From Plutarch's city, Chaeronea, one passes at the continuous risk of his life over a dozen mountains into Phocis, to reach, on the very slope of Parnassus, the sacred city of Delphi. A thousand feet below is the Crisaean plain, bright with the silver leaves of ten thousand olive trees; five hundred feet farther down is an inlet of the Corinthian Gulf; ships move with the stately, silent slowness of distance over waters deceptively motionless. Beyond are other ranges, clothed for a moment in royal purple by the setting sun. At a turn in the road is the Castalian Spring, framed in a gorge of perpendicular cliffs; from the heights, legend said (adding another fable to his own), the citizens of Delphi hurled the wandering Aesop; over them, says history, Philomelus the Phocian drove the defeated Locrians in the Second Sacred War. [Twice the Greeks waged Sacred `Vats over the perquisites of Apollo's temple: once in 595-B5, when the southern Greeks put an end to the exacting of greedy tolls by the people of neighboring Cirrha from pilgrims passing to Delphi through their port; and again m 356-46, when an allied Greek army under Philip of Macedon ousted the Phocians who had captured Delphi and appropriated the temple funds. The first war led to the neutralization of Delphi and the establishment of the Pythian games; the second led to the Macedonian conquest of Greece.] Above are the twin peaks of Parnassus, where the Muses dwelt when they tired of Helicon. Greeks who climbed a hundred tortuous miles to stand on this mountainside-poised on a ledge between mist-shrouded heights and a sunlit sea, and surrounded on every side with beauty or terror-could hardly doubt that beneath these rocks lived some awful god. Time and again earthquake had rumbled here, frightening away the plundering Persians, and a century later the plundering Phocians, and a century later the plundering Gauls; it was the god protecting his shrine. As far back as Greek tradition could reach, worshipers had gathered here to find in the winds among the gorges, or the gases escaping from the earth, the voice and will of deity. The great stone that nearly closed the cleft from which the gases came was, to the Greeks, the center of Greece, and therefore the omphalos, as they called it, the umbilicus or very navel of the world.

Over that navel they built their altars, in older days to Ge, Mother Earth, later to her bright conqueror Apollo. Once a terrible serpent had guarded the gorge, holding it against men; Phoebus had slain him with an arrow, and, as the Pythian Apollo, had become the idol of the shrine. There, when an earlier temple was destroyed by fire (548), the rich Alcmaeonids, aristocrats exiled from Athens, rebuilt it with funds subscribed by all Greece and augmented by their own; they gave it a façade of marble, surrounded it with a Doric peristyle, and supported it with Ionic colonnades within; seldom had Greece seen so magnificent a shrine. A Sacred Way wound up the slope to the sanctuary, adorned at every step with statues, porticoes, and "treasuries" – miniature temples built in the sacred precincts (at Olympia, Delphi, or Delos) by Greek cities as repositories for their funds, or as their individual tributes to the god. A hundred years before the battle of Marathon, Corinth and Sicyon raised such treasuries at Delphi; later, Athens, Thebes, and Cyrene rivaled them, Cnidus and Siphnos surpassed them. Amid them all, as a reminder that Greek drama was a part of Greek religion, a theater was built into the face of Parnassus. Far above all the rest was a stadium, where Greece practiced its favorite worship of health, courage, beauty, and youth.

Imagination pictures the scene in the days of Apollo's festival-fervent pilgrims crowding the road to the sacred city, filling noisily the inns and tents thrown up to shelter them, passing curiously and skeptically among the booths where subtle traders displayed their wares, mounting in religious procession or hopeful pilgrimage to Apollo's temple, laying before it their offering or sacrifice, chanting their hymns or saying their prayers, sitting awed in the theater, and plodding up half a thousand trying steps to witness the Pythian games or gaze in wonder at mountains and sea. Life once passed this way in all its eagerness.

In the western mainlands of Greece life was content to be rural and subdued throughout Greek history-and is so today. In Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania, and Aeniania men were too close to primitive realities, too far from the quickening currents of communication and trade, to have time or skill for literature, philosophy, or art; even the gymnasium and the theater, so dear to Attica, found no home here; and the temples were artless village shrines stirring no national sentiment. At long intervals modest towns arose, like Amphissa in Locris, or Aetolian Ntaupactus, or little Calydon, where once Meleager had hunted the boar with Atalanta. [A wild boar having devastated the fields of Calydon, Meleager, son of Calydon's King Oeneus, organized a hunt for it~ with such aides as Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Nestor, Jason, and the fair-faced, fleet-footed Atalanta. Several heroes were slain by the boar, but Atalanta shot it and Meleager killed it. Atalanta, sought by many wooers in her Arcadian home, agreed to marry any one of them that could outrun her, but those who lost were to be put to death. Hippomenes won by dropping as he ran the three golden apples of the Hesperides given him by Aphrodite; Atalanta stooped to pick them, and last the race. Of Mel eager's secret love for Atalanta, and his tragic death, the reader may learn in Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon.] On the west coast near Calydon is the modern Mesolongion, or Missolonghi, where Alarco Bozzaris fought and Byron died.

Between Acarnania and Aetolia runs the greatest river of Hellos – the Achelous, which the imaginative Greeks worshiped as a god, and appeased with prayer and sacrifice. Near its sources in Epirus rises the Spercheus, along whose banks in the little state of Aeniania once lived the pre-Homeric Achaeans, and a small tribe called Hellenes, whose name, by: the whims of usage, was adopted by all the Greeks. Towards the east lay Thermopylae' called "Hot Gates" because of its warm sulphur springs and its narrow strategic pass, from north to south, between mountains and the Malic Gulf. Then over Mt. Othrys and through Achaea Phthiotis one descends into the great plains of Thessaly.

