Solon, The Just #
Solon, is generally credited with the introduction of Justice and Democracy to Athens. His esteemed authority has stood the test of time. Both Plato and Aristotle bow to his acknowledged authority in law. Juvenal simply refers to him as “eloquent Solon, the Just”.
The people of Athens, suffering under the capricious and arbitrary jurisdiction of aristocratic judges, wanted Solon to use his popularity and his power to make himself a tyrant. Solon, who was a wise man, replied that:
“tyranny is indeed a very pleasant peak, but there is no safe way down from it”.
Solon ruled Athens for one year, expecting his reforms of wresting power from the aristocrats and vesting it in the lives of the people to last at least ten years. Five years later most of the power had aggregated back to the upper classes.
Three hundred years before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Solonic authority decreed a fair and just society for all by establishing a system of government and justice that freed all members of the community from the oppression and injustice of the privileged, by freeing them from slavery due to their debts.
Solon believed the family to be the foundation of society and ensured that family disputes were resolved fairly and equitable.
Solon Poems
Eunomia - Solon #
These things my spirit bids me
teach the men of Athens:
that Dysnomia (disorder - lawlessness)
brings countless evils for the city,
but Eunomia brings order (Good governance)
and makes everything proper,
by enfolding the unjust in fetters,
smoothing those things that are rough,
stopping greed,
Eunomia (Greek: Εὐνομία) was a minor Greek goddess of law and legislation “Good order”, “governance according to good laws”),
EUTHENICS is a science concerned with bettering the condition of human beings through the improvement of their environment.
Eudemonic - pertaining or conducive to happiness. Eudemonism - the striving for more heonic (hedonistic) or pleasurable experience.
Euphonic, pleasing sounds
Euphemism from Greek eúphēmos, which means “uttering sounds of good omen,” “fair-sounding,” or “auspicious.”
The Man Whose Riches Satisfy His Greed
The man whose riches satisfy his greed Is not more rich for all those heaps and hoards Than some poor man who has enough to feed And clothe his corpse with such as God affords. Eunomia.
These things my spirit bids me teach the men of Athens: that Dysnomia brings countless evils for the city,
……
The relationship between the poetry of Hesiod (Works and Days) and Solon is profound. Solon, through a series of allusions, incorporates into his poem Hesiod’s authority on dikē (justice) to validate condemnation of injustice in his own city, and in the second half of the poem he turns the Hesiodic pessimism of this injustice into an optimistic hope for his city’s just future. Solon expands Hesiod’s notion of Zeus as the punisher of injustice to create a pessimistic view of human life darker than Hesiod’s own. A final discussion of the scholarly division on the question of whether dikē in Solon is essentially Hesiodic or something new in Greek thought rounds out the observations on the relation between the poets and confirms Solon’s dependence on Hesiod.
Solon’s Basic tenets: #
Solon was born into a well-to-do family of Athens. He worked as a merchant in the export-import trade, and he considered himself relatively poor. He did not worship money, as is evident from some poems of his.
Poetry was for Solon a way to entertain himself, and he also used poetry to give his ideas easy access to the minds of the Athenians. Communication was oral, so oratory was a key skill to be influential.
When Anacharsis, a wise man, saw Athenian democracy at work, he remarked that it was strange that in Athens wise men spoke and fools decided. Anacharsis laughed at Solon for drafting laws, imagining that the dishonesty and greed of the Athenians could be restrained by written laws.
Such laws, are like spiderwebs: they catch the weak and poor, but the rich can rip right through them.
Solon knew that spite, is part of human nature, but he established certain places where it was illegal to indulge this weakness. To suppress it completely would have been impossible.
If the aim is to punish a few, moderately, as an example – rather than many, severely, to no purpose – the lawmaker must confine his law to the limits of human nature, and not try to legislate perfection.
It is not affection, but weakness, that brings a man – unarmed against fortune by reason – into these endless pains and terrors. Because they are always worrying about what might go wrong, most are unable to enjoy their present opportunities for happiness.
Athens at this time had three factions:
- the people of the hills, who favored democracy;
- the people of the plains, who favored oligarchy; and
- the people of the shore, who favored a mixed sort of government and prevented either of the other two factions from prevailing.
The political turmoil had come to the point where it appeared that the only way any government at all could be established would be for some tyrant to take all power into his own hands.
