the Athenians could not repeal them, as they had bound themselves under a heavy curse to be governed for ten years by the laws which should be imposed on them by Solon.” He did come back, unlike the Spartan Lycurgus who, having made the laws, compelled Sparta to agree not to change any of them until his return. They are still waiting.
Solon expressed greatest satisfaction with what he called seisachtheia, the “shaking off of the burdens.” This entailed exonerating numerous citizens of debt, a cause of deep unrest given the excessive power of the landed and lending interests. Solon’s legislation liberated land that was mortgaged and entailed and freed people sold as slaves or exiled because of debt so that they could return. He was also responsible for easing the dues of the hekte-moroi, or “sixth-parters,” citizens who had been reduced to a state of virtual servitude because they had, for one reason or another, to give a sixth of whatever they produced to a lord. Solon saw to it that enslavement for debt, when the borrower used himself as collateral, ceased. A free citizen could not be held as collateral and could not offer himself either. In verse he describes his achievement, how he
lifted out
The mortgage stones that everywhere were planted
And freed the fields that were enslaved before.22
Solon introduced other reforms. He made immigration easier for people with craft skills. They were even made citizens. Exports of agricultural produce were restricted, apart from olive oil. Athenian farmers concentrated on olive production and this helped to develop a single-product export economy.
The social structures he proposed, under the eye of the Areopagus, the governing council, enfranchised every class of citizen, from the wealthy pentakosioimedimnoi, or 500-bushel men, the larger farmers, through the hippeis, or knights, to the zeugitai (yoke-men) and the thetes, peasants worth less than 200 measures a year. Each group had defined flexibility. Now it was a man’s material substance rather than his birthright that determined his place in the order of things. He also reorganised the boule (senate) of 400 members and each adult Athenian was given a seat in the ecclesia (popular assembly). The Heliaea (popular tribunal) was established as a final court of appeal, and it was possible for even the poorest man to bring a legal action. Solon’s reforms strengthened the peasants’ position, weakened that of the aristocrats, put muscle in the courts and the judiciary, and laid a foundation for the institutions of classical Athens. It was a responsive and subtle series of checks and balances. Solon did not throw his power behind any one group. Aristotle in his Constitution of Athens quotes a wonderfully calm and even-handed passage of Solon’s verse:
I’ve given common folk sufficient rights
Without surrendering or taking back;
The rich who were resented, and the mighty,
I saw to it that they were undiminished.
I took my stand, my shield defends both sides
And neither can come at and hurt the other.23
It would have made a worthy epitaph: he advanced the art of the possible, pushing forward no more than would be accepted or could be enforced. He sees himself as a man between contesting parties, insisting on compromise. Dialogue is at the heart of his most inventive poems. He imagines voices speaking against him, criticising him; or he works himself into the voices of contesting parties, speaking for them and then speaking for their opponents, translating conflict into argument. He begins by overhearing a critic: “Solon isn’t a sage or counsellor.” He listens to his critic and then frames a response. He reports speech and enters into semi-dramatised debate.24
“In great matters it’s not easy to please everyone,” Plutarch quotes him as saying.25 Was he offered absolute power and did he refuse it? One account suggests as much. He shrank from tyranny because a tyrant, to achieve power, must compromise with one interest at the expense of others. Tyranny can work, he admits, but there is no easy political way back from it. As an institution it depends on individuals: a good political institution should depend upon the proper enforcement of equitable laws.
He left Athens and his travels took him, legend says, to several destinations, though the stories may tell, to use Lefkowitz’s term, representative rather than factual truths, illuminating his exemplary character rather than his biography. Let us believe, with Herodotus and Plutarch, that there is something to the stories.
He went to Egypt and stayed “at the Nile’s great mouth, near Canopus’ shore.”26 From Egypt, either on this or on an earlier visit, he imported, says Herodotus, a momentous notion: income tax. “It is said that the reign of Amasis was the most prosperous time that Egypt ever saw, the river was more liberal to the land, and the land brought forth more abundantly for the service of man than had ever been known before; while the number of inhabited cities was not less than twenty thousand. It was this King Amasis who established the law that every Egyptian should appear once a year before the governor of his canton, and show his means of living; or, failing to do so, and to prove that he got an honest livelihood, should be put to death. Solon the Athenian borrowed this law from the Egyptians, and imposed it on his countrymen, who have observed it ever since. It is indeed an excellent custom.”27 Such self-assessment, issuing in a payment (the duty of “liturgies” which the rich citizen “volunteered”) or in death, sounds positively modern.
During his stay “at the Nile’s great mouth” he philosophised with Psenophis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Saïs, learnèd Egyptian priests. He began to gather information about the lost city of Atlantis and started to write a poem about it but gave up on the task, being too old and sceptical to proceed with the necessary intensity. Plato says he gave up because he was too busy, but Plutarch disagrees. Modern critics sniff a forgery: Plato invented the Atlantis story for his own political argument and assigned it to Solon to give it “factual” probity. Benjamin Jowett, introducing his translation of Plato’s Critias, is categorical: “we may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato.” He continues, “To the Greek such a tale, like that of the earth-born men, would have seemed perfectly accordant with the character of his mythology, and not more marvellous than the wonders of the East narrated by Herodotus and others.” But why did later ages believe the myth to such an extent that they set out to discover the lost island “in every part of the globe, America, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Palestine, Sardinia, Sweden”?