Here at Pharsalus Caesar's weary troops wiped out the forces of Pompey. Nowhere else in Greece were the crops so rich as in Thessaly, or the horses so spirited or the arts so poor. Rivers ran from all directions into the Peneus, making a fertile alluvial soil from the southern boundary of the state to the foot of the northern ranges. Through these mountains the Peneus slashes its way across Thessaly to the Thracian Sea. Between the peaks of Ossa and Olympus it carves the Vale of Tempe (i.e., a cutting), where for four miles the angry river is hemmed in by precipitous cliffs rising a thousand feet above the stream. Along the great rivers were many cities-Pherae, Crannon, Tricca, Larisa, Gyrton, Elates-ruled by feudal barons living on the toil of serfs. Here, in the extreme north, isMt. Olympus, tallest of Greek peaks, and home of the Olympian gods. On its northern and eastern slopes lay Pieria, where the Muses had dwelt before they moved to Helicon. [Hence the wise counsel of Alexander Pope's philosophical doggerel: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring"] Southward, and along the gulf, ran Magnesia, piling up mountains from Ossa to Pelion.

Beginning a few miles across the strait from Magnesia, the great island of Euboea stretches its length along the shores of the mainland between inner gulfs and outer Aegean, and pivots itself on a peninsula at Chalcis that. Almost binds it to Boeotia. The island's backbone is a range that continues Olympus, Ossa, Pelion, and Othnys, and ends in the Cyclades. Its coastal plains were rich enough to lure Ionians from Attica in the days of the Dorian invasion, and to lead to its conquest by Athens in job on the plea that Athens, if blockaded at the Piraeus, would starve without Euboean grain. Neighboring deposits of copper and iron and banks of murex shells gave Chalcis its wealth and its name; for a time it was the chief center of the metallurgical industry in Greece, making unrivaled swords and excellent vases of bronze. The trade of the island, helped by one of the first Greek coinages, passed out from Chalcis, enriched its citizens, and led them to found commercial colonies in Thrace, Italy, and Sicily. The Euboean system of weights and measures became almost universal in Greece; and the alphabet of Chalcis, given to Rome by the Euboean colony of Italian Cumae, became through Latin the alphabet of modern Europe. A few miles to the south of Chalcis was its ancient rival, Eretria. There Menedemus, a pupil of Plato, established a school of philosophy, but for the rest neither Eretria nor Chalcis wrote its name very distinctly into the record of Greek thought or art.

From Chalcis a bridge, lineal descendant of the wooden span built in 41 r B.C., leads the traveler across the Euripus strait back into Bocotia. A few miles south on the Boeotian coast lay: the little town of Aulis, where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to the gods. In this region once lived an insignificant tribe, the Grail, who joined the Euboeans in sending a colony to Cumae, near Naples; from them the Romans gave to al[ the Hellencs whom they encountered the name Graici, Greeks; and from that circumstance all the world came to know Hellos by a term which its own inhabitants never applied to themselves.' Farther south is Tanagra, whose poetess Corinna won the prize from Pindar about 500 s.c., and whose potters, in the fifth and fourth centuries, would make the most famous statuettes in history. Five miles south again and we are in Attics. From the peaks of the Parses range we can make out the hills of Athens.

The very atmosphere seems different – clean, sharp, and bright; each year here has three hundred sunny days. We are at once reminded of Cicero's comment on "Athens' clear air, which is said to have contributed to the keenness of the Attic mind." Rain falls in Attics in autumn and winter, but seldom in summer. Fog and mist are rare. Snow falls about once a year in Athens, four or five times a year on the surrounding mountaintops. The summers are hot, though do and tolerable; and in the lowlands, in ancient days, malarial swamps detracted from the healthiness of the air." The soil of Attics is poor; nearly everywhere the basic rock lies close to the surface, and makes agriculture a heartbreaking struggle for the simplest goods of life. ["Attica;" says Thucydides (i, 1), "because of the poverty of its soil, enjoyed from a very remote period freedom from faction [?] and invasion."] Only adventurous trade, and the patient culture of the olive and the grape, made civilization possible in Attics.

It is all the more surprising that on this arid peninsula so many towns should have appeared. They are everywhere: at every harbor along the coast, in even: valley amonn the hills. An active and enterprising people had settled Attica in or before neolithic days, and had hospitably received and intermarried with Ionians – a mixture of Pelasgo-Mycenaeans and Achaeans – fleeing from Boeotia and the Peloponnesus in the face of the northern migrations and invasions. Here was no conquering alien race exploiting a native population, but a complex Mediterranean stock, of medium stature and dark features, directly inheriting the blood and culture of the old Helladic civilization, proudly conscious of its indigenous quality, and excluding from its national sanctuary, the Acropolis, those half-barbarian upstarts, the Dorians.

Relationships of blood gave them their social organization. Each family belonged to a tribe, whose members claimed the same divine heroic ancestor, worshiped the same deity, joined in the same religious ceremony, had a common archon (governor) and treasurer, owned together certain communal lands, enjoyed among themselves the rights of intermarriage and bequest, accepted obligations of mutual aid, vengeance, and defense, and slept at last in the tribal burial place. Each of the four tribes of Attica was composed of three phratries or brotherhoods, each phratry of thirty clans or gentes (gene), and each clan, as nearly as possible, of thirty heads of families. This kinship classification of Attic society lent itself not only to military organization and mobilization, but to so clannish an aristocracy of old families that Cleisthenes had to redistribute the tribes before he could establish democracy.

