Solon, the famous lawgiver of ancient Athens, was born probably about 640 or 638 B.C., and died about 558 or 559. His father, Execstides, who traced his descent from the royal family of Attica, had squandered an ample fortune. His son became a trader, an occupation which at once brought him wealth and opened up rich stores of observation and experience to his inquiring mind. Doubtless to the wide extent of his travels must be ascribed that unprejudiced political genius by which he was to create a constitution such as had never existed in the world before. He was known also as a writer of graceful and amatory verses, but later his muse soared to a higher strain and sang the triumphs of his legislation and the blessing of the gods on his reforms. One of the finest of his elegies owes its preservation to its being quoted by Demosthenes in his De Falsa Legatione (sects. 286-289), 'to show (as he says) how Solon hated fellows like Æschines;' several quotations—one of twenty lines otherwise unknown—occur in Aristotle's Constitution of Athens (first edited from a papyrus acquired by the British Museum, by F. G. Kenyon, 1891). The Megarian war (610-600) saw the occasion of Solon's first political achievements. The sarcasms of his stirring Tyrræan verse induced the desponding Athenians to continue the struggle, and Solon was placed at the head of an expedition to Salamis. Suddenly landing there, he drove out the Megarian garrison, and won the 'lovely island' for Athens; finally the dispute was settled by the arbitration of Sparta in favour of Athens. No story of antiquity is better known than that which tells how Solon attempted to influence the award by the insertion of a line in the Iliad (ii. 558), which speaks of the Salaminian Ajax ranging his ships with the Athenians. Solon's influence, already wide, was increased by the strong position he took up a little later in behalf of the Delphic oracle against its oppressors. But the unholy murder of Cylon still rested as a stain upon Athens; Nisea and Salamis were again lost; and superstitious fears took hold of the people.
But the distress of Attica was not so much religious as economic. The particular grievance which brought matters to a head was the law of debt. The want of a middle class made the contrast between the opulence of the nobility and the indigence of the poor more glaring. A desperate conflict was imminent, when in 594 both parties concurred in inviting the poet and devoted patriot, Solon, to assume the archonship and pacify his distracted country. 'It is not the will of the gods that our city should perish,' sang the poet in noble numbers; 'it is the desire of gain which will bring us to ruin; the thoughts of our leaders are not honest, and their greed will bring great evils upon them. Many of the poor go into foreign lands, sold as slaves, and burdened with shameful bonds.' His first measure was the famous Seisachtheia, and the remedy was severe. A limit was placed on vast accumulation of lands, the person of the debtor was safe whatever his obligations, all debts public and private were cancelled. The reform of the money-standard was made, with the view not so much of assisting debtors by reducing their debts (73 of the old drachmas were coined into 100 of the new) as of simplifying trade with Asia Minor and opening up new fields for Athenian enterprise. Then the poet sang the end of his labours: 'Many citizens who had been sold into slavery I brought back to Athens their home; some of them spoke Attic no longer, their speech being changed in their many wanderings. Others who had learned the habits of slaves at home, and trembled before a master, I made to be free men. All this I accomplished by authority, uniting force with justice, and I fulfilled my promise.' On laying down office at the end of the year he was requested to reform the entire political constitution of Athens. Solon's object was to destroy the power of the Gentes, and give the poorest class some control over the officers and the law. On the division of the people into four classes, rated according to income, a division which our latest authority, the Constitution of Athens, assigns to Draco, his reforms were based. The first class (Pentacosiomedimni) were such as possessed an annual income of not less than 500 medimni of corn, the second class (Hippis) were rated at 300, the third (Zeugitai) at 200, the fourth (Thetes) consisted of all below the Zeugitai.
On each of the four certain duties were imposed. The three highest provided the land army of Attica, while the Thetes, as rowers in the triremes, formed the most important part of the navy, one day to prove the salvation of Greece and the mainstay of the Athenian empire. The chief offices of state were restricted to the Pentacosiomedimni; the second and third classes were eligible for minor functions. If the Thetes were not admitted to office, their inclusion in the Attic tribes or phylæ, their new right of sitting in the Assembly, electing the public magistrates and passing sentence on their conduct at the end of their year of office, made them practically the sovereign power in the state; and Aristotle traces the swift development of Athenian democracy to the judicial powers received from Solon. The Boulē of 400, another of the great lawgiver's creations, was formed by the election of 100 members from each tribe, and took the place of Draco's council of 401, of which we first learn also in the newly-discovered Aristotelian papyrus. The democratic nature of Solon's Council is proved by its subsequent history. The Areopagus continued as before to be the guardian of the laws and the public morals; it decided also on all grave criminal cases. If he did not originate it, Solon saw the wisdom of preserving and strengthening a body which, by its nature, comprised the best representatives of the highest class of citizens. 'It was,' says Æschylus, 'the bulwark of the land and city, the like of which no man had seen either in Scythia or in the island of Pelops; a council incorrupt, awful, and severe; a watchful guardian over those who slept.' The last of his political reforms was the institution of the Heliea or popular court of law, the members of which were men of more than thirty years of age chosen annually by lot from every class. The object of its creation was to serve as a balance to the Areopagus, whose judicial supremacy might go too far in the interests of the aristocracy who composed it.
