Solon

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. I. Perrin, Bernadotte, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.

Furthermore, some say that Solon got an oracle at Pytho which ran as follows:—

  1. Take thy seat amidships, the pilot’s task is thine;
  2. Perform it, many in Athens are thine allies.
And above all, his familial friends chid him for being averse to absolute power because of the name of tyranny, as if the virtues of him who seized it would not at once make it a lawful sovereignty. Euboea (they argued) had formerly found this true of Tynnondas, and so had the Mitylenaeans, now that they had chosen Pittacus to be their tyrant.

None of these things shook Solon from his resolution. To his friends he said, as we are told, that a tyranny was a lovely place, but there was no way down from it. And in his poems he writes to Phocus:—

  1. And if, he says, I spared my land,
  2. My native land, and unto tyranny and violence implacable
  3. Did not set hand, polluting and disgracing my fair fame,
  4. I’m not ashamed; in this way rather shall my name be set above
  5. That of all other men.
[*](Solon, Frag. 32 (Bergk).) From this it is clear that even before his legislation he was in high repute.

And as for the ridicule which many heaped upon him for refusing the tyranny, he has written as follows;—

  1. Solon was a shallow thinker and a man of counsel void;
  2. When the gods would give him blessings, of his own will he refused.
  3. When his net was full of fish, amazed, he would not pull it in,
  4. All for lack of spirit, and because he was bereft of sense.
  5. I had certainly been willing, for the power, and boundless wealth,
  6. And to be tyrant over Athens no more than a single day,
  7. Then to have a pouch flayed from me, and my lineage blotted out.[*](Fragment 33 (Bergk).)
[*](Solon, Frag. 33 (Bergk).)

Thus he represents the multitude and men of low degree as speaking of him. However, though he rejected the tyranny, he did not administer affairs in the mildest possible manner, nor in the enactment of his laws did he show a feeble spirit, nor make concessions to the powerful, nor consult the pleasure of his electors. Nay, where a condition was as good as it could well be, he applied no remedy, and introduced no innovation, fearing lest, after utterly confusing and confounding the city, he should be too weak to establish it again and recompose it for the best.

But those things wherein he hoped to find them open to persuasion or submissive to compulsion, these he did,

  1. Combining both force and justice together,
[*](Solon, Frag. 36. 14 (Bergk)) as he says himself. Therefore when he was afterwards asked if he had enacted the best laws for the Athenians, he replied, The best they would receive.

Now later writers observe that the ancient Athenians used to cover up the ugliness of things with auspicious and kindly terms, giving them polite and endearing names.

Thus they called harlots companions, taxes contributions, the garrison of a city its guard, and the prison a chamber. But Solon was the first, it would seem, to use this device, when he called his cancelling of debts a disburdenment. For the first of his public measures was an enactment that existing debts should be remitted, and that in future no one should lend money on the person of a borrower.