Each town or village was probably in origin the home of a clan, and sometimes took its name from the clan, or from the god or hero whom it worshiped, as in the case of Athens. The traveler entering Attica from eastern Bocotia would come first to Oropus, and receive no very favorable impression; for Oropus was a frontier town, as terrifying to the tourist as any such today. "Oropus," says Dicaearchus (?) about 300 b.c., "is a nest of hucksters. The greed of the customhouse officials here is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Host of the people are coarse and truculent in their manners, for they have knocked the decent members of the community on the head."" From Oropus southward one moved through a close succession of towns: Rhamnus, Aphidna, Deceleia (a strategic point in the Peloponnesian War), Acharnae (home of Aristophanes' pugnacious pacifist Dicaeopolis), Marathon, and Brauron – in whose great temple stood that statue of Artemis which Orestes and Iphigenia had brought from the Tauric Chersonese, and where, every four years, as much of Attica as could come joined in the piety and debauchery of the Brauronia, or feast of Artemis. Then Prasiae and Thoricus; then the silver-mining region of Laurium, so vital in the economic and military history of Athens: then, at the very point of the peninsula, Sunium, on whose cliffs a lovely temple rose as a guide to mariners and their hopeful offering to the incalculable Poseidon. Then up the western coast (for Attica is half coast, and its very name is from aktike, coastland) past Anaphlystus to the isle of Salamis [probably named by the Phaenicians from shalam, peace; cf. salem], home of Ajax and Euripides; then to Eleusis, sacred to Demeter and her mysteries; and then back to the Piraeus. Into this sheltered port, neglected before Themistocles revealed its possibilities, ships were to bring the goods of all the Mediterranean world for the use and pleasure of Athens. The barrenness of the soil, the nearness of the coast, the abundance of harbors lured the people of Attica into trade; their courage and inventiveness won for them the markets of the Aegean; and out of that commercial empire came the wealth, the power, and the culture of Athens in the Periciean age.

These towns of Attica were not only the background but the members of Athens. We have seen how, according to Greek belief, Theseus with a benevolent "synoecism" had brought the people of Attica into one political organization, with one capital. [Tradition placed this event in the thirteenth century b.c.; but the union of Attica under Athens could hardly bare been completed before 700, since the "Homeric" Hymn to Demeter, composed about that date, speaks of Eleusis as still hoeing its own king.] Five miles from the Piraeus, and in a nest of hills – Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes – Athens grew around the old Ilycenaean acropolis; and all the landowners of Attica were its citizens. The oldest families, and those with the largest holdings, wielded the balance of power; they had tolerated the kingship when disorder threatened, but when quiet and stability returned they reasserted their feudal domination of the central government. After King Codrus had died in heroic self-sacrifice against the invading Dorians [a possibly legendary event attributed by tradition to1068 b.c.], they announced (so the story went) that no one was good enough to succeed him, and replaced the king with an archon chosen for life. In752 they limited the tenure of the archonship to ten years, and in 683 to one. 0n the latter occasion they divided the powers of years, office among nine archons: an archon eponymos, who gave his name to the year as a means of dating events; an archon basileus, who bore the name of king but was merely head of the state religion; a polemarchos, or military commander; and six thesmothetai, or lawmakers. As in Sparta and Rome, so in Athens the overthrow of the monarchy represented not a victory for the commons, or any intentional advance towards democracy, but a recapture of mastery by a feudal aristocracy-one more swing of the pendulum in the historical alternation between localized and centralized authority. By this piecemeal revolution the royal office was shorn of all its powers, and its holder was confined to the functions of a priest. The word king remained in the Athenian constitution to the end of its ancient history, but the reality was never restored. Institutions may with impunity be altered or destroyed from above if their names are left unchanged.

The Eupatrid oligarchs – i.e., the well-born ruling few-continued to govern Attica for almost five centuries. Under their rule the population was divided into three political ranks: the hippes, or knights, who owned horses [The mark of a gentleman then, as in the days of Roman equites, French chevaliers, and English cavaliers.] and could serve as cavalry; the zeugitai, who owned a yoke of oxen and could equip themselves to fight as hoplites or heavy-armed troops; and the thetes, hired laborers who fought as light-armed infantry. Only the first two were accounted citizens; and only the knights could serve as archons, judges, or priests. After completing their term of office the archons, if no scandal had tarnished them, became automatically and for life members of the boule or Council that met in the cool of the evening on the Areopagus, or Ares' hill, chose the archons, and ruled the state. Even under the monarchy this Senate of the Areopagus had limited the authority of the king; now, under the oligarchy, it was as supreme as its counterpart in Rome.

Economically the population fell again into three groups. At the top were the Eupatrids, who lived in relative luxury in the towns while slaves and hired men tilled their holdings in the country, or merchants made profits for them on their loans. "Next in wealth were the demiugoi, or public workmen – i.e., professional men, craftsmen, traders, and free laborers. As colonization opened up new markets, and coinage liberated trade, the rising power of this class became the explosive force that under Solon and Peisistratus won for it a share in the government, and under Cleisthenes and Pericles raised it to the zenith of its influence. Most of the laborers were freemen; slaves were as yet in the minority, even in the lower classes. – Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peasants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of moneylenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a bit of the earth.

Some of these peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously individual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious, many peasants sold their lands-despite the fine and disfranchisement that punished such sales-and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders of craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of ownership, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or "share-croppers" who kept a part of the produce as their pay.' Still others struggled on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest, were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab announcing this ownership. Small holdings became smaller, free peasants fewer, great holdings greater. "A few proprietors," says Aristotle, "owned all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable to be sold as slaves," even into foreign parts, "on failure to pay their rent" or their debts.' Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coinage, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured articles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers, and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attics became so great that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer mouths would have to be fed.

Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with slaves. Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen. The landowners, jealous of the growing wealth of the merchant class, sold abroad the corn that their tenants needed for food, and at last, under the law of debt, sold the Athenians themselves.

