Solon

Based on Wikipedia: Solon

The Man Who Shook Off the Burdens

Imagine a city tearing itself apart. The poor are literally enslaved to the rich—not metaphorically, but physically dragged away with their wives and children when they cannot pay their debts. The land belongs to a handful of aristocratic families. Violence simmers beneath every political dispute. This was Athens around 594 BCE, and into this chaos walked a poet who would reshape Western civilization.

His name was Solon.

The Greeks counted him among the Seven Sages—those legendary wise men whose sayings were carved into the walls of Apollo's temple at Delphi. But Solon was no armchair philosopher. He was a warrior, a merchant, a lawmaker, and above all, a practical man who understood that a society built on debt slavery was a society destined for tyranny or revolution.

He chose a third path. And the Athenians, remarkably, let him try it.

Born to Nobility, Drawn to Commerce

Solon came from one of Athens's oldest aristocratic families—the Eupatrids, which translates roughly as "those of good fathers." His lineage supposedly traced back to Codrus, the last king of Athens, a figure who had become more legend than history by Solon's time. His family tree would later include some rather famous branches: Plato himself was descended from Solon's brother Dropides, separated by six generations.

But noble blood did not guarantee noble wealth. Solon's father, Execestides, had apparently depleted the family fortune through excessive generosity. So the young aristocrat did something rather shocking for his class.

He became a merchant.

This was deeply unaristocratic behavior in ancient Greece, where the nobility derived their status from land ownership and military prowess, not from buying and selling goods. Trade was for lesser men. Yet Solon embraced it, and this experience would prove invaluable. He learned how the economy actually worked—not from the comfortable remove of an estate, but from the docks and marketplaces where ordinary Athenians struggled to survive.

The Poet Goes to War

Before Solon became a lawmaker, he had to prove himself as a warrior. The issue was Salamis—a strategically vital island in the Saronic Gulf that Athens and its rival city Megara had been fighting over for years. The Athenians had suffered so many defeats that they had actually passed a law forbidding anyone from even proposing another attempt to take the island. The penalty for violating this law was death.

Solon found this defeatism intolerable.

According to one ancient account, he pretended to go mad, then rushed into the public square and began reciting a poem he had composed about Salamis. The ruse worked because madmen were considered touched by the gods and therefore exempt from ordinary laws. His verses stirred something in the Athenian spirit:

Let us go to Salamis to fight for the island we desire, and drive away our bitter shame!

The Athenians were moved. They repealed their law of despair and appointed Solon to lead them. With the help of his cousin Pisistratus—a name that would later become infamous—he defeated the Megarians around 595 BCE. When Megara refused to accept the loss, the dispute went to arbitration before the Spartans, and Solon's rhetorical skills won the day. Salamis became Athenian.

This victory established Solon as someone who could accomplish the impossible. The Athenians would soon ask him to attempt something even harder.

A Society Devouring Itself

To understand what Solon faced when he was appointed archon—the chief magistrate—in 594 BCE, you need to understand the horror of debt bondage in the ancient world.

If an Athenian farmer borrowed money and could not repay, his creditor could seize not just his property but his person. The debtor became a slave. His wife became a slave. His children became slaves. They could be sold abroad, separated forever, their fates determined by whoever purchased them. The security for every loan, as Aristotle later wrote, was the debtor's own body.

And the loans kept coming due.

All the land was concentrated in the hands of a few aristocratic families. Everyone else worked as tenant farmers, owing a portion of their harvest—traditionally one-sixth—to their landlords. A single bad harvest could push a family into unpayable debt. A second bad harvest could destroy them entirely. Stone markers called horoi dotted the Athenian countryside, each one announcing that the land beneath it was mortgaged, that the farmer who worked it was one step away from bondage.

The rich grew richer. The poor grew desperate. Aristotle would later call Solon "the first people's champion" because he stepped into this nightmare and did something extraordinary.

He cancelled the debts.

