In Our Time - Solon the Lawgiver

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Solon, who was elected archon or chief magistrate of Athens in 594 BC: some see him as the father of Athenian democracy. In the first years of the 6th century BC, the city state of Athens was in crisis. The lower orders of society were ravaged by debt, to the point where some were being forced into slavery. An oppressive law code mandated the death penalty for everything from murder to petty theft. There was a real danger that the city could fall into either tyranny or civil war.Solon instituted a programme of reforms that transformed Athens’ political and legal systems, its society and economy, so that later generations referred to him as Solon the Lawgiver. WithMelissa Lane Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton UniversityHans van Wees Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College Londonand William Allan Professor of Greek and McConnell Laing Tutorial Fellow in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at University College, University of Oxford Producer Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in the first years of the 6th century BC, the Greek city state of Athens was in crisis. The lower orders of society were ravaged by debt

to the point where some of them were being forced into slavery. An oppressive law code mandated the death penalty for everything from murder to petty theft. There was a real danger that the city could fall into either tyranny or civil war. In 594 BC, a man named Solon was the elected Arcon or chief magistrate. He instituted a program of reforms

that transformed Athens' political and legal systems, its society and economy, so that later generation is referred to him as Solon the lawgiver. Some see him as the father of Athenian democracy. with me to discuss Solon the lawgiver are Hans Van Wies, Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London, William Allen, Professor of Greek,

and McConnell Lang tutorial fellow in Greek and Latin languages and literature at University of College Oxford, and Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Melissa Lane, we think Solomon was born around 630 BC in Athens. What was Greece like at the time? So Solon is born into the middle of the archaic period of Greek history. So that's traditionally dated to begin in 776 towards the start of the 8th century

with the first Olympic Games. And that was a couple of centuries after the Mycenaean palace societies had collapsed. And then the archaic period stretches forward towards the 5th century, which then is followed by the classical period. So in Solon's time, the Pallas, the city-state, was really taking shape across the Greek area. And it was domic. largely in most places by elite families, aristocratic families, that drew their wealth largely from the land. They enjoyed symposia where there would be oral poetry. It was still, to a great extent, an oral culture. But also we have the emergence of alphabetic writing for Greece in this period. And so shortly before Solon's birth, we have the evidence of the first written laws

in Greece. This could be roughly called 200 years before the Golden Age of Greece. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. What do we know about Solon's family, if anything, on his early life? So we know a remarkable amount about Solon, actually probably more than anyone else in the archaic period. He was born into one of these noble families,

his family traced. What did a noble family mean in that time? So it was both bloodlines, so his father traced his lineage to one of the legendary kings of Athens, but it was also wealth, having this landed wealth. But what's unusual about Solon is we're not sure

why, but he also chose to go into trade. And so he seems to have done very well in trade. It meant that he traveled a good deal. He gained wisdom. Perhaps that's when he started composing poetry. And it was his role as a poet that brought him into political life, it seems initially as a young man. He used his poetry to galvanize Athens into a war to recover the island of Salamis, which was a major trading post. It's just outside Athens, really, wasn't it? That's right. What sort of shape as Athens. Can you give this as some idea of how big it was, how many people lived there? So it's one of the largest societies in Greece, one of the largest Paulist communities, both in terms of its geographical extent and also in terms of its population. About 20% of the people were in some way, perhaps in some level of the elite, more wealthy.

And then there was a very large proportion of people who might have been peasants or poor artisans. and were largely under the thumb of the elites in this period to varying degrees. People write about the imminent breakdown of the society at that time. Can you give us some idea of how that came about and how dangerous it was? Yeah, so it's a little bit hard to know some of our best evidences actually from Solon's own poetry, which was originally oral and then gets written down much later. But it does seem that there was intra-elite conflict, so there had been an attempt at a tyranny in Athens around the time of.

Solon's birth and there was still a lot of tension between the two sides of that struggle. There was economic pressure because people were now making money in new ways, so there were wealthy families that were kind of pushing their way into the elite, as it were. And then there was the pressure on the poor, different degrees of vulnerability even to debt slavery, where they would secure their debts on their person and effectively be enslaved until they could actually pay them off. Some people fled Athens, it seems, in order to escape that sort of economic bankruptcy. So slavery was effective life there. Was it quite a big section of the community as far as you know?