For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these evils. About 620 this thesmothete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to codify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would restore order in Attics. So far as we know, the essential advances of his code were a moderate extension, among the newly rich, of eligibility to the archonship, and the replacement of feud vengeance with law: hereafter the Senate of the Areopagus was to try all cases of homicide. The last was a basic and progressive change; but to enforce it, indeed to persuade vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own revenge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his legislation had been superseded by Solon's he was remembered for his punishments rather than for his laws. Draco's code congealed the cruel customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws and issues affecting their interests. The owners of property were protected more zealously than ever before; petty theft, even idleness, was punished in the case of citizens with disfranchisement, in the case of others with death. ["Those that stale a cabbage or an apple were to suffer even as villains that committed sacrilege or murder." – Plutarch, Solon.]

As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. "The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor," says Plutarch, "had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances . . . seemed possible but a despotic power." The poor, finding their situation worse with each year – the government and the army in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them – began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth. The rich, unable any longer to collect the debts legally due them, and angry at the challenge to their savings and their property, invoked ancient laws, and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all civilization.

It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often repeated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, without any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaos but established a new and more generous political and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens' independent career. Solon's peaceful revolution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.

His father was a Eupatrid of purest blood, related to the descendants of King Codrus and, indeed, tracing his origin to Poseidon himself. His mother was cousin to the mother of Peisistratus, the dictator who would first violate and then consolidate the Solonian constitution. In his youth Solon participated lustily in the life of his time: he wrote poetry, sang the joys of "Creek friendship,"'° and, like another Tyrtaeus, stirred the people with his verses to conquer Salamis.' In middle age his morals improved in inverse ratio to his poetry; his stanzas became dull, and his counsel excellent. "Many undeserving men are rich," he tells us, "while their betters are poor. But we will not exchange what we are for what they have, since the one gift abides while the other passes from man to man." The riches of the rich "are no greater than his whose only possessions are stomach, lungs and feet that bring him joy, not pain; the blooming charms of lad or maid; and an existence ever in harmony with the changing seasons of life." Once, when a sedition occurred in Athens, he remained neutral, luckily before his own reputed legislation making such caution a crime. But he did not hesitate to denounce the methods by which the wealthy had reduced the masses to a desperate penury."

If we may believe Plutarch, Solon's father "ruined his estate in doing benefits and kindnesses to other men." Solon took to trade, and became a successful merchant with far-flung interests that gave him wide experience and travel. His practice was as good as his preaching, for he acquired among all classes an exceptional reputation for integrity. He was still relatively ,young – forty-four or forty-five – when, in 594, representatives of the middle classes asked him to accept election nominally as archon eponynos, but with dictatorial powers to soothe the social war, establish a new constitution, and restore stability to the state. The upper classes, trusting to the conservatism of a moneyed man, reluctantly consented.

His first measures were simple but drastic economic reforms. He disappointed the extreme radicals by making no move to redivide the land; such an attempt would have meant civil war, chaos for a generation, and the rapid return of. inequality. But by his famous Seisachtheia, or Removal of Burdens, Solon canceled, says Aristotle, "all existing debts, whether owing to private persons or to the state" [Probably this did not apply to commercial debts in wbich personal servitude was not involved.]; and at one blow cleared Attic lands of all mortgages. All persons enslaved or attached for debt were released; those sold into servitude abroad were reclaimed and freed; and such enslavement was forbidden for the future. It was characteristic of humanity that certain of Solon's friends, getting wind of his intention to cancel debts, bought on mortgage large tracts of land, and later retained these without paying the mortgages; this, Aristotle tells us with a rare twinkle in his style, was the origin of many fortunes, that were later "supposed to be of. immemorial antiquity." Solon was under suspicion of having connived at this and of having profited by it, until it was discovered that as a heavy creditor he himself had lost by his law. The rich protested unanswerably that such legislation was confiscation; but within a decade opinion became almost unanimous that the act had saved Attica from revolution.

Of another Solonian reform it is difficult to speak with clearness or certainty. Solon, says Aristotle, "superseded the Pheidonian measures" – that is, the Aeginetan coinage theretofore used in Attics – "by the Euboic system on a larger scale, and made the mina, which had contained seventy drachmas, now contain a hundred." According to Plutarch's fuller account, Solon "made the mina, which before passed for seventy-three drachmas, go for a hundred, so that, though the number of pieces in a payment was equal, the value was less; which proved a considerable benefit to those that were to discharge great debts, and no loss to the creditors."' Only the genial and generous Plutarch could devise a form of inflation that would relieve debtors without hurting creditors-except that doubtless in some cases half a loaf is better than none. [Grote and many others interpreted Plutarch's statement to mean that Solon had depreciated the currency by twenty-seven per cent and had thereby given relief to landlords who themselves debtors to others, were deprived of the mortgage returns upon which they had depended for meeting their obligations." Such inflation, however, would have fallen as a second blow upon those landlords who had lent sums to merchants; if it helped any class it helped these merchants rather than the landlords or the peasants-whose mortgages had already been forgiven. Possibly Solon had no thought of debasing the currency, but wished merely to substitute, for a monetary standard that had been found convenient in trading with the Peloponnesus. another that would facilitate trade with the rich and growing markets of Ionia, were the Euboic standard was in common use.]

