Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History episode 20, “Chaos and Compromise: Early Athens and the Reforms of Solon.” I’m Scott Emmons.

We’re 20 episodes in, and we’re finally getting to the city that eventually came to define classical Greece. The city of the Parthenon, the birthplace of drama, the home of Plato’s Academy, really the epicenter of Golden Age Greece. We’re still a long way from that high point, but today we’ll be looking at the early Athenian polis and the lawgiver who set Athens on the road that would eventually lead to democracy.

 To set the scene… Thanks to Aristotle and a few others, we have a rough idea of what the Athenian constitution looked like in the early Archaic period. Like most Greek cities, Athens had left kingship behind and replaced it with an aristocratic form of government. Members of the ruling class were called the Eupatrids, which means something like “well born.” “Of good lineage.” Instead of a king, you now had three high officials called “archons.” The word “archon” is very straightforward — it just means “leader.” Aristotle tells us that the archonships were originally for life and later for ten years, but early on, it became a one-year term. Each of the three had specific responsibilities. Just to make things confusing for us moderns, one of them continued to be called the king, the “basileus.” Even though monarchy had gone away, the word stayed in use, probably because the king had always had important religious functions, so “basileus” was something of a sacred title. So now it was the King Archon who had responsibility for the state cults. It’s an interesting contrast with ancient Rome, where the tradition was that the last of the kings were horrible oppressors, and after they were overthrown, “king” became a taboo word. Evidently in Athens, the memory of kingship wasn’t quite so harsh.

 Well, the second of the three archons was the polemarch, which literally means “war leader,” so he of course was in charge of military operations. The third was just called the “archon,” and he seems to have had the broadest powers. He’s often referred to as the “eponymous archon,” meaning he gave his name to his year in office. And that’s my excuse to go off on a brief digression about ancient Greek calendars. They didn’t count sequential years the way we do. They referred to a year by the name of the archon who was in office. So you’d say such-and-such a thing happened “in the archonship of Hippias,” for example. And then, if you were trying to remember events in chronological order, you’d have to remember whether Hippias came before or after another archon. It’s one of the things that make ancient Greek chronology so messy, because each city had its own calendar. Sometimes the Greeks could anchor a date by referring to a year in a particular Olympiad, so at least they’d have a common frame of reference. But for most purposes, they just referred to archonships.

 Back to the main topic… Those were the three initial archons, and then at some point six more were added, bringing the total to nine. The additional six were called “thesmothetes,” or “law-setters,” and they acted as a board of legal authorities. So each archon serves a one-year term, and what happens then? He becomes a member of the other important governing body, the council of the Areopagus, where he serves for life. The Areopagus is a very prestigious institution with great influence, both in policy and as a lawcourt. 

 Now, the way I’ve laid this out, it all sounds pretty neat and orderly. But by the end of the 7th century BCE, the situation in Athens is anything but. For one thing, there are always tensions between rival noble families jockeying for power. We’ve talked about the rise of the hoplite infantry in the mid-7th century, which means more non-elites are playing a major role in the military and demanding more of a share in government. There’s also a growing wealth gap between rich and poor, which I’ll come back to later in the episode. So at this point, Athens is ripe for revolution.

 There are only two specific events that we know about from late 7th-century Athens, and they reveal a lot about what a powder keg it was. The first is called the conspiracy of Cylon, which is usually dated to about 632 BCE. A young nobleman by the name of Cylon, who had the distinction of being an Olympic victor, assembled a group of supporters and tried to seize the Acropolis and make himself tyrant. According to Thucydides, Cylon was the son-in-law of the tyrant Theagenes from the nearby town of Megara, and he got military support from there. Well, the plot failed. Evidently the archons kept control of the fighting men, or most of them anyway, so the Athenians surrounded the Acropolis and trapped the conspirators. Somehow, Cylon and his brother managed to escape, but his supporters were under siege, and they took refuge at the altar of Athena while they negotiated terms for their surrender. They worked out a deal where the archons promised to spare their lives if they gave themselves up. But as soon as they left the altar, the Athenian forces slaughtered them. Plutarch adds a colorful detail that the conspirators tied a long cord to the statue of Athena and held onto it as they came down, so that they’d still be under her protection. But when they’d gotten a good way down, the cord snapped, and the Athenians took that as their cue to finish them off. That’s probably a later addition, but it may be true. That device of extending a sacred space by tying a rope to it is known from other events in Greek history. 

