This is a survey of ancient Greek history from the Bronze Age to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Along with studying the most important events and personalities, we will consider broader issues such as political and cultural values and methods of historical interpretation.
Athens 2 - Solon: Poetry, Politics and Economics
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The Ancient Greeks
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From the lesson
Two City-States: Sparta and Athens
In Module 3 we will analyze some major political developments in the Archaic Age, which were largely responses to the huge societal changes discussed in Module 2. We will focus on Sparta and Athens. Sparta evolved into a unique hoplite-polis, famed for strict discipline and military prowess. Athens followed a very different path, showing the first traces of democracy. We will also observe how tyrannies arose in many poleis, often, paradoxically, to the community’s benefit. In fact we can now consider the historical effect of individual leaders, like the renowned lawgivers, Lycurgus of Sparta and Solon of Athens. Both men came to be revered as the “founding fathers” of their poleis. Both men also belonged to the legendary Seven Sages, who were famed for their wisdom. The module concludes with a consideration of Peisistratos, who ruled Athens as a tyrant in the mid-6th-century BCE and led the Athenians to new levels of power and prosperity.
Meet the Instructors
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
Classical Studies
When we talked about tyranny, we talked about the circumstances that made a state
or a community ripe for a tyranny. That is, an entrenched, old elite.
Controlled most of the good land, controlled political and legal processes,
etcetera. In some ways, the situation at Corinth
with Cypselus, and then with his son Periander, is a sort of paradigm for how
tyranny works. In Athens, we talked about the domination
of the clans who called themselves the Eupatrids, that is those of good fathers.
And they, like the elites elsewhere, have established a very tight control over the
most important resources of the state. What happened toward the end of the 7th
and the beginning of the 6th century, was some kind of economic crisis.
We're not quite sure exactly what form it took, because this became a topic for
debate much later and all of our sources are from later, most of our sources are
from later, so it's difficult to tell exactly what was happening.
But, what seems to be the standard view is that there had grown alongside the elite,
a large class of citizens of farmers, who were impoverished, and not only
impoverished, but were in a kind of debt bondage, that is owing large debts to
their wealthier neighbors. This has been discussed over and over and
over again. Some people think that this is a result of
the new economic factors of the time, the rise of movable wealth, which we also
talked about. Others have argued that this is an old
form of sort of patron and client relations which had just got out of hand,
things had just gone too far so that the clients were really unable to persist in
paying back their debts, and this created tremendous social tension.
Enter Solon, we've talked about him already as a paradigm of the lawgiver as a
member of the seven sages as one of the founders of the Athenian civic identity.
Talk about all of that a little bit more as we go on, and here, you have, yeah,
another picture of a bearded man. They get pretty indistinguishable I
imagine for you, but this is a bust of Solon and the traditional date for Solon's
reforms is 594 BCE. We have a few sources for Solon, we have
the account in Herodotus, we have the document called the Constitution of
Athens, which is ascribed to Aristotle, may or may not be by him, but contains a
lot of important, although, always contentious information.
We have Plutarch's Life of Solon which was written much, much later, some 600 years
after Solon lived. And perhaps, most important we have
Solon's own poetry persevered in a variety of sources, because on top of everything
else, Solon was a poet. What was his background?
The sources tell us that he was a middle citizen, some say that he was a merchant
who traveled widely. I think this is extremely unlikely.
He may have been a merchant, but he was also clearly a member of the elite,
because otherwise, they wouldn't have chosen him to act as a sort of reformer
for the state or for the constitution. However, in terms of the legends of the
lawgivers, being a legend is good, because it means he can travel around from place,
to place, to place, and observe peoples customs.
His reforms were widespread. We can begin by talking about the economic
group reforms, they had grown as I said, this class of debtors and the term that is
applied to them is Hectemor, which means quite literally a sixth share or a sixth
partner. This seems to imply that annually, the
debtor owed 1 6th of the product of his land or his flocks to the creditor, maybe
so, maybe not. Again, this term is a little bit of
illusive, but what Solon did is to talk about the boundary stones that marked off
the debtors land. We have to clarify something here, which
is that, at this time, if a debtor couldn't pay, he could be sold into
slavery or he might just flee abroad. Solon, in his poems, talks about plucking
the boundary stones from the black breast of earth and bringing back to Athens,
Athenians who had been a, abroad for so long that they'd forgotten how to speak
Greek. Maybe an exaggeration, but if not, what
we're seeing here is a huge change, and it takes the form of what's called the
Seisachtheia, which means quite literally the shaking off of burdens.
Like everything else, this is controversial.
Most people interpret it as a one time cancellation of debt.
Once and once only, all of the books were wiped clean, the debt, the debtors were
relieved of their burden and could start over.
Later on, this becomes a [laugh] a topic of some controversy and some ancient
sources say, no, no, no, it wasn't really a cancellation of debt.
He really just reduced the interest rate as if it were just some sort of credit
card bargain. I don't think so, I think it was actually
the more radical version. Why the debtors would want this is clear,
why would the creditors want it? Why would the members of the old elite,
the Eupatrid landholders want this? The answer I think is equally clear,
because it staved off revolution. The demand for land reform is something
that becomes more and more intense as big history goes on and may have been around
in a kind of nascent form at this time. It's been claimed that part of the reason
for death bondage was that the person who incurred the death took it on himself,
because the land didn't really belong to him.
It belonged to his ancestors who were buried on it and to his descendants who
would inherit it. And so, he was, in a way, he was just
holding it and so land could not, in fact, be transferred from one person to another.