Under Athenian law at that time, if a loan went into default, the creditor could seize the debtor and his family and sell them as slaves to get money to pay off the debt. The cruelty and arrogance of the rich caused the poor to form into gangs to save themselves and rescue those who had been made slaves through usury. The best men of the city saw Solon as someone who was partial to neither the rich nor the poor, and they asked him to lead. The rich consented because Solon was wealthy, and the poor consented because he was honest.
Solon’s task was dangerous and difficult because of the greediness of one side and the arrogance of the other. To placate both sides, Solon said: “Fairness breeds no strife.” To the poor, “fairness” meant equal wealth; and to the rich, “fairness” meant keeping what they owned.
Both rich and poor, therefore, believed for a while that Solon was on their side. But soon the poor people became disgusted that Solon would not use his power to seize the property of the rich. Solon’s friends advised him that he would be a fool if he did not take advantage of the opportunity that fate had presented. Now that he had this power, they said, he should make himself a tyrant. Solon, who was a wise man, replied that
“tyranny is indeed a very pleasant peak, but there is no way down from it.”
Solon could not change the state from top to bottom, so he worked only on what it was possible to improve without a total revolution. He only attempted what he thought he could persuade the Athenians to accept, with a little compulsion. Wherever possible, Solon made use of euphemisms, such as calling taxes “contributions.” With a judicious mixture of sweet with sour, justice with force, he managed to achieve some success. When afterwards Solon was asked whether he had made the best laws he could for the Athenians, he answered: “The best they were able to receive.”
Solon’s first reform was forbidding mortgages on bodies. Even with the consent of the debtor, the creditor could no longer legally enslave him and his family. Those who had already become slaves were liberated, and those who had been sold to foreigners returned to Athens as free men.
Solon also ordered that all outstanding debts were forgiven, so all mortgages on land disappeared.
When Solon was asked once which city he thought was well-governed, he said:
“That city where those who have not been injured take up the cause of one who has, and prosecute the case as earnestly as if the wrong had been done to themselves.”
Accordingly, he allowed anyone to take up the cause of a poor man who had been injured.
Solon decided that he should leave the Athenians for a while so that they would cease bothering him, and work things out by themselves. He got permission to leave Athens and took a ship to Egypt in 590 B.C..
Croesus commanded that his treasure houses be opened so that Solon could see how many beautiful clothes he had, and how much gold. Solon politely looked at everything, then came back to the king.
“Well, Solon,” said Croesus, “have you ever seen a man who was more fortunate than Croesus?”
Solon replied:
“Yes, I have, and that was Tellus, a citizen of Athens. He was an honest man who left his children well provided for and with good will in the city. He lived to see grandchildren by his sons. Then he died gloriously, fighting for his country.”
This frank answer enraged Croesus, but Solon pacified him by adding:
“Oh mighty king of the Lydians, the gods have given us Greeks only small things, and our wisdom is only of small things and not the business of men as important as you. We consider how a man’s life is so much subject to chance, and how disaster can come to us completely by surprise, so we don’t consider any man to be successful until he has died well, with his good fortune intact to the end. Otherwise, if we should say that a living man is a success, when there is so much that can still happen to him, we would be like soldiers celebrating victory before the battle is over.”
Solon’s constitution reduced the power of the old aristocracy by making wealth rather than birth a criterion for holding political positions, a system called timokratia (timocracy). … The only parts of Draco’s code that Solon kept were the laws regarding homicide.
The Collapse of Antiquity #
by Michael Hudson.
Solon was the Athenian statesman credited with laying the foundations of Athenian democracy. Michael Hudson, in his new book, The Collapse of Antiquity, shows that much of his reform involved addressing the burden of debt in that society:
“Like reformers in other Greek cities, Solon’s poetry criticizing the hubris of the wealthy helped establish his reputation as a sage. In Fragment 4 of his major poem, he wrote that the wealthy ‘do not understand how to hold back their satiety,’ despite there being plenty to go around. ‘Hubristic individuals “appropriate, unjustly, the property of others.” As Josiah Ober translates Fragment 4 in modern prose:
It is the citizens themselves who, by their act of foolishness and subservience to money, are willing to destroy a great city, … the people’s leaders … are certain to suffer much pain as a result of their great arrogance. For they do not know how to restrain excess or to conduct in an orderly and peaceful manner the festivities of the banquet that are at hand … they grow wealthy, yielding to unjust deeds … sparing neither sacred nor private property, they steal with rapaciousness … and they have no regard for the august foundations of Justice, who bears silent witness to the present and the past and who in time assuredly comes to exact retribution.
