Solon

Under these circumstances they summoned to their aid from Crete Epimenides of Phaestus, who is reckoned as the seventh Wise Man by some of those who refuse Periander a place in the list.[*](See note on Plut. Sol. 3.5, and cf. Aristot. Const. Ath. 1.) He was reputed to be a man beloved of the gods, and endowed with a mystical and heaven-sent wisdom in religious matters. Therefore the men of his time said that he was the son of a nymph named Balte, and called him a new Cures.[*](The Curetes were Cretan priests of Idaean Zeus, who took their name from the demi-gods to whose care Rhea was said to have committed the infant Zeus.) On coming to Athens he made Solon his friend, assisted him in many ways, and paved the way for his legislation.

For he made the Athenians decorous and careful in their religious services, and milder in their rites of mourning, by attaching certain sacrifices immediately to their funeral ceremonies and by taking away the harsh and barbaric practices in which their women had usually indulged up to that time. Most important of all, by sundry rites of propitiation and purification, and by sacred foundations, he hallowed and consecrated the city, and brought it to be observant of justice and more easily inclined to unanimity. It is said that when he had seen Munychia[*](The acropolis of the Peiraeus, stategically commanding not only that peninsula, but also Athens itself.) garrisoned by conquerors of Athens and considered it for some time, he remarked to the bystanders that man was indeed blind to the future;

for if the Athenians only knew what mischiefs the place would bring upon their city, they would devour it with their own teeth. A similar insight into futurity is ascribed to Thales. They say that he gave directions for his burial in an obscure and neglected quarter of the city’s territory, predicting that it would one day be the market-place of Miletus. Well then, Epimenides was vastly admired by the Athenians, who offered him much money and large honors; but he asked for nothing more than a branch of the sacred olive-tree, with which he returned home.