Solon

Solon was born in Athens around 638 BCE, into a family that claimed descent from Codrus, a legendary king of the city ^[1]. The family was aristocratic by lineage but, according to the ancient biographical tradition, only moderately wealthy by the time of his birth. Plutarch, whose life of Solon is the fullest ancient account, reports that his father Execestides had reduced the household estate through generosity, and that the young Solon turned to trade to restore his fortunes ^[2].

Travel for commerce was not unusual for Greeks of his class in the seventh century BCE, and the tradition that Solon sailed widely as a merchant fits what we know of the period. Whatever the details, the experience mattered: later Athenians remembered him as a man who understood money, credit, and the pressures that debt placed on ordinary farmers ^[1]. His middling economic position also shaped his politics. He belonged to the old nobility by blood yet was not one of the great landowners, which allowed both sides in the coming crisis to see him as someone who might treat them fairly ^[3].

Almost nothing reliable is recorded of his education, but his poetry shows a man steeped in the epic and elegiac traditions of early Greece. He wrote in the elegiac and iambic meters common to his era, and he used verse throughout his life as a political instrument, since formal prose oratory did not yet exist as a medium ^[4].

Solon first came to public attention through the long Athenian struggle with the neighboring city of Megara over the island of Salamis. Athens had suffered repeated setbacks, and, according to a famous story told by Plutarch, the assembly had even passed a law forbidding anyone to propose renewing the war. Solon is said to have feigned madness and recited a poem, his Salamis elegy, urging the citizens to fight for the island; the campaign that followed brought Salamis under Athenian control ^[2]. Fragments of the poem survive, including its opening line in which the speaker presents himself as a herald from lovely Salamis ^[4].

The episode, embellished or not, reflects a real reputation. By the 590s BCE Solon was known as a persuasive public voice at a time when Athens faced a far larger internal problem than Megara. The Athenian countryside was in crisis. Many poor farmers, called hektemoroi or sixth-parters, worked land under obligations to the wealthy and could be seized, along with their families, and sold into slavery when they defaulted ^[3]. The Athenaion Politeia, the constitutional history attributed to Aristotle's school, describes the whole land as being in the hands of the few, and the many enslaved to them ^[5].

An earlier attempt at legal order had made matters worse rather than better. Around 621 BCE the lawgiver Draco had produced Athens' first written code, remembered for penalties so severe that later Greeks said his laws were written in blood rather than ink ^[1]. With the poor on the edge of revolt and the rich unwilling to yield, both factions agreed on an unusual remedy: they chose Solon as archon, traditionally dated to 594 BCE, and gave him authority to act as mediator and lawgiver ^[5]. Some modern scholars place his legislation a decade or two later, in the 570s BCE, but the ancient tradition is firm on the archonship itself ^[3].

Solon's first and most dramatic measure was economic. He enacted what the Athenians called the seisachtheia, the shaking off of burdens. Debts secured on the person or the land were cancelled, the boundary markers that recorded encumbrances were pulled up from the fields, and enslavement for debt was abolished for the future ^[5]. He also arranged for Athenians who had been sold abroad into slavery to be bought back, a policy he describes in his own verses, where he speaks of restoring to Athens men who had forgotten how to speak Attic Greek after long years away ^[4]. He pointedly refused, however, to redistribute the land itself, disappointing radicals who had hoped for a general reallotment ^[2].

His constitutional reforms reached just as deep. Solon divided the citizen body into four property classes based on annual agricultural produce: the pentakosiomedimnoi (five-hundred-bushel men), the hippeis (horsemen), the zeugitai (yoke-men), and the thetes (laborers) ^[5]. Eligibility for office now depended on wealth rather than noble birth, a change that broke the aristocracy's formal monopoly on power. Even the lowest class, the thetes, gained the right to attend the assembly and to sit on the popular law courts. Ancient writers, including the author of the Athenaion Politeia, judged the right of appeal to these courts among the most democratic of his measures, since it made even magistrates answerable to ordinary jurors ^[5].

He replaced most of Draco's code, retaining only the homicide laws, and published his own statutes on wooden frames called axones so that any citizen could consult them ^[1]. The laws covered a striking range of subjects: inheritance and wills, the conduct of women at funerals, the planting of trees near boundary lines, rewards for victors at the Olympic and Isthmian games, and an obligation on fathers to teach their sons a trade ^[2]. One famous provision penalized citizens who stayed neutral during civil strife, on the reasoning that public conflict was every Athenian's business ^[2]. Later Athenians of the classical period habitually attributed almost any venerable law to Solon, which makes it hard to fix the exact boundaries of his code, but the core of the tradition is not in doubt ^[3].