More lasting than these economic reforms were those historic decrees that created the Solonian constitution. Solon prefaced them with an act of amnesty freeing or restoring all persons who had been jailed or banished for political offenses short of trying to usurp the government. He went on to repeal, directly or by implication, most of Draco's legislation; the law concerning murder remained." It was in itself a revolution that the laws of Solon were applied without distinction to all freemen; rich and poor were now subject to the same restraints and the same penalties. Recognizing that his reforms had been made possible by the support of the mercantile and industrial classes and signified their accession to a substantial share in the government, Solon divided the free population of Attics into four groups according to their wealth: first, the pentacosiomedimni, or five-hundred-bushel men, whose annual income reached five hundred measures of produce, or the equivalent thereof [a medimnus – about one and a half bushels – was considered the equivalent pf one drachma in money]; second, the hippes, whose income was between three and five hundred measures; third, the zeugitai, with incomes between two and three hundred measures; and fourth, the tbetes, all other freemen. Honors and taxes were determined by the same rating, and the one could not be enjoyed without paying the other; furthermore, the first class was taxed an twelve times, the second class on ten times, the third class on only five times, the amount of its annual income; the property tax was in effect a graduated income tax.` The fourth class was exempt from direct taxation. Only the first class teas eligible to tire archonship or to military commands; the second class was eligible to lower offices and to the cavalry; the third was privileged to join the heavy-armed infantry; the fourth was expected to provide the common soldiers of the state. This peculiar classification weakened the kinship organization upon which the oligarchy had rested its power, and established the new principle of "timocracy" – government by honor or prestige as frankly determined by taxable wealth. A similar "plutocracy" prevailed, throughout the sixth and part of the fifth century, in most of the Greek colonies.

At the head of the new government Solon's code left the old Senate of the Areopagus, a little shorn of its exclusiveness and powers, open now to all members of the first class, but still with supreme authority over the conduct of the people and the officers of the state. Next below it he created a new boule, a Council of Four Hundred, to which each of the four tribes elected a hundred members; this Council selected, censored, and prepared all business that could be brought before the Assembly. Beneath this oligarchic superstructure, ingratiating to the strong, Solon, perhaps with goad will aforethought, placed fundamentally democratic institutions. The old ekklesia of Homer's day was brought back to life, and all citizens were invited to join in its deliberations. This Assembly annually elected. from among the five-hundred-bushel men, the archons who heretofore had been appointed by the Areopagus; it could at any time question these officers, impeach them, punish them; and when their terms expired it scrutinized their official conduct during the year, and could debar them, if it chose, from their usual graduation into the Senate. More important still, though it did not seem so, was the admission of the lowest class of the citizens to full parity with the higher classes in being eligible to selection by lot to the heliaea – a body of six thousand jurors that formed the various courts before which all matters except murder and treason were tried, and to which appeal could be made from any action of the magistrates. "Some believe," says Aristotle, "that Solon intentionally introduced obscurity into his laws, to enable the commons to use their judicial power for their own political aggrandizement"; for since, as Plutarch adds, "their differences could not be adjusted by the letter, they would have to bring all their causes to the judges, who were in a manner masters of the laws." This power of appeal to popular courts was to prove the wedge and citadel of Athenian democracy.

To this basic legislation, the most important in Athenian history, Solon added a miscellany of laws aimed at the less fundamental problems of the time. First he legalized that individualization of property which custom had already decreed. If a man had sons he was to divide his property among them at his death; if he died childless he might bequeath to anyone the property that in such cases had heretofore reverted automatically to the clan. With Solon begins, in Athens, the right and law of wills. Himself a businessman, Solon sought to stimulate commerce and industry by opening citizenship to all aliens who had a skilled trade and came with their families to reside permanently at Athens. He forbade the export of any produce of the soil except olive oil, hoping to turn men from growing surplus crops to practicing an industry. He enacted a law that no son should be obliged to support a father who had not taught him some specific trade, To Solon – not to the later Athenians – the crafts had their own rich honor and dignity.

Even into the dangerous realm of morals and manners Solon offered laws. Persistent idleness was made a crime, and no man who lived a life of debauchery was permitted to address the Assembly." He legalized and taxed prostitution, established public brothels licensed and supervised by the state, and erected a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos from the revenues, "Hail to you, Solon!" sang a contemporary Leckv. "You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men who, in the absence of your wise institution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the better women." He enacted the un-Draconian penalty of a hundred drachmas for the violation of a free woman, but anyone who caught an adulterer in the act was allowed to kill him there and then. He limited the size of dowries, wishing that marriages should be contracted by the affection of mates and for the rearing of children; and with childlike trustfulness he forbade women to extend their wardrobes beyond three suits. He was asked to legislate against bachelors, but refused, saying that, after all, "a wife is a heavy, load to carry."" He made it a crime to speak evil of the dead, or to speak evil of the living in temples, courts, or public offices, or at the games; but even he could not tie the busy tongue of Athens, in which, as with us, gossip and slander seemed essential to democracy. He laid it down that those who remained neutral in seditious should lose their citizenship, for he felt that the indifference of the public is the ruin of the state. He condemned pompous ceremonies, expensive sacrifices, or lengthy lamentations at funerals, and limited the goads that might be buried with the dead. He established the wholesome law – a source of Athenian bravery for generations – that the sons of those who died in war should be brought up and educated at the expense of the government.

To all of his laws Solon attached penalties, milder than Draco's but still severe; and lie empowered any citizen to bring action against any person whom he might consider guilty of crime. That his laws might be the better known and obeyed he wrote them down in the court of the archon basileus upon wooden rollers or prisms that could be turned and read. Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, he made no claim that a god had given him these laws; this circumstance, too, revealed the temper of the age, the city, and the man. Invited to make himself a permanent dictator he refused, saying that dictatorship was "a very fair spot, but there was no way down from it." Radicals criticized him for failing to establish equality of possessions and poorer; conservatives denounced him for admitting the commons to the franchise and the courts; even his friend Anacharsis, the whimsical Scythian sage, laughed at the new constitution, saying that now the wise would plead and the fools would decide. Besides, added Anacharsis, no lasting justice can be established far men, since the strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made; the law is a spider's web that catches the little flies and lets the big bugs escape. Solon accepted all this criticism genially, acknowledging the imperfections of his code; asked had he given the Athenians the best laws, he answered, "No, but the best that they could receive" – the best that the conflicting groups and interests of Athens could at that time be persuaded conjointly to accept. He followed the mean and preserved the state; he was a good pupil of Aristotle before the Stagirite was born. Tradition attributed to him the motto that was inscribed upon the temple of Apollo at Delphi – meden agan, nothing in excess; and all Greeks agreed in placing him among the Seven Wise Men.