The Shaking Off of Burdens

The Athenians had a beautiful word for what Solon did: seisachtheia. It means, literally, "the shaking off of burdens." Imagine the relief—generations of accumulated debt, wiped away. Families that had been sold into slavery abroad were, where possible, redeemed and brought home. Those who had fled Athens to escape their creditors could return. The stone markers of mortgage were pulled from the ground.

Solon commemorated this in verse:

I removed the horoi that were fixed in many places; the black earth that was formerly enslaved is now free.

But he went further. He reformed the entire legal system, repealing almost all of Draco's laws. Draco, an earlier lawmaker whose name gives us the word "draconian," had famously prescribed death as the penalty for nearly every offense. When asked why, he reportedly said that small crimes deserved death, and he could not think of a greater punishment for large ones. Solon kept only Draco's homicide laws. Everything else went.

The new legal code addressed not just economics but morality, social organization, and political participation. Citizens were now divided into four classes based on their agricultural production—measured in medimnoi, a unit equivalent to about twelve gallons of grain. The wealthiest class, the pentakosiomedimnoi, produced five hundred or more medimnoi annually. Below them came the hippeis (cavalry class), then the zeugitai (those who could afford a yoke of oxen), and finally the thetes, the poorest laborers.

Here was the revolutionary part: even the thetes could now participate in the assembly and serve on juries. For the first time, the poorest Athenians had a formal voice in their government.

The Scandal of the Insider Trading

Before Solon could implement his reforms, there was a scandal—and it reveals that human nature has not changed much in two and a half millennia.

Solon had discussed his planned debt cancellation with some friends. These friends, knowing what was coming, immediately took out large loans and used the money to buy land. When the seisachtheia was announced, their debts vanished while their new property remained.

It was, essentially, insider trading.

Solon was suspected of involvement in the scheme. To clear his name, he publicly complied with his own law and forgave the debts owed to him—either five talents or fifteen, depending on which ancient source you believe. A talent was roughly the amount of silver needed to pay a warship's crew for a month, so either figure represented substantial wealth that Solon voluntarily surrendered.

His friends, notably, never repaid their borrowed money. Some accusations, it seems, stick whether or not they are true.

The Voluntary Exile

After establishing his reforms, Solon did something that distinguishes him from most men who acquire power.

He gave it up.

He made the Athenians swear to maintain his laws for ten years, then left the city entirely so they could not pressure him into changing anything. He traveled first to Egypt, where he reportedly spent time with the pharaoh Amasis II and discussed philosophy with priests at Heliopolis and Sais. At the temple of the goddess Neith in Sais, according to Plato, he heard the story of Atlantis—though whether this is history or literary invention remains debated to this day.

From Egypt, Solon sailed to Cyprus, where he helped a local king redesign his capital city. The grateful monarch named the new city Soloi in his honor—one of several ancient cities that bore this name, which is also the origin of our word "solecism," referring to grammatical errors supposedly common among the city's inhabitants.

His final famous stop was Sardis, capital of Lydia in what is now Turkey. There he met Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king whose name still survives in the phrase "rich as Croesus." The encounter produced one of antiquity's most famous pieces of advice.

Count No Man Happy Until He Is Dead

Croesus was proud of his wealth and wanted the visiting sage to acknowledge it. He showed Solon his treasures and then asked a seemingly simple question: who was the happiest man he had ever met?

Croesus expected to hear his own name.

Instead, Solon named an Athenian called Tellus—a man Croesus had never heard of. Tellus, Solon explained, had lived in a prosperous city, raised fine children who themselves had children, enjoyed a comfortable life, and died gloriously in battle defending his city, receiving a public burial where he fell. This, said Solon, was genuine happiness.

Croesus was annoyed but pressed on. Surely he ranked at least second?

