Solon

Since the country was not supplied with water by ever-flowing rivers, or lakes, or copious springs, but most of the inhabitants used wells which had been dug, he made a law that where there was a public well within a hippikon, a distance of four furlongs, that should be used, but where the distance was greater than this, people must try to get water of their own; if, however, after digging to a depth of ten fathoms on their own land, they could not get water, then they might take it from a neighbor’s well, filling a five gallon jar twice a day; for he thought it his duty to aid the needy, not to provision the idle.

He also showed great experience in the limits which he set to the planting of trees; no one could set out a tree in a field within five feet of his neighbor’s field, or, in case it was a fig-tree or an olive-tree, within nine. For these reach out farther with their roots, and injure some trees by their proximity, taking away their nourishment, and emitting an exhalation which is sometimes noxious. He that would dig a pit or a trench, must dig it at the distance of its own depth from his neighbor’s; and he that would set out hives of bees, must put them three hundred feet away from those which another had already installed.

Of the products of the soil, he allowed oil only to be sold abroad, but forbade the exportation of others; and if any did so export, the archon was to pronounce curses upon them, or else himself pay a hundred drachmas into the public treasury. His first table is the one which contains this law. One cannot, therefore, wholly disbelieve those who say that the exportation of figs also was anciently forbidden, and that the one who showed up, or pointed out such exporters, was called a sycophant, or fig-shower. He also enacted a law concerning injuries received from beasts, according to which a dog that had bitten anybody must be delivered up with a wooden collar three cubits long fastened to it; a happy device this for promoting safety.

But the law concerning naturalized citizens is of doubtful character. He permitted only those to be made citizens who were permanently exiled from their own country, or who removed to Athens with their entire families to ply a trade. This he did, as we are told, not so much to drive away other foreigners, as to invite these particular ones to Athens with the full assurance of becoming citizens; he also thought that reliance could be placed both on those who had been forced to abandon their own country, and on those who had left it with a fixed purpose.

Characteristic of Solon also was his regulation of the practice of eating at the public table in the townhall, for which his word was parasitein. [*](Hence, with scornful meaning, the word parasite.) The same person was not allowed to eat there often, but if one whose duty it was to eat there refused, he was punished. Solon thought the conduct of the first grasping; that of the second, contemptuous of the public interests.

All his laws were to have force for a hundred years, and they were written on axones, or wooden tablets, which revolved with the oblong frames containing them. Slight remnants of these were still preserved in the Prytaneium when I was at Athens, and they were called, according to Aristotle,[*](Cf. Aristot. Const. Ath. 7.1, with Sandys’ notes.) kurbeis. Cratinus, also, the comic poet, somewhere says:—

1. By Solon, and by Draco too I make mine oath,
2. Whose kurbeis now are used to parch our barley-corns.

But some say that only those tablets which relate to sacred rites and sacrifices are properly called kurbeis, and the rest are called axones. However that may be, the council took a joint oath to ratify the laws of Solon, and each of the thesmothetai, or guardians of the statutes, swore separately at the herald’s stone in the market-place, vowing that if he transgressed the statutes in any way, he would dedicate at Delphi a golden statue of commensurate worth.