Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
just, not to meddle with those that are gone, and politic, to prevent
the perpetuity of discord. He likewise forbade them to speak evil of
the living in the temples, the courts of justice, the public offices, or
at the games, or else to pay three drachmas to the person, and two to
the public. For never to be able to control passion shows a weak nature
and ill-breeding; and always to moderate it is very hard, and to some
impossible. And laws must look to possibilities, if the maker designs
to punish few in order to their amendment, and not many to no purpose.
He is likewise much commended for his law concerning wills; for before
him none could be made, but all the wealth and estate of the deceased
belonged to his family; but he, by permitting them, if they had no
children, to bestow it on whom they pleased, showed that he esteemed
friendship a stronger tie than kindred, and affection than necessity;
and made every man's estate truly his own. Yet he allowed not all sorts
of legacies, but those only which were not extorted by the frenzy of a
disease, charms, imprisonment, force, or the persuasions of a wife; with
good reason thinking that being seduced into wrong was as bad as being
forced, and that between deceit and necessity, flattery and compulsion,
there was little difference, since both may equally suspend
the exercise of reason.
He regulated the walks, feasts, and mourning of the women, and took away
everything that was either unbecoming or immodest; when they walked
abroad, no more than three articles of dress were allowed them; an
obol's worth of meat and drink; and no basket above a cubit high; and at
night they were not to go about unless in a chariot with a torch before
them. Mourners tearing themselves to raise pity, and set wailings, and
at one man's funeral to lament for another, he forbade. To offer an ox
at the grave was not permitted, nor to bury above three pieces of dress
with the body, or visit the tombs of any besides their own family,
unless at the very funeral; most of which are likewise forbidden by our
laws,@ but this is further added in ours, that those that are convicted
of extravagance in their mournings, are to be punished as soft and
effeminate by the censors of women.
Observing the city to be filled with persons that flocked from all parts
into Attica for security of living, and that most of the country was
barren and unfruitful, and that traders at sea import nothing to those
that could give them nothing in exchange, he turned his citizens to
trade, and made a law that no son should be obliged to relieve a father
who had not bred him up to any calling. It is true, Lycurgus, having a
city free from all strangers, and land, according to Euripides,
Large for large hosts, for twice their number much,
and, above all, an abundance of laborers about Sparta, who should not be
left idle, but be kept down with continual toil and work, did well to
take off his citizens from laborious and mechanical occupations, and
keep them to their arms, and teach them only the art of war. But Solon,
fitting his laws to the state of things, and not making things to suit
his laws, and finding the ground scarce rich enough to maintain the
husbandmen, and altogether incapable of feeding an unoccupied and
leisurely multitude, brought trades into credit, and ordered the
Areopagites to examine how every man got his living, and chastise the
idle. But that law was yet more rigid which, as Heraclides Ponticus
delivers, declared the sons of unmarried mothers not obliged to relieve
their fathers; for he that avoids the honorable form of union shows that
he does not take a woman for children, but for pleasure, and thus gets
his just reward, and has taken away from himself every title to upbraid
his children, to whom he has made their very birth
a scandal and reproach.
Solon's laws in general about women are his strangest; for he permitted
any one to kill an adulterer that found him in the act; but if any one
forced a free woman, a hundred drachmas was the fine; if he enticed her,
twenty; except those that sell themselves openly, that is, harlots, who
go openly to those that hire them. He made it unlawful to sell a
daughter or a sister, unless, being yet unmarried, she was found wanton.
Now it is irrational to punish the same crime sometimes very severely
and without remorse, and sometimes very lightly, and, as it were, in
sport, with a trivial fine; unless, there being little money then in
Athens, scarcity made those mulcts the more grievous punishment. In the
valuation for sacrifices, a sheep and a bushel were both estimated at a
drachma; the victor in the Isthmian games was to have for reward a
hundred drachmas; the conqueror in the Olympian, five hundred; he that
brought a wolf, five drachmas; for a whelp, one; the former sum, as
Demetrius the Phalerian asserts, was the value of an ox, the latter, of
a sheep. The prices which Solon, in his sixteenth table, sets on choice
victims, were naturally far greater; yet they, too, are very low in
comparison of the present. The Athenians were, from the beginning, great
enemies to wolves, their fields being better for pasture than corn.
Some affirm their tribes did not take their names from the sons of Ion,
but from the different sorts of occupation that they followed; the
soldiers were called Hoplitae, the craftsmen Ergades, and, of the
remaining two, the farmers Gedeontes,
and the shepherds and graziers Aegicores.
