The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C.. John Bagnell Bury
to come, was postponed for more than thirty years. The mediator in the civil strife was Solon, the son of Execestides, a noble connected with the house of the Medontids. He was a merchant, and belonged to the wealthiest class in the state. But he was very different from the Attic Eupatrids, rustic squires, of old fashions and narrow vision. We may guess that he had not been a home-keeping youth, but had visited the eastern coasts of the Aegean, whither mercantile concerns might have taken him. At all events, he had learned much from progressive Ionia. He had imbued himself with Ionic literature, and had mastered the art of writing verse in the Ionic idiom; so that he could himself take part in the intellectual movement of the day and become one of the sages of Greece. He was a poet, not because he was poetically inspired, like the Parian Archilochus of an earlier, or the Lesbian Sappho of his own, generation; but because at that time every man of letters was a poet; there was no prose literature. A hundred years later Solon would have used prose as the vehicle of his thoughts. His moderate temper made him generally popular; his knowledge gave him authority; and his countrymen called upon him, at last, to set their house in order. We are fortunate enough to possess portions of poems—political pamphlets—which he published for the purpose of guiding public opinion; and thus we have his view of the situation in his own words. He did not scruple to speak plainly. The social abuses and the sad state of the masses were clear to everybody, but Solon saw another side of the question; and he had no sympathy with the extreme revolutionary agitators who demanded a redistribution of lands. The more moderate of the nobles seem to have seen the danger and the urgent need of a new order of things; and thus it came to pass that Solon was solicited to undertake the work of reform. He definitely undertook the task and was elected archon, with extraordinary legislative powers, for the purpose of healing the evils of the state, and conciliating the classes.
Instead of making the usual declaration of the chief magistrate, that he would protect the property of all men undiminished, he made proclamation that all mortgages and debts by which the debtor’s person was pledged were annulled, and that all those who had become slaves for debt were free. By this proclamation in that summer, memorable for the rescue of hundreds of poor wretches into liberty and hope, the Athenians “shook off their burdens”, and this first act of Solon’s social reform was called the Seisachtheia. The great deliverance was celebrated by a public feast.
The character of the remedial measures of Solon is imperfectly known. After the cancelling of old debts he passed a law which forbade debtors to be enslaved. He fixed a limit for the measure of land which could be owned by a single person, so as to prevent the growth of dangerously large estates. And he forbade the exportations of Attic products, except oil. For it had been found that so much corn was carried to foreign markets, where the prices were higher, that an insufficient supply remained for the population of Attica. It is to be observed that at this time the Athenians had not yet begun to import Pontic corn.
All these measures hit the rich hard, and created discontent with the reformer; while, on the other hand, he was far from satisfying the desires and hopes of the masses. He would not confiscate and redistribute the estates of the wealthy, as many wished. And, though he rescued the free labourer from bondage, he made no change in the Sixth-part system, so that the condition of these landless freemen was improved only in so far as they could not be enslaved, and in so far as the law limiting exportation affected prices. And Solon was too discreet to attempt to interfere seriously with the conditions of the money market by artificial restrictions. He fixed no maximum rate of interest, and his monetary reforms must be kept strictly apart from his social reforms. He replaced the Aeginetan scale of weights and measures by a scale which was very close to the Euboeic, and he made a corresponding change in the coinage. The weight of the mina was increased in such a way that 70 of the new drachmae were equivalent in value to 100 Aeginetan drachmae. This change is to be brought into connexion, not with the domestic reform, but with the foreign policy of Athens, to which new prospects were opening. The old coinage attached her to Aegina, with which her relations were strained, and to her foe Megara; the new system seemed to invite her into the distant fields beyond the sea, where Chalcis and Corinth had led the way in opening up a new world. For the scale of the Corinthian money was the same as the Euboeic.
What Solon did to heal the social sores of his country entitled him to the most fervent gratitude, but it was no more than might have been done by any able and honest statesman who possessed men’s confidence. His title to fame as one of the great statesmen of Europe rests upon his reform of the constitution. He discovered a secret of democracy, and he used his discovery to build up the constitution on democratic foundations. The Athenian commonwealth did not actually become a democracy till many years later; but Solon not only laid the foundations, he shaped the framework. At first sight, indeed, the state as he reformed it might seem little more than an aristocracy of wealth—a timocracy—with certain democratic tendencies. He retained the old graduation of the people in classes according to property. But he added the Thêtes as a fourth class, and gave it certain political rights. On the three higher classes devolved the public burdens, and they served as cavalry or as hoplites. The Thetes were employed as light-armed troops or as marines. It is probable that Solon made little or no change in regard to the offices which were open to each class. Pentacosiomedimni were alone eligible to the archonship, and for them alone was reserved the financial office of Treasurer of Athena. Other offices were open to the Hippos and the Zeugitae, but the distinction in privilege between them is unknown. The Thetes were not eligible to any of the offices of state, but they were admitted to take part jn the meetings of the Ecclesia, and this gave them a voice in the election of the magistrates.
The opening of the Assembly to the lowest class was indeed an important step in the democratic direction; but it may have been only the end of a gradual process of widening, which had been going on under the aristocracy. The radical measure of Solon, which was the very corner-stone of the Athenian democracy, was his constitution of the courts of justice. He composed the law-courts out of all the citizens, including the Thetes; and as the panels of judges were enrolled by lot, the poorest burgher might have his turn. Any magistrate on laying down his office could be accused before the people in these courts; and thus the institution of the popular courts invested the people with a supreme control over the administration. The people, sitting in sections as sworn judges, were called the Heliaea,—as distinguished from the Ecclesia, in which they gathered to pass laws or choose magistrates, but were required to take no oath. Having in its hands both the appointment of the magistrates and the control of their conduct, the people possessed theoretically the sovereignty of the state; and the meting out of more privileges to the less wealthy classes could be merely a matter of time. At first the archons were not deprived of their judicial powers, and the heliaea acted as a court of appeal; but by degrees the competence of the archons was reduced to the conduct of the proceedings preliminary to a trial, and the heliaea became both the first and the final court.
The constitution of the judicial courts out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which Solon discovered. It is his title to fame in the history of the growth of popular government in Europe. Without ignoring the tendencies to a democratic development which existed before him, and without, on the other hand, disguising the privileges which he reserved to the upper classes, we can hardly hesitate to regard Solon as the founder of the Athenian democracy. It must indeed be confessed that there is much in the scope and intention of his constitution which it is difficult to appreciate, because we know so little of the older constitution which he reformed. Thus we have no definite record touching the composition of the Council of the Areopagus, touching its functions as a deliberate body and its relations to the Assembly, or touching the composition of the Assembly itself. We can, however, have little doubt that under the older commonwealth the Council of Elders exerted a preponderant influence over the Assembly, and that the business submitted to the Assembly, whether by the magistrates or in whatever way introduced, was previously discussed and settled by the Council. The founder of popular government could not leave this hinge of the aristocratic republic as it was. He must either totally change the character of the Council and transform it into a popular body, or he must deprive it of its deliberative functions in regard to the Assembly. Solon deprived the Council of Elders of these deliberative functions, so that it could no longer take any direct part in administration and legislation. But on the other hand he assigned to it a new and lofty rôle. He constituted it the protector of the constitution, and the guardian of the laws, giving it wide and