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SOLON was born at Athens of an ancient and noble family. When young he travelled as a merchant through many parts of Greece and Asia Minor. He early became known as a keen and deep observer of character and conduct, and as a man capable of wise counsel. With Thales, Bias, and others, he was classed among the Seven Wise Men of his time. His thoughts were expressed in poems: the fragments which survive show him rather as a practical moralist than as a speculative thinker. In any case, it is on his civic work that his fame principally rests.
In the struggle of Athens against Megara for the possession of Salamis, he took a leading part. Still more important was his intervention in the fierce quarrels then raging between rich and poor. Large numbers of citizens were working as slaves, and had even been sold to neighboring states for debts that they could not otherwise discharge. Civil war was imminent. In 594 B.C. Solon was chosen one of the archons for the year, and was invited to propose a settlement of these difficulties. His friends urged him to become the dictator or despot of the city. But this he steadily refused. With complete freedom from personal ambition, he set himself to the difficult work of making a practical settlement. He annihilated all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his person or his children. He abolished many of the land mortgages; he brought back from distant cities many of the debtors who had been sold as slaves. He restored many poor people to the privilege of citizenship which they had forfeited.
All this involved confiscation. The money for the redemption of slaves was obtained by debasing the coinage so that four parts of silver were used when five had been used before. But it was seen that Solon had gained nothing himself--indeed, that he had become a poorer man. Perfect trust was felt in his devotion to the public good, and the best proof of his wisdom is that the wiping out of debt, once done, never needed repetition, and that the law between debtor and creditor remained less barbarous in Athens than in other States of antiquity.
Solon made other changes in the constitution which prepared the way for the gradual admission of freemen into a share of government and of judicature. He was, however, no democrat; much power was still reserved by his laws to property and rank. "I stood," he says in one of his poems, "with the strong shield cast over both parties, so as not to allow an unjust triumph to either."
Many other of Solon's laws were wise and humane. He encouraged trade and industry. He made prudent regulations for the transmission of wealth by will. He punished slanderous insults either of the living or the dead. He relaxed the extreme severity of previous laws against theft and crimes of violence. One of his laws became specially famous; in times of political dissension he made it compulsory for each citizen to form and express his judgment.
He lived to the age of eighty. The last year of his life was distinguished by his patriotic resistance to the usurping tyranny of Pisistratus. His life presents one of the noblest types recorded in history of a thinker who never ceased to be a citizen.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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