Plato’s eponymous speaker, Critias, recounts the provenance of Solon’s story: “His manuscript was left with my grandfather Dropides, and is now in my possession.” It tells how, “in the division of the earth Poseidon obtained as his portion the island of Atlantis, and there he begat children whose mother was a mortal. Towards the sea and in the centre of the island there was a very fair and fertile plain, and near the centre, about fifty stadia from the plain, there was a low mountain in which dwelt a man named Evenor and his wife Leucippe, and their daughter Cleito, of whom Poseidon became enamoured. He to secure his love enclosed the mountain with rings or zones varying in size, two of land and three of sea, which his divine power readily enabled him to excavate and fashion, and, as there was no shipping in those days, no man could get into the place. To the interior island he conveyed under the earth springs of water hot and cold, and supplied the land with all things needed for the life of man. Here he begat a family consisting of five pairs of twin male children. The eldest was Atlas, and him he made king of the centre island, while to his twin brother, Eumelus, or Gadeirus, he assigned …” And so the intriguing story proceeds until the manuscript ends abruptly just as Zeus is about to speak. Critias says the manuscript “was carefully studied by me when I was a child.” It is fantastic and magical and belongs to the realm of childhood and of make-believe more than to that of political fable.
Herodotus reports that, in his travels, Solon stayed with Croesus, the last king of Lydia, who wanted his guest to deem him the happiest man in the world. Solon conceded that he was fortunate, but not happy, a state which can only be finally affirmed at the conclusion, and in the conclusion, of a life. When the Athenian moved on, Croesus was not sorry to see him go. This story is almost certainly legendary because Solon’s and Croesus’ dates do not coincide, but Herodotus takes the opportunity to display a sage’s wisdom in action. On his way back from Egypt he may have stopped off in Cyprus and stayed with Philocyprus, a tyrant whose rule he much admired. Diogenes says he died in Cyprus, aged 80, “leaving instructions to his kinfolk that his bones should be carried to Salamis and there burnt to ashes and scattered over the soil.”28
Most agree, however, that he returned to Athens and found it in a troubled state. A good set of constitutional balances was not proof against democratic weakness: in 561 the assembly voted Pisistratus a body-guard and he was about to begin his distinguished career as tyrant. Solon rushed in, as in the Salamis intervention, but this time to the agora, not the assembly, and in full armour, not a comic hat, to urge the case against. His intervention was unsuccessful; the man whose boyhood had unsettled his heart was now in a position to destroy all that Solon had created.
There was no rancour between them, however. Solon lived to see his constitution overthrown, but then restored with some changes. He stayed on in Athens, a lonely, monitory elder who inevitably became an advisor to Pisistratus and even approved some of his actions. Solon died old. Lucian says that he, like the sages Thales and Pittacus, lived a century.29 Eighty was a more widely accepted age. Perhaps his ashes were scattered, as Aristotle says, agreeing with Diogenes, on Salamis. Perhaps they were not.
When Solon got back to Athens, something else troubled him. Diodorus Siculus quotes a passage in which Solon likens Athenians to wily foxes trusting in shifty speeches rather than examining closely men’s deeds.30 Thespis, hardly a political figure but preying upon the fashion for public speaking, was just starting his activities. Thespis celebrated make-believe. “Yes, but if we allow ourselves to praise and honour make-believe like this, the next thing will be to find it creeping into our serious business,” Solon declares, striking the ground with his stick. For him poetry is not make-believe. It is instrumental, didactic, monitory; it is a language of distilled moral truth. “Obey the archon, right or wrong.”31 Solon’s attitude to Thespis and the birth of thespianism may have contributed to Plato’s declared hostility to poets.
There is a change in the purpose of iambic poetry and its public performance. He uses it to defend his political programme, a use that Archilochus and Hipponax would have found odd. Solon does not satirise and scapegoat but justifies himself, in a language the people could understand and easily remember. His verse is preserved in fragments within the texts of writers like Aristotle and Plutarch.32 His developments of iambic trimeter and trochaic tetrameter may have contributed to the emergence of Attic tragedy, bringing into a popular form a higher style and more elevated content.
Solon, it is easy to forget, wrote poetry of private pleasures as well as public responsibilities. Some of his poems would have been appropriate to a symposium, though we visualise him more readily as a public orator. At the beginning of the sixth century, his alone was the merit of Athenian poetry. Bowra declares, “Solon had written his political and patriotic elegiacs, less skilful indeed than those of his friend Mimnermus but noble and undeniably moving. But after him there is hardly a trace of poetry until the patronage of the Pisistratids gradually helped into existence the majestic forms which were to dominate the succeeding century.”33
A humourless pithiness marks much of his writing, and because quite substantial chunks of it survive (time preserving unjustly the political at the expense of the lyrical—historians are to blame) we wonder whether the firebrand of Salamis did not become a little like Polonius in Hamlet, with Pisistratus as his dear Laertes. There is wisdom in Polonius, if we do not laugh at his resignation. Solon points out how wealth passes from hand to hand; but nobility is non-transferable and non-negotiable. He reminds us that “No man is happy, not one under the sun.”34 He writes a poem about the ages of man, working not by decades but by seven-year periods, and he dwells vividly upon the growth of teeth. At his most succinct and elegiac, he speaks with great candour and authority.
Perhaps “poets tell many lies,”36 but they can also learn to tell the truth.