This was a thesis that held sway for quite a long time.
No matter what, it's clear that Solon addressed this head on with the shaking
off of debts. And, there is an additional and very
important provision here, which is ,he also passed a law, that from now on, no
Athenian could hold another Athenian as a slave.
We don't want to think of this as what in America we call in the Emancipation
Proclamation. What this means is that, from now on,
slaves were always and only others from somewhere else.
This is, it can be construed as a, sort of set of boundaries, both internal and
external. The boundaries on the land, but also and
very decisively, the boundaries between the citizen and the slave.
I put up an example here, of a boundary stone.
This is a much later one, it's in fact, a civic one.
But if you look closely, I think you, you can see the word Horos across the top that
just gives you the idea of what these things look like.
And then, Solon also had, along with the kind of major economic reforms, a set of
economically related political reforms. He established a division of four property
classes. There were the pentakosiomedimnoi, which
is those people whose property produced 500 measures, presumably of grain, and
olives, and grapes are old triad. Then, the hippeis, which means literally
horsemen or knights, and Aristotle's scheme, he works it out so that if the 500
measure men were at the top, next were 300, who were the horsemen and knights.
Then comes the zeugitai, which means the men that who had, who were yoked and, or
the yokemen who were 200 measures or more. Then the thetes was everybody else that is
none of the above. Now, this categorization is clearly
artificial, it clearly doesn't really work.
You have the 500 measure men, okay, that's fine, they were probably the traditionally
wealthy landowners. The knights were prosperous, that is
prosperous enough to afford cavalry outfit.
We talked about this a little bit as well. Always, you know, to outfit yourself as a
hoplite was expensive enough to outfit yourself as a knight was much more
expensive. The zeugitai were probably the relatively
well-to-do farmers who could afford hoplite armor.
Some people have suggested that the term means that they were yoked together in the
hoplite phalanx, this seems to me to be impossible.
But, finally, you have the thetes who were the subsistence farmers.
So these economic categories were there. And, what we're doing is replacing, or
what Solon is doing, is replacing the criterion of birth with a criterion of
wealth and he linked this to access t political office.
The top offices in the state that have archon and treasurer were limited to
members of the top property class. The other important offices were limited
to the top two, the 500 measure men and the knights.
But, all citizens have the right to participate in the assembly and this is
important as well. There is a mysterious council of 400 that
is ascribed to Solon. It may have existed, it may not have.
If it did, it left no trace. But, I'm just mentioning it now, because
we've talked about king council and assembly, talked about how the functions
of the King were divided among those with the magistrates and etcetera.
What the system did was simultaneously preserve some of the old privileges and to
allow for social mobility. Aristotle in, if it's him.
Aristotle, let's call him that, for the constitution of Athens, reports the he saw
a dedicatory statue on the Acropolis from one man who said, I dedicate this on
having risen from the thetic class to the class of knights.
So that, you have the possibility there to make money, to rise through the ranks, and
this takes into account now, the new economic realities.
Again, just to repeat myself very quickly. You're replacing a standard of birth, or
inheritance, or elite genes with now something that recognizes some of the new
economic realities. There were two other very important
reforms that Solon introduced. One of them is what I've put up here as
the right of legal intervention, which means that any citizen could intervene on
behalf of any other citizen legally. This is a tremendous advance in terms of a
sense of mutual responsibility among all the members of the community.
Again, we're seeing in practice, this notion of the Egalitarian ideal that we
are all somehow as citizens at least that is as free, native born adult males, we
don't have to keep repeating that. But nonetheless, that all of us are
somehow responsible for each other. And there was also, and finally, the right
to transfer a case, before verdict was rendered, from a magistrate, that is if a
magistrate was hearing your case, you could say, no, I want it heard by a jury
of my citizen peers. Again, we have this sense of mutual
responsibility of being able to call on those who are like us to make a decision
in a law court that might affect something like a deed or an inheritance.
Some important familiar process that is now given a legal and civic identity.
How did Solon promote his reforms? Well, here's where we loop back to his
being a poet. We don't want to think of him as some sort
of street corner crank just standing there singing out his verses.
This is comic, but not exact. Instead, what we think of, what we should
think of is Solon, in a very special circumstance, and we'll talk about this
later on, called a symposium, which is a formalized drinking party for the elite,
in which one of the key elements was the recitation of poetry.
And it seems that Solon participated there and he talks about his own activity and he
talks about it with a sort of measured pride.
He said, I gave everybody what they were entitled to, neithertoo much, nor too
little. And repeatedly refers to himself as being
in the center, is sometimes in the center, like a boundary stone, and sometimes in
one vivid image. He describes himself as a wolf surrounded
by hunters fending them off. He also says and quite explicitly that he
had the opportunity to make himself tyrant, but passed it up.
He is, I think, the first three-dimensional, fully-realized, vivid
historical character that we have seen. And even so, and this is another caution,
you can see with all the evidence that we have about him, so many things still
remain uncertain. What is certain however, is that he
becomes a figure of an enormous importance in the Athenian ideology.
Later on, when people wanted to undertake a conservative revolution, they talked
about going to back to the laws of Solon. And in the popular imagination, he
becomes, as we have seen one of the Seven Sages, and after he, as a good lawgiver,
takes leave of his community after having passed his code.
He goes to places like Lydia and visits the enormously rich King Croesus here in
the wonderful 17th century painting. Solon, it might be said, has been said, I
think it should be said in some ways, set the terms for or laid the groundwork for
the development of Athenian democracy. Where it went to next is where we will go
to from here.
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