So these people were not slaves as we think of the sort of slaves of classical Athens. The debt slavery would typically be temporary if one could sort of work it off. You got into debt. And how did that lead to slavery? Well, so, I mean, while you were indebted in this way, then you lost the ability to work freely and amass wealth. you were under the thumb economically and had to pay it off. But in theory you could pay it off. There were other people who were kind of slaves and had very little, if any, chance of being freed.

Thank you. Hans van Wies, Greek was divided into city-states. Can you give the list of some idea of the different political systems around that time? Yeah, it was a very volatile time, I think. So the political systems changed frequently. typically you would either have an oligarchy of some sort or what the Greek called tyranny. Tyranny, not being quite what we mean by that word, but a monarchical regime

where power is exercised, established or exercised in less traditional ways. It's interesting for this distinction. Why was it called tyrannid? But you say it wasn't really a tyranny. What's going on? Right, right. The origin of the word tyranny, tyrannos is the Greek word.

It's thought to be essentially a non-Greek equivalent for king or rindsaying. ruler, it acquired this notion of despotic, you know, violent rule later on when in the classical period in Greece, people started really disliking the whole idea of monarchical rule. And so, by definition, monarch was also a tyrant in our sense. But originally it seems to have been, yes, as I say, a sort of synonym for ruler. Was Athens one of the more enlightened and the city states, many of cities states, were the huge differences between them? Apart from in size, I think Athens at that point was quite similar to many other city-states.

So with the possible exception of Sparta, it's just bigger as a political community than anything else in, well, almost everywhere in Greece. But I think otherwise economic conditions, political conditions, really not that unusual for its time. The problem with slavery, the inequality, the sort of oligarchic nature of the regime, the threat of tyranny in Athens itself that Melissa just mentioned,

these are all there. And so in the background that Solon comes, into is typical of the Greek world at the time, which is really in crisis, I think, it's fair to say, around 600 BC, there's a very widespread social, economic and political crisis in the Greek world. What do we know about the political history of Athens before Solon's time? What did it come into mend? Right, right. Well, the political history, it's slightly tricky to reconstruct that. A major source for the Athenian political system before Solon actually has a constitution of Draco, is what that's called, and it's a

very deep described. Drago is in Draconian. Yes, yes, that Draco, the one who, it's a historical figure who, he's also a lawgiver, but he issued that code of laws that you mentioned in your introduction, this very bloody one. He's also credited by later sources with a constitutional structure that's described for us. That actually doesn't sound plausible. There's a lot of detail. It all sounds anachronistic.

So we think people later invented an idea of what Draco's constitutional. institution might have been like. So in that respect, it's difficult to know, but we know a bit about some of the political institutions, which again, suggests a quite closed oligarchy. There's a council known as the Council of the Ariopagus, which seems to work by basically appointing magistrates who are then co-opted after their term of office into the council. So it's a very cozy arrangement. And so that creates almost inevitably sort of closed oligarchy. Some of these families seem to call themselves or have called themselves the Eupatrodite, the descendants of good father, so they claim to be a sort of aristocracy of birth.

But whether that is true or just, you know, advertising on their part, it's hard to tell. Was the condition of the poorer, the poorer class, was it as devastating, as has already been mentioned? Can you just be a bit more graphic about that, please? Yeah, I can certainly try. Solon actually is quite a good job of making it graphic in his poetry. So he talks about this political conflict, and then he says, and the poor, as a result of all that's going on,

the poor end up abroad in shackles, you know, in chains sold into slavery. And that's one of the things that he singles out as an abuse of the time and that he wants to address. Maybe we would distinguish between the two kinds of slavery. One is the debt bondage that Melissa referred to, so where you have to work off your debt for your creditor. But the other is actually where your creditor is legally entitled to seize your person or your children or your wife

and sell you as a slave abroad somewhere and there's no coming back from that normally. So that is a very serious problem at the time. William Allen, a big switch now. What role did writing play in Greece at this period and how radical was it that it arrived at that time? So writing was used for a variety of purposes. You have, for example, inscriptions on stone

of important state documents, laws and decrees, so they'd be publicly visible and a permanent record of the community's decisions. And then you have writing on papyrus in ink, which would be used for things like So-On's poetry. So the earliest Greek literature we've got is about a century before So-Lon, about 700 BC. You've got the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the important thing about writing is very few people can read and write. Literacy is the preserve of a highly educated elite. So that most people's experience of poetry and literature would be in performance.