Since the country has but few rivers, lakes, or large springs, and many
used wells which they had dug, there was a law made, that, where there
was a public well within a hippicon, that is, four furlongs, all should
draw at that; but, when it was farther off, they should try and procure
a well of their own; and, if they had dug ten fathom deep and could find
no water, they had liberty to fetch a pitcherful of four gallons and a
half in a day from their neighbors'; for he thought it prudent to make
provision against want, but not to supply laziness. He showed skill in
his orders about planting, for any one that would plant another tree was
not to set it within five feet of his neighbor's field; but if a fig or
an olive, not within nine; for their roots spread farther, nor can they
be planted near all sorts of trees without damage, for they draw away
the nourishment, and in some cases are noxious by their effluvia. He
that would dig a pit or a ditch was to dig it at the distance of its own
depth from his neighbor's ground; and he that would raise stocks of bees
was not to place them within three hundred feet of those which another
had already raised.
He permitted only oil to be exported, and those that exported any other
fruit, the archon was solemnly to curse, or else pay an hundred drachmas
himself; and this law was written in his first table, and, therefore,
let none think it incredible, as some affirm, that the exportation of
figs was once unlawful, and the informer against the delinquents called
a sycophant. He made a law, also, concerning hurts and injuries from
beasts, in which he commands the master of any dog that bit a man to
deliver him up with a log about his neck, four and a half feet long; a
happy device for men's security. The law concerning naturalizing
strangers is of doubtful character; he permitted only those to be made
free of Athens who were in perpetual exile from their own country, or
came with their whole family to trade there; this he did, not to
discourage strangers, but rather to invite them to a permanent
participation in the privileges of the government; and, besides, he
thought those would prove the more faithful citizens who had been forced
from their own country, or voluntarily forsook it. The law of public
entertainment (parasitein is his name for it) is, also, peculiarly
Solon's, for if any man came often, or if he that was invited refused,
they were punished, for he concluded that one was greedy, the other a
contemner of the state.
All his laws he established for an hundred years, and wrote them on
wooden tables or rollers, named axones, which might be turned round in
oblong cases; some of their relics were in my time still to be seen in
the Prytaneum, or common hall, at Athens. These, as Aristotle states,
were called cyrbes, and there is a passage of Cratinus the comedian,
By Solon, and by Draco, if you please,
Whose Cyrbes make the fires that parch our peas.
But some say those are properly cyrbes, which contain laws concerning
sacrifices and the rites of religion, and all the others axones. The
council all jointly swore to confirm the laws, and every one of the
Thesmothetae vowed for himself at the stone in the marketplace, that, if
he broke any of the statutes, he would dedicate a golden statue, as big
as himself, at Delphi.
Observing the irregularity of the months, and that the moon does not
always rise and set with the sun, but often in the same day overtakes
and gets before him, he ordered the day should be named the Old and
New, attributing that part of it which was before the conjunction to
the old moon, and the rest to the new, he being the first, it seems,
that understood that verse of Homer,
The end and the beginning of the month,
and the following day he called the new moon. After the twentieth he
did not count by addition, but, like the moon itself in its wane, by
subtraction; thus up to the thirtieth.
Now when these laws were enacted, and some came to Solon every day, to
commend or dispraise them, and to advise, if possible, to leave out, or
put in something, and many criticized, and desired him to explain, and
tell the meaning of such and such a passage, he, knowing that to do it
was useless, and not to do it would get him ill-will, and desirous to
bring himself out of all straits, and to escape all displeasure and
exceptions, it being a hard thing, as he himself says,
In great affairs to satisfy all sides,
as an excuse for traveling, bought a trading vessel, and, having
obtained leave for ten years' absence, departed, hoping that by that
time his laws would have become familiar.
His first voyage was for Egypt, and he lived, as he himself says,
Near Nilus' mouth, by fair Canopus' shore,
and spent some time in study with Psenophis of Heliopolis, and Sonchis
the Saite, the most learned of all the priests; from whom, as Plato
says, getting knowledge of the Atlantic story, he put it into a poem,
and proposed to bring it to the knowledge of the Greeks. From thence he
sailed to Cyprus, where he was made much of by Philocyprus, one of the
kings there, who had a small city built by Demophon, Theseus's son, near
the river Clarius, in a strong situation, but incommodious and uneasy of
access. Solon persuaded him, since there lay a fair plain below, to
remove, and build there a pleasanter and more spacious city. And he
stayed himself, and assisted in gathering inhabitants, and in fitting it
both for defense and convenience of living; insomuch that many flocked
to Philocyprus, and the other kings imitated the design; and, therefore,
to honor Solon, he called the city Soli, which was formerly named Aepea.
And Solon himself, in his Elegies, addressing Philocyprus, mentions this
foundation in these words--
Long may you live, and fill the Solian throne,
Succeeded still by children of your own;
And from your happy island while I sail,
Let Cyprus send for me a favoring gale;
May she advance, and bless your new command,
Prosper your town, and send me safe to land.
That Solon should discourse with Croesus, some think not agreeable with
chronology; but I cannot reject so famous and well-attested a narrative,
and, what is more, so agreeable to Solon's temper, and so worthy his
wisdom and greatness of mind, because, forsooth, it does not agree with