 So Athens was saved from tyranny, but the way the affair ended had ripple effects for the next couple of centuries. Executing the conspirators after promising to spare them while they were under the protection of the goddess was clearly sacrilege. The man responsible for giving the order was Megacles, a member of the Alcmaeonid clan, which was one of the leading noble families in Athens. His sacrilege was thought to have brought a curse on the Alcmaeonids, and their enemies used that as an opportunity to have them exiled. They had enough wealth and influence that they were able to come back, but the curse was never forgotten, and their opponents were always ready to use it against them. The curse of the Alcmaeonids is going to come up repeatedly in later episodes. 

 So much for the conspiracy of Cylon. The other big event from this period is the law code of Draco, which was enacted just a few years later. Now, nothing is known about Draco or how he got to be in this position as a lawgiver. But his work was especially important because it introduced a written code that authorities were bound to follow, as opposed to just a body of nobles who supposedly knew the law and administered their own judgments. That alone is a significant step toward breaking the aristocracy’s stranglehold on power. 

About the only part of Draco’s code that lasted very long was the part pertaining to homicide. He seems to have innovated in drawing a distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide. That may seem like a no-brainer to us, but homicide, whether intentional or not, was thought to incur blood-guilt, which had religious significance. It brought a pollution on the community, so the person responsible had to face justice in order to restore purity. But Draco’s law at least shows a sense that an unintentional killing deserved a lighter sentence, exile instead of death. 

 We can also look at the homicide law in the context of what we’ve seen before, the polis taking over some authority that had earlier belonged to the family. Traditionally, a murder victim’s family had the responsibility to exact justice, which often amounted to vengeance. The best-case scenario was that the offender might take refuge in a sanctuary while the families would negotiate an appropriate penalty. But obviously, this system was a recipe for a blood feud. With Draco’s law code, the state took on the responsibility for administering justice, although the victim’s family would still be expected to bring charges.

 Outside of homicide, not much is known about the specifics of Draco’s code. The other laws just didn’t last and weren’t recorded for us. But in general, they had a reputation for being very harsh when it came to penalties. The popular perception in later times was that every crime, including petty theft, was punishable by death. Plutarch even tells an anecdote that someone asked Draco why he’d prescribed capital punishment for all offenses, and he answered, “Well, the minor crimes deserve the death penalty, and for the major crimes, there are no harsher options.” That has to be an exaggeration, because we’ve already seen that he prescribed a lighter sentence for an unintentional killing. But it’s probably true that his code had very strict penalties. A later Athenian orator famously said that Draco’s laws had been written not in ink, but in blood.

 Well, one aspect of life under Draco’s laws will be especially important for the rest of this episode. And that is that when someone is in debt, he himself or members of his family can stand as security for the loan. If he can’t pay the loan back, he and his family can be kept or sold as slaves. This ultimately leads to a crisis that will require a constitutional overhaul. 

 With that cliffhanger, let’s take our first break. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank my newest subscriber, Karl Schwarzenegger. I don’t know if he’s of the California Schwarzeneggers, but I very much appreciate the support. I’m happy to offer Epic Greek History as a free podcast, but if you’d like to be like Karl and help with the cost of production, the one way to do that is to visit the website at www.epicgreekhistory.com and hit that “Support” button. You’ll be given options to subscribe for as little as three dollars a month. Thanks again to all who’ve supported the podcast, and now let’s break for…

 [SFX: A Moment of Greek]

 Draco’s harsh law code has given us the word “draconian” for rules that seem overly strict or punishments that seem excessive. And I guess it shows how far I’ve gone down the Greek rabbit hole with this podcast that I only just now thought of Draco Malfoy. I’m sure J.K. Rowling must have had the negative associations with Draco in the back of her mind when she named that character. But it also just has a sinister ring because of its similarity to the word “dragon.” And in fact, Draco’s name, Δράκων in Greek, means something like that — not exactly a dragon as we think of it, but a huge snake. Which is again a pretty good description of the Malfoy clan. It all comes back around. And that’s today’s moment of Greek!

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 Conditions in Athens at the start of the 6th century BCE looked pretty bleak. As Aristotle describes it in his treatise on the Athenian constitution, the poor were slaves of the rich. Just a few lines later, he says the same thing in slightly different terms: the many were slaves of the few. A lot of the details are unclear, but in broad terms we can distinguish two hot button issues of the time.