No, said Solon. That honor belonged to Cleobis and Biton, two brothers from Argos. When their mother needed to reach a temple for a festival and her oxen had not arrived, the brothers yoked themselves to her cart and pulled it six miles. The crowd praised them, their mother prayed that the gods would grant them the greatest blessing possible, and the brothers lay down in the temple and died peacefully in their sleep. The gods, apparently, agreed that a good death was the greatest gift.

Croesus was now thoroughly irritated. Did Solon count his happiness as nothing?

Solon's reply has echoed through the centuries:

Count no man happy until he is dead.

The point was not pessimism but wisdom. Fortune is fickle. The gods are jealous. A life that seems blessed can collapse in an instant. Only when someone has died can you assess whether their life was truly happy, because only then are they beyond the reach of misfortune.

Croesus dismissed this as the rambling of an old man. He would remember it later, though—when his kingdom fell to the Persians, his son died in a hunting accident, and he himself was captured by Cyrus the Great. As the Persians prepared to execute him, Croesus cried out Solon's name three times. Cyrus, curious, asked what he was saying. When he learned the story, he was so struck by it that he spared Croesus's life.

Or so the story goes. Ancient historians were not always reliable reporters, and Herodotus, who tells this tale, was known for his love of a good yarn. But whether literally true or not, the story captured something essential about Solon's worldview: wisdom means understanding that human fortune is precarious, and that true success can only be judged in retrospect.

The Return and the Tyrant

When Solon returned to Athens after his decade of travel, he found that his reforms had not solved everything. The old social divisions had reasserted themselves, though in new forms. Political factions emerged based on regional loyalties: the men of the hills, the men of the plain, the men of the coast. Each faction had different economic interests and different views about how Athens should be governed.

And into this factional chaos stepped Solon's own cousin, Pisistratus.

Pisistratus was ambitious, charismatic, and not particularly scrupulous. He saw in Athens's divisions an opportunity for himself. According to Herodotus, he wounded himself and his mules, drove into the city center bleeding, and claimed that his political enemies had attacked him. The Athenians, moved by sympathy, voted him a bodyguard for protection. Pisistratus then used this bodyguard to seize the Acropolis and make himself tyrant.

The word "tyrant" did not originally carry its modern connotation of cruelty. In ancient Greece, a tyrannos was simply someone who had seized power unconstitutionally, regardless of how they governed afterward. Many Greek tyrants were actually popular rulers who improved their cities. But to a man like Solon, who had spent his life building constitutional institutions, any form of one-man rule was an abomination.

The elderly Solon stood outside his own home in full armor, calling on the Athenians to resist. They ignored him. When someone asked why he was bothering, he reportedly replied that at least his old age would not be without courage.

It was futile. Pisistratus established his tyranny, and though he would be expelled twice before finally consolidating power, his family would rule Athens for decades. Solon did not live to see the worst of it. He died around 560 BCE, approximately seventy years old, and—in accordance with his will—his ashes were scattered around Salamis, the island he had won for Athens in his youth.

The Sage Who Loved to Learn

One small story captures something essential about Solon's character.

At a dinner party, his young nephew was singing a poem by Sappho, the great lyric poet. Solon listened, enchanted, and asked the boy to teach him the song.

Someone at the party was baffled. "Why would you waste your time learning that?"

Solon's reply: "So that I may learn it before I die."

He was already an old man, already famous, already accomplished. But he still wanted to know more, to experience more, to learn one more beautiful thing before the end. Interestingly, a nearly identical story is told about Socrates, suggesting that for the Greeks, this attitude toward learning was the mark of a true philosopher—someone who loved wisdom not for what it could do for them, but for its own sake.

The Laws That Survived in Fragments

Solon's actual laws were inscribed on large wooden slabs called axones, mounted on rotating cylinders in the Prytaneion—the civic building that served as Athens's symbolic hearth. Visitors could turn these cylinders to read different sections of the code. Centuries later, when the traveler Pausanias visited Athens in the second century of the Common Era, the axones were still on display, though by then they were more antiquarian curiosity than living law.