And Solon is writing for live performance. And that explains that to us weird thing that this politician and legislator is defending his reforms in poetry, not prose. But this is a good... Why is that? Prose hasn't caught on at that stage. That's right. So he's writing in the 590s. It's a good hundred years before prose establishes itself as the main medium for the dissemination of political, philosophical wisdom.

Is this poetry spoken dry or is you accompanied by a musical instrument? It depends if you've got an Allos player, so it's a kind of oboe-like instrument, double-obo instrument. If you happen to be able to afford one, then you might perform the elegiac poetry with the Alos, but it could be performed simply dry, as you say. So he's writing for performance, and performance requires poetry, not prose.

Poetry is more memorable than, than pros. It's more fun to listen to and so on seizes on that as a more viable medium for reaching the largest audience possible and getting his message across. You say it's basically an illiterate society and he puts up these great boards right around the city with his new laws written on them.

And they say they're told for hundreds of years. Yeah. So some of the population would be literate. You would have different levels of literacy. You'd have a certain amount of functional literacy people involved in trade and business could be literate, literate to a point. But obviously the majority of the poorer citizens would not

be literate and they'd actually have to ask someone to tell them what that law was and they'd have to have an intermediary who was literate. We'd thrown away this word Archon, he became an Archon. What's an Arcon? So Arcon is a Greek word for ruler. By Solon's time

it means the chief civil magistrate. The Arcon's appointed annually as are the other two. By whom? By the people. So what happens when he becomes Arcones, it's this crisis where you've got the poor resenting the wealth of the aristocrity, the rise up, a civil war might happen. And the ancient sources say that both sides agreed to appoint him as an Arcon and the Greek word is the Dalactes are reconciler. So they wanted him to reconcile the war and factions and prevent civil war. What did he done to make him chosen for that role?

I think it's in part what we were saying before he was already known as a poet, but I think his role in trade also meant that he probably had more social contacts more widely. So he understood the position of people who were in trade. He had interacted with them, whereas some of the elites who were only living off their land wouldn't have known those people. So he had a wider range of social contacts and therefore might have been trusted more widely. Now, just to add to that, I think Melissa mentioned the songs or poems that so long composed about the war over Salamis. So Salamis is its island really close to Athens, which they'd lost shortly before his time to their neighbour, Megara.

And so one of the things he seems to have done is really get people going and stimulate this patriotic war to recover lost territory. And that will also have been a factor that made him popular because they did succeed in getting that island back. Melissa, so he comes at a time of crisis. Does he come into power because of the crisis or is just a coincidence? No, I think as Bill mentioned, it's significant that Archon was an established role that people were chosen for annually. But the idea that he was also asked to be a reconciler, or one can also translate that word, an arbitrator or a mediator, means that he was really charged with a special sort of pivotal moment and then acted also as a lawgiver. So as you mentioned at the beginning, replace the code of Draco with these new laws.

And the publicity around the new laws, I think even if people couldn't read them, the fact that you could see that they were written up on these wooden boards all over the city meant that a sort of substantial change had happened and people would have been aware of that. Why did people think he was going to be successful? I mean, that's an interesting question. I think because he had this reputation for wisdom, so later he would be remembered as one of the seven. wise men of all of Greece. So it's a very distinctive role. He clearly, you know, had a kind of reputation as a poet and, and a wise person. And I think part of the wisdom will be that he, I think he appealed to the people who were in this, in this debt, you know, bondage and debt crisis, because some of his early poems, clearly before his reforms, you know, flag this up and do,

they do criticize the elite and say that the elites are greedy, that they, you know, they overindulge at the expense of the rest of the community. So that will have made him quite popular, you know, an elite person expressing these more popular sentiments will make him accessible, I guess, acceptable rather, to the population as a potential mediator. Okay, let's take with you and go, may a bit more particular in describing what you did.