 First, there’s a pervasive problem with debt. A lot of the independent farmers have gotten so deep in the red that they’ll never be able to pay back what they owe. When we talk about debt in this period, keep in mind that we’re not yet talking about a money economy. Coinage won’t appear in Athens until about the middle of the 6thcentury, so at this point wealth is mainly defined as agricultural produce. And it’s not hard to see how farmers could fall into a debt spiral. Even today, running a small farm is a dicey business. It must have been much more so in the days before nitrogen fertilizers and modern farm equipment. So if you have a bad harvest, you have no choice but to look to a wealthy landowner to borrow your seed for the next year. And if that year is a bust, you’re really in trouble. You’ll probably lose your land first if you own it, and then all you have left is your own body and your family. And at that point the creditor can take you as slaves either to work his land or sell for a profit. 

 So debt slavery is one problem. A related issue is a class of sharecroppers called hektemoroi. The word means literally “sixth-parters,” which almost certainly means they have to pay one-sixth of their produce to a landlord or a creditor. Again, the details are murky. It may be that these hektemoroi technically own the land but it’s under a sort of perpetual mortgage where they have to keep paying a portion of what they grow. We really don’t know. But however it comes about, these people are stuck in this position of permanently owing one-sixth of their output. 

 By the time we’re talking about, the debt problem has reached crisis proportions, and the threat of revolution is looming. The lower class is clamoring for redistribution of land. The Eupatrids, the nobles, naturally want to hold onto their wealth and power, but they’re afraid that if something doesn’t give, they’ll end up with a tyranny. To avoid that, the Athenians resort to a different solution. They decide to elect an archon with special powers to reorganize the state and try to solve the economic crisis. This idea doesn’t come out of nowhere. If you listened to the episode on the poets Theognis and Alcaeus, you may remember that the city of Mytilene on Lesbos put a nobleman named Pittacus in a similar position. But it’s a very unusual move, and it shows how desperate the Athenians were for a solution. In any case, they decided to take this step to avoid a tyranny, and their choice was a man named Solon.

 In many ways, Solon is the first Greek historical figure who’s fully fleshed out for us. We have stories about earlier figures like some of the tyrants and what they did, but we know a lot more about Solon, in part because Plutarch wrote a biography of him. He drew heavily on earlier Athenian authors whose works are now lost. But we can also hear directly from Solon himself, because we have substantial excerpts of his writings. And what he wrote amounts to political pamphlets in the form of poetry. We’ve already seen how important poetry was in Greek public life. Later on, in the classical period, political oratory would come into its own, but in Solon’s time, the best way to get a message across was to put it into verse. It had rhythms and cadences that would stick in listeners’ heads. A poem might get passed around and sung at drinking parties. Plutarch says Solon gave public recitations in the agora to express his views. Fortunately for us, later authors like Aristotle, Plutarch, and others quoted extensively from his work, so for the first time, we have a Greek public figure speaking to us from the past.

 So who was Solon, and what made him the man for the job? Aristotle probably got it right when he described him as a nobleman by birth but middle class in terms of wealth. He’d have to be from a noble bloodline just to be considered for a leading position. And he was probably better off than the average Athenian, but not one of the super-rich. He evidently engaged in trade, and as we’ll see, that experience probably influenced his economic policies. He also evidently gained some political cred in a war between Athens and its neighbor Megara over possession of the island of Salamis, just off the coast of Attica. Some fragments of his early poems urge the Athenians to keep fighting for Salamis. But the overarching message of his poetry emphasizes traditional Greek values of moderation and eunomia, “good government,” which is by nature just. Let’s look at a typical example from one of his best-known poems, where he criticizes members of his own class for greed. All my quotations from Solon will be from the Loeb Classical Library translation by Douglas Gerber. Referring to rich opportunists, Solon says, quote:  

 They grow wealthy, yielding to unjust deeds… sparing neither sacred nor private property, they steal with rapaciousness, one from one source, one from another, and they have no regard for august foundations of Justice, who bears silent witness to the present and the past and who in time assuredly comes to exact retribution.

 And a little further on:

 This is what my heart bids me teach the Athenians, that Lawlessness brings the city countless ills, but Lawfulness reveals all that is orderly and fitting, and often places fetters around the unjust. Unquote

 Solon is a member of the upper class, he has his interests in common with other nobles, but he’s not afraid to criticize his fellow noblemen for greed and injustice. He has qualities that can appeal to both sides in the class struggle. So in 594/3 BCE according to the conventional dating, he was chosen as archon with extraordinary powers to deal with the crisis.