Today, we have only fragments—quotes and paraphrases in later authors, many of whom did not fully understand the archaic Greek in which Solon wrote. Later Athenian orators had a tendency to attribute any law they liked to Solon, regardless of when it was actually enacted. Sorting out what Solon actually legislated from what was later attributed to him has occupied scholars for generations.

What we can say with confidence is that his reforms touched nearly every aspect of Athenian life: economic, political, moral, even sexual. He created a framework within which Athenian democracy could eventually develop, though the democracy we associate with Athens—the direct participation of all citizens in governing—would not fully emerge until the reforms of Cleisthenes about a century later and the radical democracy of the fifth century BCE.

Solon did not create democracy. But he made it possible.

Three Ways to Understand a Crisis

Modern historians have debated what was really happening in Solon's Athens. The ancient sources give us three different frameworks for understanding the conflict.

The first is economic and ideological: a struggle between rich and poor, creditors and debtors, aristocrats and commoners. This is the story Solon himself tells in his poems, presenting himself as a mediator holding the line between two dangerous extremes.

The second is regional: a conflict between men from different parts of Attica—the hill country, the coastal regions, the central plain—each with different economic bases and different political preferences. The men of the hills, dependent on small-scale farming and herding, favored more democratic arrangements. The men of the plain, the wealthiest landowners, preferred oligarchy. The men of the coast, involved in trade and fishing, wanted something in between.

The third is factional: a struggle between aristocratic clans competing for dominance, with the common people serving as clients and supporters of various noble families rather than as independent political actors.

All three frameworks probably capture part of the truth. Ancient Athens, like any complex society, contained multiple overlapping conflicts. What made Solon remarkable was his ability to craft solutions that addressed all of them simultaneously—at least temporarily.

The Poet's Voice

We should not forget that Solon was a poet. His verses are among the earliest surviving examples of Attic Greek poetry, and they reveal a man of considerable literary sophistication. One fragment describes a feast with remarkable sensory detail:

They drink and some nibble honey and sesame cakes, others their bread, others gouroi mixed with lentils. In that place, not one cake was unavailable of all those that the black earth bears for human beings, and all were present unstintingly.

This is not the voice of a dry legislator. This is someone who pays attention to the texture of life, who notices what people eat and how they eat it, who takes pleasure in abundance and variety. Perhaps this sensibility—this attention to how ordinary people actually lived—helped make him such an effective reformer.

The Legacy

Demosthenes, the great orator of the fourth century BCE, credited Solon with starting a golden age for Athens. This may be exaggeration—orators were prone to idealizing the past—but it captures something true. The institutions Solon created, however imperfect, provided the foundation for everything that followed: the democracy, the empire, the cultural flowering that produced tragedy and comedy and philosophy and history.

When the American founders looked for models of republican government, they looked to Rome—but behind Rome stood Athens, and behind Athens stood Solon. The idea that laws should be written down and publicly displayed, that citizens should have a voice in their government, that economic power should not translate directly into political domination—these ideas did not originate with Solon, but he gave them institutional form in one of history's most influential cities.

He was not, by modern standards, a democrat. He still believed in property qualifications for office. He still accepted a hierarchical society in which birth and wealth mattered. But he also believed that even the poorest citizen had rights that the law must protect, and that a society that enslaved its own members for debt was not a society worth preserving.

His solution was not revolution but reform—a shaking off of burdens that preserved social order while creating space for something new. It worked, more or less, for about a generation. Then the factions reasserted themselves, the tyrant seized power, and the long struggle toward democracy resumed.

But the memory of what Solon had accomplished remained. And when the Athenians finally did create their democracy, they looked back to him as the founder, the first people's champion, the man who had shown that it was possible to choose a path between oligarchy and chaos.

Count no man happy until he is dead, Solon said. By that measure, we can count Solon happy. He died having done what he set out to do, having won his island and freed his city and created something that would outlast him by millennia. His ashes scattered around Salamis, he became part of the land he had fought for as a young man.

Not a bad ending for a sage.