Let's start with his economic reforms. What did he do there that mattered? It made a difference, I mean. Right. Well, the most obvious thing, and then the sort of least contested thing is that he forbade the enslavement of people for debt. So creditors are no longer allowed to sell people in order to make their money back.

That is sort of agreed by all. Beyond that, it's a bit controversial, but most ancient sources agreed that he cancelled all debts, so all existing outstanding debt. Just like that. Yes, they did think that was really radical. And, you know, for some classical authors, that was too radical, really. And they tried to come up with a different scenario.

But he got it through? Yes, he got that through, apparently. Against some resistance, it would seem, because he writes these poems later on where he sort of defends his actions against those who thought that he went too far or not far enough. He says if anybody else had done it, you'd have been in far worse.

Absolutely, exactly. He said it would have been a bloodshed in the streets if it hadn't been me. So he does really suggest there were very serious tensions. So he draws up these economic, rules. How does he implement them? Who are those civil service? What's going on? No, there's really no civil service to speak or for it's very difficult to know how he did that.

One element is that he got people to swear, I guess, that they would abide by his rulings and by his legislation. And taking oath was taken very seriously. Did they swear by the gods? Yes, yeah, absolutely. So that counts very heavily. But he does also say, one of his poems, he said he achieved all this by combining force and justice, which is an interesting phrase. And so he's saying he did have to use violence, I think, but in a good cause. But what form that took? It's very hard to tell. He doesn't elaborate. So he got these

economic reforms through. We know about abolishing the debt. What else did the economic reforms do? So beyond that, he, again, most of what we know comes from one of Solon's own poems. And one of the things he says is that he freed, he liberated the land by, removing boundary stones. And there's a whole industry of scholarship trying to work out what he meant by that. It could just be that land was mortgaged as part of the whole debt crisis

and that he, you know, by counselling the debt that land was free. So he turned it back to common land? That is definitely a possibility of one I personally favour, actually, that he returned common land to common use and that could have made a big difference. What he didn't do, and he says explicitly,

is redistribute the land. That's the other the two radical things that the reform was doing Greece later on is cancelled debt and redistribute land. And our later sources make it very clear that Solon definitely did not redistribute with land. Did that get him more favour by not doing that? I think that's all he could get away with. I mean, the people were, you know, I would have liked him to redistribute land and do more. But he's clearly faced with an entrenched elite whose land it is,

that don't want him to go that far. So these poems after his reforms are really all about that, where he's saying, you know, the elite should be glad. it didn't go further and the people should be glad that I didn't go further the other way. Impartial to a fault, perhaps. Right, he emphasises that a great deal. Bill, Bill, Alan, can we now talk about his political reforms? Yes, I think the core of the political reforms was this quite radical innovation of opening up access to the Assembly.

So the Assembly was a participatory democracy and the Assembly was where he went to speak and to vote and to make decisions. and he opens up access to the Assembly to all Athenian citizens, even the poorest class. Everybody? Yes, and that was a huge... Men and women are just men. No, just men. We're talking about an Athenian citizen as an adult male, not women or slaves. That was a hugely revolutionary move.

He could have gone further and said the poorest class can also hold office, so he didn't go that far. But by granting them access to the Assembly, he's really at the start of this hugely influential idea that dominates democratic thought until today, which is that every citizen matters. It doesn't matter how rich you are, how poor you are, whether you own land and property or not. You matter, you have a right to participate in the political community. As long as you're an adult male, you should participate.

And you cannot be sold into slavery. You are a free citizen. And that's a hugely influential idea for many centuries to come. Have there been any idea how that's. idea was received? It was welcomed by some and strongly resented by others. So the people who resented it were the aristocrats of an oligarchic bent who believed that power should be vested in a much smaller group.