 Solon’s first act in office was what came to be known as the “seisachtheia,” the “shaking off of burdens.” What that amounts to is a cancellation of debts. Some of the ancient authors say he canceled all debts, public and private. There’s been a lot of debate about whether he really went that far. If so, it was a radical reset, and it must have made a lot of the upper class unhappy. What’s clear, though, is that he outlawed debt slavery and freed those who’d been enslaved for their failure to pay. And when you think about it, if your body is the only security for a loan, your emancipation means your debt is canceled. Solon tells us that he brought back Athenians who’d been sold into slavery abroad or who’d left voluntarily to avoid being enslaved. He adds the detail that some of these people had been away so long, they no longer spoke their native Attic dialect. That raises a lot of questions about how it worked. It would have taken a lot of time and some public expenditure to track down and either buy back slaves from other cities or force their masters to give them up. I’m speculating here, but I wonder if this was more of a PR effort than a major undertaking. If Solon could bring back a few former slaves in a high-profile initiative, that would boost his image as a liberator of Athenian citizens. But that’s just me giving my imagination free rein.

 Well, as a part of this “shaking off of burdens,” he also abolished the hektemor system, that sharecropping arrangement I mentioned earlier. That seems to be what he refers to in one of his most famous poems, where he says he pulled up the horoi, the boundary stones. In classical times a horos was a stone that marked the boundary of a piece of public or private property. In this context, the horoi were probably markers showing that a plot of land was under a pledge with one-sixth of its produce due. In his poem, Solon puts this in religious terms, that he’s not just liberating the sharecroppers, he’s freeing Mother Earth herself from slavery. Quote:

 In the verdict of time I will have as my best witness the mighty mother of the Olympian gods, dark Earth, whose boundary markers fixed in many places I once removed; enslaved before, now she is free. Unquote

 It’s not quite clear what happened to the hektemoroi after the system was abolished. One possibility is that they were allowed to keep working the same land as independent farmers. I like to think that’s what happened. In any case, after Solon, we never hear of hektemoroi in Athens again.

 After addressing the debt crisis, Solon’s next big reform was a revision of the constitution. And the game changer here was that he transformed the system from one based on birth to one based on wealth. Now, of course there was a lot of overlap. Most of the richest people belonged to the nobility. But there were successful merchants, traders and craftsmen who had achieved a good level of material wealth but had no access to the offices of state because they couldn’t trace their ancestry back to Theseus or whoever. Solon’s reform changed that, replacing birth privilege with wealth privilege. 

 So how did this work? Well, before Solon, there was already a hierarchy of wealth classes that was used for military organization. At the top were the so-called “horsemen,” who would be the Eupatrids, the noblemen who were wealthy enough to keep horses and would be eligible to serve as cavalry. Below them were the so-called “yoke-men,” which either meant that they had the means to own team of oxen or that they were yoked together with their peers in the hoplite phalanx. In any case, these would be the hoplite class. And then there were the thetes, the lowest class who owned no property and had no military standing except that they might fight as light-armed troops. In this period it’s doubtful whether they could even participate in the assembly.

 Solon kept those class divisions, at least in name, but he added a new one. The highest class now consisted of those he called — wait for it — pentakosiomedimnoi. The Greeks, from ancient times to the present, have never shied away from big words. A medimnos was a dry measure that we can conveniently translate as “bushel,” even though it’s not an exact equivalent. The “pentakosio-“ part means 500. So the pentakosiomedimnoi were “500-bushel men,” in other words, those whose estates were assessed as producing at least 500 bushels of produce in a year. That obviously had to be a very inexact kind of assessment, because you’d be comparing different kinds of products. A bushel of wheat couldn’t have had the same value as the equivalent volume of olive oil, for example. So these valuations must have been rough estimates. This whole system also underscores the point that we’re still in a time when wealth means agricultural produce, not money as we know it. In any case, the 500-bushel men are now the highest class. The classes below them keep their old names, but now “horsemen” are those who produce 300 to 500 bushels, “yoke-men” are those who produce between two and three hundred, and below that threshold are the thetes. Only the top two classes can hold the higher offices like the archonships. The “yoke-men” can hold lower state offices. The thetes can’t hold office, but they can participate in the assembly, and some historians think they first got that right under Solon.