But Solon's work was not yet done. The laws of Draco were not suited to a more civilised age; not only was the severity of punishment for infringement out of all proportion to the offence, but Draco's conception of law appeared inadequate to the comprehensive views of Solon, to whom the function of law was contained not less in directing the citizen's most intimate relations and arrangements than in the guidance of his political and public conduct. Solon's regulations ranged over every province of life. All Draco's laws were repealed except those relating to murder. A limit was placed on the quantity of land that might be held in Attica; no citizen could be enslaved for debt, and absolute freedom in bequeathing property was ensured to any citizen who died childless. Arbitrary power of fathers over their children was restrained and arbitrary disinheritance forbidden. Any citizen who maintained neutrality in a sedition lost his civic status. The Areopagus was empowered to deal severely with luxury in food and dress. No woman might leave home with more than three changes of clothing, or with a basket of more than a cubit's length, and excessive wailing at funerals was forbidden. The laws, inscribed on wood, were placed in the Acropolis, whence they were removed to Salamis during the Persian wars.
The later years of Solon belong more to legend than to history. We are told that he left Athens for ten years, after binding the Athenians by oath to observe his laws till his return. His travels took him far afield. Cyprus, Asia Minor, and Egypt, probably the scenes of his early career, were revisited. Historical investigation may deny the possibility of a dialogue between Solon and Cæsus, but cannot spoil the charm of a story which Herodotus has rendered immortal. The king, then at the height of his prosperity, was said to have asked him who was the happiest man in the world, expecting to hear himself named. Solon first mentioned Telos, an Athenian who had died for his country at Eleusis. Nor could Cæsus obtain the second mention in the ranks of the happy; that place was assigned to two Argive youths, Cleobis and Biton, to whom the gods had given to die in their sleep as the reward of an act of filial piety. The wrath of Cæsus at the moment was unrestrained, but bitter experience taught him to appreciate the wisdom of Solon, and 'to account a prosperous man happy only when he ended his life as he began it.' Solon's meetings with Anacharsis and with Thales, one of the seven wise men like himself, were among the moral apologues of the ancients. The last years of Solon were passed at Athens, where the wild conflict of parties disturbed the application of the new constitution. He saw the failure of his plans with the deepest distress. His suspicion of his kinsman Pisistratus was justified by the issue. Again he entrusted his warnings to elegiac verse: 'Fools, ye are treading in the footsteps of the fox; can ye not read the hidden meaning of these winning words?' The protest was in vain; Pisistratus seized the government. The opposition of Solon continued; undeterred he laid down his arms before his door, and called heaven to witness that he had stood by his country. Retiring into private life he died soon after the usurpation of Pisistratus, with the last injunction that his ashes should be scattered over the island of Salamis, the 'lovely island' which had been the scene of his earliest exploit.
Solon died the subject of a despotic monarch. His labour might seem wasted, but its eclipse lasted only for a season, and even during the years of the tyranny of Pisistratus its influence was strong. Morally and politically a power among his countrymen, Solon saw that to imprison men in a relentless political machine like
Lycurgus, or to humble a refined aristocracy beneath a paid proletariat like Pericles, were policies equally dangerous. His constitution was a graceful compromise between democracy and oligarchy. In poetry he represents a high Ionian type; as a traveller and a soldier his experience of men was large. In the higher realms of constructive statesmanship he rivals the greatest legislators not only of Greece but of the world.
See the Greek histories of Thirlwall, Grote, Curtius, Cox, and Evelyn Abbott; for the poems, Bergk, Lyrici Græci (4th ed. 1878); also editions of the Constitution of Athens, by Kenyon (1891), Kaibel and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Berl. 1891), and Sandys (1893); and Eng. trans. by F. G. Kenyon (1891), Thomas J. Dymes (1891), and E. Poste (1891).