The best proof of his wisdom was the lasting effect of his legislation. Despite a thousand changes and developments, despite intervening dictatorships and superficial revolutions, Cicero could say, five centuries later, that the laws of Solon were still in force at Athens. Legally his work marks the end of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, and the beginning of government by written and permanent law. Asked what made an orderly and well-constituted state, he replied, "When the people obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the laws:" To his legislation Attica owed the liberation of its farmers from serfdom, and the establishment of a peasant proprietor class whose ownership of the soil made the little armies of Athens suffice to preserve her liberties for many generations. When, at the close of the Peloponnesian War, it was proposed to limit the franchise to freeholders, only five thousand adult freemen in all Attica failed to satisfy this requirement. At the same time trade and industry were freed from political disabilities and financial inconveniences, and began that vigorous development which was to make Athens the commercial leader of the Mediterranean. The new aristocracy of wealth put a premium upon intelligence rather than birth, stimulated science and education, and prepared, materially and mentally, for the cultural achievements of the Golden Age.

In 572, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as archon for twenty-two years, Solon retired from office into private life; and having bound Athens, through the oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten years, he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and the East. It was now, apparently, that he made his famous remark – "I grow old while always learning.'" At Heliopolis, says Plutarch, he studied Egyptian history and thought under the tutelage of the priests; from them, it is said, he heard of the sunken continent Atlantis, whose tale he told in an unfinished epic which two centuries later would fascinate the imaginative Plato. From Egypt he sailed to Cyprus and made laws for the city that in his honor changed its name to Soli [Diogenes Laertius tells this story rather of Soli in Cilicia – the town whose preservation of old Greek speech into Alexander's day led to the word solecism.]. Herodotus and Plutarch describe with miraculous memory his chat at Sardis with Croesus, the Lydian king: how this paragon of wealth, having arrayed himself in all his paraphernalia, asked Solon did he not account him, Croesus, a happy man; and how Solon, with Greet audacity, replied:

The gods, O King, have given the Greeks ail other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyment, or to admire any man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come with every- possible variety of fortune; and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end do we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of life and hazard we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring.

 

This admirable exposition of what the Greek dramatists mean by hybris – insolent prosperity – has the ring of Plutarch's eclectic wisdom; we can only say that it is better phrased than Herodotus' report, and that both accounts belong, presumably, to the realm of imaginary conversations. Certainly both Solon and Croesus, in the manner of their deaths, justified the skepticism of this homily. Croesus was dethroned by Cyrus in 546, and (if we may rephrase Herodotus with Dante) knew the bitterness of remembering, in his misery, the happy rime of his splendor, and the stern warning of the Greek. And Solon, returning to Athens to die, saw in his last years the overthrow of his constitution, the establishment of a dictatorship, and the apparent frustration of all his work.

The conflicting groups which he had dominated for a generation had resumed, upon his departure from Athens, the natural play of politics and intrigue. As in the passionate days of the French Revolution, three parties struggled for power: the "Shore," led by the merchants of the ports, who favored Salon; the "Plain," led by the rich landowners, who hated Solon; and the "Mountain," a combination of peasants and town laborers who still fought for a redistribution of the land. Like Pericles a century later, Peisistratus, though an aristocrat by birth and fortune, manners and tastes, accepted the leadership of the commons. At a meeting of the Assembly he displayed a wound, claiming that it had been inflicted upon him by the enemies of the people, and asked for a bodyguard. Solon protested; knowing the subtlety of his cousin, he suspected that the wound had been self-inflicted, and that the bodyguard would open the way to a dictatorship. "Ye men of Athens," he warned them, "I am wiser than some of you, and braver than others: wiser than those of you who do not perceive the treachery of Peisistratus, and braver than those who are aware of it, but out of fear hold their peace."' Nevertheless the Assembly voted that Peisistratus should be allowed a force of fifty men. Peisistratus collected four hundred men instead of fifty, seized the Acropolis, and declared a dictatorship. Solon, having published to the Athenians his opinion that "each man of you, indi'V2dually, walketh with the tread of a fox, but collectively ye are geese," placed his arms and shield outside his door as a symbol of resigning his interest in politics, and devoted his last days to poetry.

The wealthy forces of the Shore and the Plain united for a moment and expelled the dictator (556). But Peisistratus secretly made his peace with the Shore, and, probably with their connivance, re-entered Athens under circumstances that seemed to corroborate Solon's judgment of the collective intelligence. A tall and beautiful woman, arrayed in the armor and costume of the city's goddess Athena, and seated proudly in a chariot, led the farces of Peisistratus into the city, while heralds announced that the patron deity of Athens was herself restoring him to power (550). "The people of the city, fully persuaded," says Herodotus, "that the woman was the veritable goddess, prostrated themselves before her, and received Peisistratus back." The leaders of the Shore turned against him again and drove him into a second exile (549); but in 546 Peisistratus once more returned, defeated the troops sent out against him, and this time maintained his dictatorship for nineteen years, during which the wisdom of his policies almost redeemed the picturesque unscrupulousness of his means.