 According to some ancient accounts, he also instituted a new council of 400 citizens. Which would make sense if he was looking for a counterweight to the very powerful council fo the Areopagus, which consisted of ex-archons, so it was all aristocratic. The trouble is that there’s no record of anything that council ever did, so it may have been just a story that later authors attached to him. But one thing that’s much better attested — and more important in the long run — is that he established the court called the Heliaia as a court of appeal, so that a magistrate’s decision didn’t have to be the last word. And all adult male citizens, including thetes, were eligible to serve as jurors. On top of that, he established a law that any male citizen could bring charges against a person he believed had committed a crime. In other words, it didn’t have to be the victim or his family. It’s another one of those steps toward the state being involved in matters that had once been the sole responsibility of the family. 

 Now, when you look at all these reforms, Solon may come across as the champion of the underdog. And from his poetry, it’s clear that he blamed the greed of the wealthy for most of the crisis. But he was not a revolutionary. He always presented himself as a moderate whose goal was justice for both sides. He didn’t confiscate wealthy citizens’ land to redistribute to the poor, and he kept most of the privileges of the wealthy intact. His attitude is best summed up in a poem that both Aristotle and Plutarch quote. Justifying his actions in office, Solon says, quote:

 I have given the masses as much privilege as is sufficient, neither taking away from their honor nor adding to it. And as for those who had power and were envied for their wealth, I saw to it that they too should suffer no indignity. I stood with a mighty shield cast round both sides and did not allow either to have an unjust victory. Unquote

 And that will take us to our second break. As always, not for an ad but for…

 [SFX: Random Facts!]

 Everyone’s heard of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Solon appears in a much lesser-known list, the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. The list appears for the first time in one of Plato’s dialogues, the Protagoras, and it includes seven men of the 7th and 6th centuries who were known for their wisdom and often their political acumen. Quite a few later writers offered their own versions of the list. Plutarch even wrote a fictitious dialogue of the seven sages at a symposium. Some of the names vary from author to author, but Solon’s reputation was high enough that he appears in all of them. And that’s today’s random fact.

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 As if the debt crisis and constitutional reform weren’t enough, Solon had a far-reaching legislative agenda that touched different aspects of Athenian life. I’m making a kind of artificial division here, because the Greeks never really distinguished between a state’s constitution and its laws. It was all part of the same package. Still, there are measures that we wouldn’t consider constitutional, but that had a significant impact on the future of Athens. So this section will be a sort of grab bag of miscellaneous Solonian laws, with an emphasis on those meant to spur trade and economic growth.

 To start with, he reformed the standard weights and measures. Our information about this is very murky, because authorities like Aristotle talked about it in terms of coinage, which didn’t exist in Athens during Solon’s time. Scholars have spilled a lot of ink arguing over exactly what he did, and I honestly don’t have the bandwidth to sift through all the scraps of evidence that would end up being inconclusive anyway. But to put it simply, he took Athens off an old standard that traced all the way back to the tyrant Pheidon of Argos and adopted the Euboean standard, which was more widely used in overseas trade. Remember, Solon was involved in trade himself, and he must have seen a need for reducing friction in overseas commerce. The historian Victor Ehrenberg, in his book From Solon to Socrates, sums it up neatly. Quote: “It is clear that Solon, by fighting the trade competition of places such as Corinth, Aegina, Megara, and perhaps Chalcis, prepared the way for the prosperity of sixth- and fifth-century Athens.” Unquote.

It seems to me that Solon had an exceptional kind of insight into the importance of trade and crafts for his city’s future. As essential as agriculture was, Attica didn’t have a lot of top-notch farmland. It was never going to be a grain-producing powerhouse like some of the Greek cities over in Italy and Sicily. But it had great land for growing olives, and it had other valuable resources, like excellent clay for pottery and quarries with fine marble. His regulations on trade are designed to extract the most benefit from both agriculture and craft. He outlawed the export of grain, which was always badly needed in Athens, and made olive oil the one agricultural product that could be exported. Olive oil was in good supply, so the profit margin must have been good. And the best oil was also shipped in fine pottery, so potters and painters would get a boost too.

 Other legislation specifically targets the development of craft industries. Solon passed a law that fathers had to make sure their sons learned a trade. I’m not sure how that would apply to the leisure class, and I’d guess that for farm families, farming would count as a trade. But otherwise, if you were an Athenian man, you had to make sure your son learned a craft to earn his living. The way the law is framed is interesting too. It was a very strong cultural value in ancient Greece that when your parents got old, you were expected to look after them. Solon’s law stated that if a father didn’t make sure his son learned a trade, the son was under no obligation to take care of him later in life. I have to wonder what Solon would say about allowing your kid to major in ancient history. But I digress. 