Sara Forsdyke points to the parallel between Theognis of Megara’s statement that:
‘personal wealth brings with it public harm’
and Solon’s rebuke of those who destroy the city
‘on account of their desire for wealth’ (Fragment 4.5-6), and who ‘grow wealthy through unjust acts’ (Fragment 4.11).
The problem, Solon wrote (Fragment 13.71-73), is that wealth is addictive: ‘There is no apparent limit of wealth laid down for men. Those of us who possess the most seek to double it.’ The result is that ’excess breeds insolence, when great prosperity comes to men who are not sound of mind’ (Fragment 6).
“Such views were part of a centuries-long Greek critique of wealth addiction and hubris. Solon’s reference to wealthy individuals ’not sound of mind’ became the takeoff point for Socrates’ argument about whether it was just to repay socially destructive creditors (Republic, Book 1, discussed below in Chapter 7).
“Solon wrote that he removed the horoi. The word meant ‘limit,’ ‘boundary,’ ‘definition,’ typically translated as boundary stones. Horoi were ‘slabs of marble, limestone, volcanic rock, or other available stone driven into the ground at the appropriate spots. They were used for private estates, city limits, state boundaries, temple and cult properties, and graves. The visible half might be entirely blank. But most often it was engraved either with the single word horos or with an additional word or phrase naming the god of a temple or giving some equally distinctive bit of information.’
“On the basis of Solon’s poetry accusing the wealthy of not sparing sacred or public land, van Wees suspects that these stones demarcated land grabbed by force, foreclosure and/or legal stealth from the public domain as well as from private holders.
By the 4th century BC they indeed came to signify the debts owed by cultivators, making them what Finley termed ‘hypothecation-stones.’ But recent scholarship shows that the horoi of Solon’s time were not ‘mortgage stones,’ because hektemoroi debtors appear to have been statutory tenants who held sharecropping rights as long as they paid their (probably) one-sixth of the crop. They were a kind of sharecropper, not landholders who had forfeited their property for debt. In contrast to the 4th-century stelai, it therefore is unlikely that Solon’s horoi recorded mortgage debts. Rather, well-to-do landowners established patronage relationships in which debts built up. Cultivation was extended by clients providing labor services on the patron’s land, ultimately leading to a state of dependency or outright bondage, losing to their patrons whatever land tenure they may have had.
“Most early debts were secured by the cultivator’s labor, not the land. ‘Debt was a deliberate device on the part of the creditor, to obtain more dependent labor,’ concludes Finley. Labor was the resource in shortest supply. Debtors had to keep working and pay the crop yield to their creditors until the debt was paid off. This is known as antichretic interest, which had a long pedigree in Sumer and Babylonia.
“After decades of studying the Athenian hektemoroi, Finley threw up his hands and acknowledged that they ‘constituted a distinct status whose roots are lost in the Dark Age of Greek history, men who worked land on terms of a fixed rent of one sixth of the crop, presumably not free to leave it, but not caught up in what we normally refer to when we speak of a debtor-creditor relationship.’ They were not slaves but ‘dependent or involuntary labor,’ or simply ‘tenants in arrears.’ The vicissitudes of weather and the harvest caused them to be chronically in arrears.
“The main protests occurred when hektemoroi fell behind on their crop obligation, or borrowed food, seed or other supplies and were unable to pay their debts, and fell into bondage. Prior to Solon’s reforms their creditor-patrons could sell them to foreign slave dealers as outright chattel slaves. What made matters urgent, according to Solon’s poetry, was the fear of debtors being sold outside of their community, away from their families and acquaintances. That ‘was an affront to traditional sentiment and violated the principle of solidarity of the citizen group.’ They felt their precarious clientage position was unfair and unnatural, no better than war slaves. They wanted their land free of debt, but Athens had no conquered territory to distribute to them, and its oligarchy fought against parting with any of its own land.