Solon is the earliest Athenian author whose words survive, and his roughly 280 extant lines of verse are a rare case of a lawgiver explaining himself in his own voice ^[4]. Because his poems were quoted by later writers such as Aristotle, Plutarch, and Demosthenes, they reached us in fragments, yet they remain a primary source for the crisis he confronted. In one poem he describes the black earth itself as his witness that he freed it by removing the mortgage stones; in another he compares himself to a wolf at bay among hounds, holding off attacks from both rich and poor ^[4].

The verses reveal a distinctive political temperament. Solon insists that he gave the common people as much privilege as was sufficient, neither adding nor taking away, and that he shielded the powerful from disgrace while refusing to let either side win outright ^[5]. His long elegy on justice argues that lawlessness ruins a city while good order, eunomia, makes all things sound. Scholars treat these poems as the first surviving articulation of a political ethic in Athenian literature, composed a century and a half before the historians and dramatists of the classical age ^[3].

He also wrote on less solemn themes: aging, wealth, the pleasures of love and wine, and the stages of a man's life, which one fragment divides into ten periods of seven years ^[4]. The blend of moral seriousness and worldly observation helps explain why the Greeks placed him among the Seven Sages, the semi-legendary wise men of the archaic age, alongside figures such as Thales of Miletus ^[1].

After completing his legislation, Solon made the Athenians swear to keep his laws unchanged for a period the sources give variously as ten or a hundred years, and then left the city, reportedly so that he could not be pressured into amending them ^[2]. Tradition sends him on a decade of travel to Egypt, where he was said to have conversed with priests at Sais, and to Cyprus, where the local ruler renamed a town Soloi in his honor ^[2]. Plato later claimed, in the Timaeus and Critias, that the Egyptian priests told Solon the story of Atlantis, a literary invention that attached the lawgiver's name to one of antiquity's most durable legends ^[6].

The most famous tale of his travels is his meeting with Croesus, the fabulously rich king of Lydia, told at length by Herodotus. Asked to name the happiest of men, Solon passed over his host and named obscure Greeks who had died well, warning the king to count no man happy until his end is known ^[7]. Chronology makes the meeting doubtful, since Croesus came to the throne around 560 BCE, near the end of Solon's life, but the story became the classic Greek parable on fortune and its reversals ^[3].

Solon returned to an Athens sliding back into factional conflict among regional parties of the plain, the coast, and the hills. In 561 or 560 BCE his younger kinsman Peisistratus seized the Acropolis with an armed bodyguard and made himself tyrant. Ancient writers record that the aged Solon spoke and wrote against the coup, telling the Athenians that their own cowardice had fed the tyrant's growth, but he was too old to do more ^[2]. He died not long afterward, around 558 BCE; one tradition places his death on Cyprus, and a story that his ashes were scattered on Salamis was already doubted in antiquity ^[1].

Solon's reforms did not stop tyranny in his own generation, yet they outlasted it. Peisistratus and his sons largely governed through the Solonian framework, and when Cleisthenes reorganized the state in 508 and 507 BCE, he built on foundations Solon had laid: a citizen body defined by law, courts open to the poor, and offices tied to wealth classes rather than birth ^[5]. For that reason historians commonly describe Solon as a founder, though not the founder, of Athenian democracy, a mediator whose compromise made later popular government thinkable ^[3]. Fourth-century Athenians went further, invoking his name as shorthand for the ancestral constitution itself.

His afterlife extended far beyond Greece. Roman writers paired him with Lycurgus of Sparta as the model lawgiver, and Plutarch's biography fixed that image for later Europe. In the United States, his reputation as a wise legislator was familiar enough that the word solon became a journalistic synonym for a lawmaker, and his figure appears among history's great lawgivers in a marble relief in the chamber of the House of Representatives ^[8]. Any Solon biography must reckon with this long shadow: readers asking who was Solon are usually asking about the origins of constitutional government itself.

Modern scholarship reads him with more caution, sifting genuine sixth-century BCE material from laws later attributed to him and treating his poems as the only strictly contemporary evidence ^[4]. Yet the caution has not diminished the achievement. Among the basic Solon facts on which historians agree, the abolition of debt slavery for citizens may be the most consequential: it defined the Athenian citizen as a person who could not be owned, a principle with a very long future ^[3].