 The boldest move he made in promoting crafts was the way he opened the door to immigrants from other Greek cities. He actually offered Athenian citizenship to skilled craftsmen who would come to Athens and set up shop there. That was very unusual. Ancient Greeks guarded their citizenship jealously and only on the rarest occasions opened it to outsiders. I’m sure Solon’s move must have been controversial at the time. But if nothing else, it shows what enormous importance he placed on promoting craft industries for the future economic growth of Athens.

 One of the challenges to understanding Solon’s legislation is that later Athenian orators and politicians often tried to score points by claiming that this or that law was the great man’s work. So it’s sometimes hard to tell whether a particular law originated with him or not. But among those that are considered genuine, a lot of them have to do with the family, and especially with preserving the oikos, the household, as the fundamental social unit within the state. So he created laws on inheritance with that in mind. For example, in ancient Greece the question sometimes arose of how to deal with an heiress. In other words, if a family had a daughter but no legitimate male heirs, how would the laws of inheritance apply to her? Not just in terms of inheriting wealth, but also of preserving her family’s bloodline. Solon established rules of marriage and guardianship for heiresses aimed at making sure her oikos wouldn’t die out. There were also sumptuary laws that aimed at reducing class strife by putting limits on conspicuous displays of wealth. Grandiose funerals were a common way for rich families to show off their affluence, so he imposed strict limits on things like when a funeral procession could take place, how long it could last, what could be worn, and even the kinds of food that could be brought to the procession.

 The last specific law I’ll mention has to do with participation in public life. Plutarch describes it better than I can, so here’s his account as translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. Quote:

 Among Solon’s other laws there is one very peculiar and unexpected one, which decrees the disenfranchisement of any citizen who, in the event of a revolution, does not take one side or the other. Solon’s intention was evidently that men should not remain indifferent or apathetic to the public interest or safeguard their private affairs while congratulating themselves upon having nothing to do with the disorders and misfortunes of their country; he wished instead to encourage them to attach themselves at once to the better cause, share its dangers, and give it their support, not to sit back in safety waiting to see which side would win. Unquote

 If it sounds weird that you could lose your citizenship just for not taking sides, it seemed weird to Plutarch too. But the spirit of the law is in keeping with that very Greek idea that a citizen is by definition involved in politics.

 Well, once Solon had made his laws, they were displayed in public for all to see. They were inscribed on wooden plaques and mounted on a sort of spinner rack so that anyone who could read could consult them easily. According to ancient authorities, at the end of his term the council and the thesmothetes — those guardians of the laws — took a solemn oath to keep his legislation in place. And then he got out of town. No doubt, his reforms had made a lot of people mad. He hadn’t redistributed the land, as the lower class wanted. And his cancellation of debts must have meant big losses for some of the wealthy. In a one-line fragment from one of his poems, he says, quote: “In matters of great importance, it is hard to please everyone.” Unquote. So, to avoid the constant pressure of people from both sides trying to get him to undo this or that measure, he took off on a world tour for the next ten years. And that period of his life gave rise to a whole body of legends about how he met with the wisest men of Egypt and other places. If you listened to episode 14 on the polis, you may remember the classic story of his visit to king Croesus of Lydia — which on chronological grounds almost certainly never could have happened.

 Some ancient authors looked at Solon’s reforms and said he founded the Athenian democracy. They were jumping the gun. Solon’s constitution was not democratic. Political privilege was still very much tied to wealth. Modern authors, on the other hand, often go out of their way to say he was a “middle of the road” leader. And he certainly represented himself that way in his poetry. But if we focus only on his moderation, we’re glossing over how revolutionary many of his acts were. Things like canceling debts; breaking the nobles’ monopoly on public offices; granting citizenship to foreign-born craftsmen; and establishing a lawcourt that all citizens could access and participate in. It took an extraordinary circumstance and, I think, an unusually gifted individual to push all of that through. I’m sure Solon considered many of those steps necessary to keep Athens from falling into a tyranny. Unfortunately, he lived long enough to see his hopes dashed. Even after his reforms, class divisions and infighting among the nobles continued, culminating in the rise of an Athenian tyrant. 

 But that’s a story for another episode. For now, that concludes episode 20. If you have questions, comments, additions, or corrections, I’m more than happy to receive those by email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com or on Instagram or Facebook. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well!