“As long as debtors remained attached to their own familiar land, they may have hoped their position was merely temporary, or at least only nominal in view of the limited ability of their creditors to further exploit them. But customary social constraints were weakening, and marginal cultivators were in danger of losing their rights as citizens. That is what led Solon to ban enslavement for debt arrears (or by illegal force) to work land that the wealthy had unjustly appropriated and enclosed:
Many fixed landmarks I removed, and made those free that were once a slave. Many brought it back to their God-built birthplace, many that had been sold, some justly, some unjustly, and others that had been exiled through urgent penury, men that no longer spake the Attic speech because they had wandered so far and wide; and those that suffered shameful servitude at home, trembling before the whims of their owners, these made I free men.
“It is not clear how in practice Solon might have redeemed debtors who had been sold abroad. What is most important to recognize is that he enforced legal recognition of the fact that the status of bondservants was much better than that of outright slaves. Between outright slavery and liberty was the intermediate category of bondage for nominally free debtors who retained their legal rights as citizens, e.g., not to be treated as slaves by being sold or mistreated by their creditors. Athenian debtors retained their rights as citizens and membership in their tribal units. “According to Blok and Krul, the problem was that ‘the Athenian elite raided the Attic countryside, fetching booty and individuals whom they then sold abroad.’ This enslavement of Athenians was illegal, and a major cause of the dysnomia cited by Solon in Fragment 4.
Masters could beat them [their slaves], chain them up, starve them (Xenophon Memorabilia. 2.1.16), employ them as prostitutes ([Demosthenes] 59.18-23), or even castrate them (Herodotus 8.105). All money earned by slaves belonged to the master ([Demosthenes] 53.20), and likewise all contracts made by the slave were the responsibility of his master (Hyp. Ath. passim). If the master fell into debt, he could offer to hand over his slave to the creditor as compensation ([Demosthenes] 53.20-1), or if the master had his property confiscated by the polis, the poletai would seize his slaves and sell them.
“Solon’s seisachtheia (‘shedding of burdens’) is the best attested debt cancellation among early Greek cities. He banned outright debt slavery for Athenian citizens, although not the obligation of debtors to work off their debts as free men owing labor service. As Edward Harris has emphasized, ‘debt-bondage is not a permanent status: the debt-bondsman remains under the control of the creditor only until his debt is paid off. The creditor does not have all the rights exercised by an owner, just the right to his services for a certain period of time,’ a practice that continued ’long after Solon’s legislation …. The law granted creditors the right to seize borrowers who failed to repay their loans and to hold them until they were able to work off their debts. Yet at the same time, the law protected the freedom of debtors by denying creditors the ability to sell them into slavery as a way of recovering their loans.’
“The ensuing century’s prosperity enabled Athenians typically to earn enough to stay out of debt. But debt bondage is found elsewhere (as in Bithynia, where it was imposed by Roman publican tax collectors and others; see Chapter 14 below).
“Solon fulfilled the aristocracy’s hope to avoid the land redistribution that had occurred in Corinth, Sicyon and other cities. This left many of the poor disappointed according to the most detailed treatment of his reforms, the Athmaion Politeia (11.2), written by one of Aristotle’s students.
Subsequent oligarchic writers celebrated Solon as a model precisely because of his moderation in refraining from redistributing the Athenian elite’s landholdings. Solon was unsympathetic to those who resented him for not redistributing the land: ‘They that came for plunder had rich hopes, reckoning every man that he would find himself great prosperity … Vain were their imaginings then, and now they are angered with me and all eye me askance as if I were an enemy.’
“Yet popular disappointment over him leaving the wealthy with their land intact was so strong that he left Athens for ten years, visiting Egypt, the court of Croesus in Lydia and other realms. That left a political hiatus in Athens, where policy disagreements among the elite prevented any archon from being elected for two years after 593.
“Aristotle considered three measures to be Solon’s most important steps toward democracy.
First was his seisachtheia (banning of debt slavery and cancellation of debts).
Second came popular access to the law courts. Establishing the right of all classes to appeal to jury courts for redress solved the problem of aristocratic judges acting arbitrarily.
The third reform was to expand membership in the Areopagus Council, which set the agenda for discussion by the popular assembly (Ekklesia). The old board of exegetai was drawn from the ranks of the Eupatridai ‘well-born’.
Solon left the Council’s authority in the hands of the largest landholders, but it seems to have played a diminishing role until finally being phased out by the 5th-century reforms of Ephialtes.”
Michael Hudson The Collapse of Antiquity Islet page(s): 86-92