The character of Peisistratus was a rare union of culture and intellect, administrative vigor and personal charm. He could fight ruthlessly, and readily forgive; he could move in the foremost currents of the thought of his time, and govern without the intellectual's vacillation of purpose and timidity of execution. He was mild of manner, humane in his decisions, and generous to all. "His administration," says Aristotle. "was temperate, and showed the statesman rather than the tvrant." He made few reprisals upon regenerate enemies, but he banished irreconcilable opponents, and distributed their estates among the poor. He improved the army and built up the fleet as security against eternal attack; but he kept Athens out of war, and maintained at home, in a city so recently disturbed by class hostility, such order and content that it was common to say that he had brought back the Golden Age of Cronus' reign.

He surprised everyone by making little change of detail in the Solonian constitution. Like Augustus he knew how to adorn and support dictatorship with democratic concessions and forms. Archons were elected as usual, and the Assembly and the popular courts, the Council of Four Hundred and the Senate of the Areopagus met and functioned as before, except that the suggestions of Peisistratus found a very favorable hearing. When a citizen accused him of murder he appeared before .the Senate and offered to submit to trial, but the complainant decided not to press the charge. Year by year the people, in inverse proportion to their wealth, became reconciled to his rule; soon they were proud of him, at last fond of him. Probably Athens had needed, after Solon, just such a man as Peisistratus: one with sufficient iron in his blood to beat the disorder of Athenian life into a strong and steady form, and to establish by initial compulsion those habits of order and law which are to a society what the bony structure is to an animal-its shape and strength, though not its creative life. When, after a generation, the dictatorship was removed, these habits of order and the framework of Solon's constitution remained as a heritage for democracy. Peisistratus, perhaps not knowing it, had come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.

His economic policies carried on that emancipation of the people which Solon had begun. He settled the agrarian question by dividing among the poor the lands that belonged to the state, as well as those of banished aristocrats; thousands of dangerously idle Athenians were settled upon the soil; and for centuries afterward we hear of no serious agrarian discontent in Attica.' He gave employment to the needy by undertaking extensive public works, building a system of aqueducts and roads, and raising great temples to the gods. He encouraged the mining of silver at Laurium, and issued a new and independent coinage. To finance these undertakings he laid a ten per cent tax upon all agricultural products; later he seems to have reduced this to 5 per cent. He planted strategic colonies on the Dardanelles, and made commercial treaties with many states. Under his rule trade flourished, and wealth grew not among a few only, but in the community as a whole. The poor were made less poor, the rich not less rich. That concentration of wealth which had nearly tom the city into civil war was brought under control, and the spread of comfort and opportunity laid the economic bases of Athenian democracy.

Under Peisistratus and his sons Athens was physically and mentally transformed. Till their time it had been a second-rate city in the Greek world, lagging behind Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene, and Syracuse in wealth and culture, in vitality of life and mind. Now new buildings of stone and marble reflected the radiance of the day; the old temple of Athena on the Acropolis was beautified with a Doric peristyle; and work was begun on that temple of Olympian Zeus whose stately Corinthian columns, even in their ruins, brighten the road from Athens to her port. By establishing the Panathenaic games and giving them a Panhellenic character, Peisistratus brought to his city not honor only, but the stimulus of foreign faces, competition, and ways; under his rule the Panathenaea became the great national festival, whose impressive ceremonial still moves on the frieze of the Parthenon. To his court, by public works and private beneficence, Peisistratus attracted sculptors, architects, and poets; in his palace was collected one of the earliest libraries of Greece. A committee appointed by him gave to the Iliad and the Odyssey the form in which we know them. Under his administration and encouragement Thespis and others lifted drama from a mummers' mimicry to a form of art ready to be filled out by the great triumvirate of the Athenian stage.

The "tyranny" of Peisistratus was part of a general movement in the commercially active cities of sixth-century Greece, to replace the feudal rule of a landowning aristocracy with the political dominance of the middle class in temporary alliance with the poor. [The word tyrant had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tower (cf. tyrris). Apparently it was applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.] Such dictatorships were brought on by the pathological concentration of wealth, and the inability of the wealthy to agree on a compromise. Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes. Hence the road to power in Greek commercial cities was simple: to attack the aristocracy, defend the poor, and come to an understanding with the middle classes" Arrived at power, the dictator abolished debts, or confiscated large estates, taxed the rich to finance public works, or otherwise redistributed the overconcentrated wealth; and while attaching the masses to himself through such measures, he secured the support of the business community by promoting trade with state coinage and commercial treaties, and by raising the social prestige of the bourgeoisie. Forced to depend upon popularity instead of hereditary power, the dictatorships for the most part kept out of war, supported religion, maintained order, promoted morality, favored the higher status of women, encouraged the arts, and lavished revenues upon the beautification of their cities. And they did all these things, in many cases, while preserving the forms and procedures of popular government, so that even under despotism the people learned the ways of liberty. When the dictatorship had served to destroy the aristocracy the people destroyed the dictatorship; and only a few changes were needed to make the democracy of freemen a reality as well as a form.

When Peisistratus died, in 527, he left his power to his sons; his wisdom had survived every test except that of parental love. Hippias gave promise of being a wise ruler, and for thirteen years continued the policies of his father. Hipparchus, his younger brother, was harmlessly, though expensively, devoted to love and poetry; it was at his invitation that Anacreon and Simonides came to Athens. The Athenians were not quite pleased to see the leadership of the state pass down without their consent to the young Peisistratids, and began to realize that the dictatorship had given them everything but the stimulus of freedom. Nevertheless Athens was prosperous, and the quiet reign of Hippias might have gone on to a peaceful close had it not been for the unsmooth course of true Greek love.

