Sōlon

Sōlon (c.640–after 561 BC), Athenian statesman, celebrated for his humane reform of the city's laws; he was also a poet, and wrote elegiac and iambic poetry to publicize and justify his political policies. For later Greek historians his poetry was the main source of information on the economic and social crisis that he attempted to deal with.

Solon was elected archon for 594/3 at a time when Athens was on the brink of revolution, largely owing to an agrarian system in which the rich landowners grew richer and the poor were reduced in some cases to slavery and altogether to despair. Selling a debtor as a chattel slave if his possessions failed to cover the debt was an accepted practice and many Athenians had found themselves unable to meet their obligations and had either been sold over the border of Attica as slaves or had fled into exile to avoid that fate. Solon's two relief measures were first of all the cancellation of all debts for which land or freedom was the security (a reform known as the seisachtheia, ‘shaking-off of burdens’) and secondly the prohibition of all future borrowing on the security of the person himself. Other economic reforms were credited to him (perhaps not reliably): notably the prohibition of the export of any crops except the olive (thus keeping for home consumption the surplus grain of the rich landowners who had been selling it outside Attica), and the granting of citizenship to immigrant craftsmen, to strengthen home industry. He also introduced a more humane legal code, repealing all the laws of Draco except those concerned with homicide. His great reform of the constitution was to grade eligibility to political office in terms of wealth, not birth, and thus to break the hereditary monopoly of power.

It was said by later writers that after his reforms Solon spent ten years in overseas travel, visiting Egypt and Cyprus among other places (but on chronological evidence almost certainly not meeting Croesus of Lydia, despite the legends). He returned to find Athens distracted by regional strife and lived long enough to see Peisistratus voted a bodyguard, the first step towards his tyranny.

Solon used verse to express his ideas and explain the motives, indeed the moral philosophy, that lay behind his reforms. His poetic eulogy of ‘good order’, Eunomia, has as much to do with the idea of justice as with its practical application. In a famous reply to the poet Mimnermus, who had said that he wanted to die when he reached 60, Solon declared that the poet should rather say 80. This should probably be taken with another famous line by Solon to the effect that even as he grows old he still continues to learn, gēraskō d'aiei polla didaskomenos.