Aristogeiton, a man of middle age, had won the love of the young Harmodius, then, says Thucydides "in the flower of youthful beauty." But Hipparchus, equally careless of gender, also solicited the lad's love. When Aristogeiton heard of this he resolved to kill Hipparchus and at the same time, in self-protection, to overthrow the tyranny. Harmodius and others joined him in the conspiracy (514.). They murdered Hipparchus as he was arranging the Panathenaic procession, but Hippias eluded them and had them slain. To complicate the tale a courtesan Leaena, mistress of Harmodius, died bravely under torture, having refused to betray the surviving conspirators; if we may believe Greek tradition, she bit off her tongue and spat it in the face of her torturers to make sure that she would not answer their questions.

Though the people lent no visible support to this revolt, Hippias was frightened by it into replacing his hitherto mild rude with a regime of suppression, espionage, and terror. The Athenians, strengthened by a generation of prosperity, could afford now to demand the luxury of liberty; gradually, as the dictatorship grew harsher, the cry for freedom grew louder; and Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had conspired for love and passion rather than for democracy," were transformed by popular imagination into the martyrs of liberty. Off in Delphi the Alcmaeonids, who had been re-exiled by Peisistratus, saw their opportunity, raised an army, and marched upon Athens with the announced intention of deposing Hippias. At the same time they bribed the Pythian oracle to tell all Spartans who consulted her that Sparta must overthrow the tyranny at Athens. Hippias successfully resisted the forces of the Alcmaeonids; but when a Lacedaemonian army joined them he withdrew to the Areopagus. Seeking the security of his children in the event of his own death, he sent them secretly out of Athens; but they were captured by the invaders, and Hippias, as the price of their safety, consented to abdication and exile (510). The Alcmaeonids, led by the courageous Cleisthenes, entered Athens in triumph; and on their heels came the banished aristocrats, prepared to celebrate the return of their property and their power.

In the election that ensued, Isagoras, representing the aristocracy, was chosen to be chief archon. Cleisthenes, one of the defeated candidates, aroused the people to revolt, overthrew Isagoras, and set up a popular dictatorship. The Spartans again invaded Athens, seeking to restore Isagoras; but the Athenians resisted so tenaciously that the Spartans retired, and Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid aristocrat, proceeded to establish democracy (507).

His first reform struck at the very framework of Attic aristocracy – those four tribes and 360 clans whose leadership, by centuries of tradition, was in the hands of the oldest and richest families. Cleisthenes abolished this kinship classification, and replaced it with a territorial division into ten tribes, each composed of a (varying) number of demes. To prevent the formation of geographical or occupational blocs, such as the old parties of Mountain, Shore, and Plain, each tribe was to be composed of an equal number of demes, or districts, from the city, from the coast, and from the interior. To offset the sanctity that religion had given to the old division, religious ceremonies were instituted for each new tribe or deme, and a famous ancient hero of the locality was made its deity or patron saint. Freemen of foreign origin, who had rarely been admitted to the franchise under the aristocratic determination of citizenship by descent, now automatically became citizens of the denies in which they lived. At one stroke the roll of voters was almost doubled, and democracy secured a new support and a broader base.

Each of the new tribes was entitled to name one of the ten strategoi, or generals, who now joined the polemarch in command of the army; and each tribe elected fifty members of the new Council of 501 which now replaced Solon's Council of Four Hundred and assumed the most vital powers of the Areopagus. These councilors were chosen for a year's term, not by election but by lot, from the list of all citizens who had reached the age of thirty and had not already served two terms. In this strange inauguration of representative government both the aristocratic principle of birth and the plutocratic principle of wealth were overridden by the new device of the lot, which gave every citizen an equal chance not only to vote, but to hold office in the most influential branch of the government. For the Council so elected determined all matters and proposals to be submitted for approval or rejection to the Assembly, reserved to itself various judicial powers, exercised wide administrative functions, and supervised all officials of the state.

The Assembly was enlarged by the access of new citizens, so that a full meeting of its membership would have meant an attendance of approximately thirty thousand men. All these were eligible for service in the heliaea, or courts; but the fourth class, or thetes, were still, as under Solon, ineligible to individual office. The powers of the Assembly were enlarged by the institution of ostracism, which Cleisthenes seems to have added as a protection for the young democracy. At any time, by a majority of votes written secretly upon potsherds (ostraka), the Assembly, in a quorum of six thousand members, might send into exile for ten years any man who in its judgment had become a danger to the state. In this way ambitious leaders would be stimulated to conduct themselves with circumspection and moderation, and men suspected of conspiracy could be disposed of without the law's delay. The procedure required that the Assembly should be asked, "Is there any man among you whom you think vitally dangerous to the state? If so, whom?" The Assembly might then vote to ostracize any one citizen-not excepting the mover of the motion. [A similar institution was used at Argos, Megara, and Syracuse.] Such exile involved no confiscation of property, and no disgrace; it was merely democracy's way of cutting off the "tallest ears of corn." Nor did the Assembly abuse its power. In the ninety years between the introduction of ostracism and its disuse at Athens, only ten persons were banished by it from Attica.

One of these, we are told, was Cleisthenes himself. But in truth we do not know his later history; it was absorbed and lost in the brilliance of his work. Beginning with a thoroughly unconstitutional revolt, he had established, in the face of the most powerful families in Attica, a democratic constitution that continued in operation, with only minor changes, to the end of Athenian liberty. The democracy was not complete; it applied only to freemen, and still placed a modest property limitation upon eligibility to individual office.' But it gave all legislative, executive, and judicial power to an Assembly and a Court composed of the citizens, to magistrates appointed by and responsible to the Assembly, and to a Council for whose members all citizens might vote, and in whose supreme authority, by the operation of the lot, at least one third of them actually shared for at lest a year of their lives. Never before had the world seen so liberal a franchise, or so wide a spread of political power.