And in later Greek history, you have oligarchic revolutions this happened. In Athens in the last decade of the 5th century BC, where groups of oligarchs would topple the democracy. And actually, when they did that, some of them claimed Solon's authority. for it and said they were going back to an ancestral constitutional constitution that he had embraced because they saw him through a much more conservative lens than the Democrats did. For the Democrats, he's the

founding father of democracy. So there's a tussle over his legacy for many centuries to come. What effect did these political reforms of his have on Athens? Well, in the short term, they stave off civil war, but in the medium term it's kind of in vain because, as we've already already alluded to, the tyranny rises and you've got Athens dominated for 50 years by the tyrant Pisistratus and his sons

until they're kicked out in 510 BC and then a guy called Kleistines comes along in 508 and 507 who's the second most important figure after so on arguably more important but he institutes what we think of as the classical form of Athenian democracy that goes even further. So what happens

that's different? You have much even more encouragement for poor citizens to participate. So you have people being paid to serve on the jury, being paid to attend the assembly, even poorer farmers. Melissa, let's switch to the law now. What did you do to the legal? We've talked a little bit about politics. Now let's talk

a little more about the legal system. So the sole on laws got stuck in there, didn't they? And what? Yeah, so he's known as a poet and as a lawgiver. As we've mentioned in his laws, there are dozens of them and they survive written up on these boards for centuries and remain part of the Athenian Law Code. So some of the other legal reforms go in the same direction of giving more power to the people. So for example, allowing popular courts to hear appeals from decisions of the more elite magistrates,

also giving any citizen the right to bring a public lawsuit in the interest of the city-state. Was this happening anywhere else in Greece? No, this is really distinctive of Athens. and something that makes Solon stand out. There are lawgivers in a number of Greek cities around this time, but some of these particular reforms. Having said that, there were other laws that Solon borrows from other societies, even from Egypt, for example, he said to have borrowed a law

requiring every male citizen to declare the sources of their livelihood as a kind of economic law. And he reformed laws in a number of other areas to do with funerals, inheritance, immigration. So he fostered the immigration into Athens of skilled craftspersons. That was significant. He, on the other hand, banned agricultural exports except for olive oil, which also sort of fostered elements of the economy and trade.

So, you know, he was really, his reforms extended across the private and public domain. They were really significant in reshaping the society. Are we talking about somebody who took the public with him on these reforms? I mean, as far as we can tell, so, you know, as was mentioned before, when you asked Hans, how did he, you know, ensure the success of his laws? One thing that he did was that he not only asked the people to swear as an oath, as was mentioned, but he also then said that he would leave Athens for 10 years. And this is a very significant thing that divides him from the tyrant, because the tyrannical figures, even if they were sometimes somewhat benevolent, they stayed and sort of maintained power in their own hands. whereas Solon as a lawgiver kind of gives the laws and then says, I'm going to go away so that I can't personally benefit or profit from these laws,

and you can have faith that they weren't made for my own interest. And I think that's very significant in enabling the laws to really bed down and remain in force. How rare was that, Hans? Very, I think. And Solon, in several of his poems, makes that point. He's very pleased with himself, I think, about that, that he had the strength of will to step away. from tyranny. He claims that people

wanted him to seize the tyranny, presumably the common people, you know, as opposed to the elite. And again, he says that that would have, you know, I could have done that, but I didn't. And that is a sign of restraint. And certainly all the other stories we hear about politics in Greece suggest that people would have indeed leapt at the opportunity to make themselves king, effectively, of their cities. So that is a remarkable thing. And I think it's probably one of the main

reasons why Solon also got her reputation as one of the so-called seven sages, like these seven wise men of the Greek world. He was one of them, and I imagine it's not least because he, one of the few, or maybe the only one, that stepped away from tyranny. It is extraordinary, though, given the volatility that had preceded him, but he walked away for ten years on time, and they just put in the reforms. And did he come back and live all was one in the garden? Not exactly.

There's an account that we have that talks about various crises, actually specifically to do with the election of the Archon at the Chief Magistrate, where apparently that was meant to have been sorted by legislation, but that continues to be contentious. So there were people who refused to step down after their year of office. At one point there was a sort of compromise

where they picked Archons from different social groups to represent everyone. So it was not all plain sailing after those reforms. And as we mentioned, a little later on, there is this tyranny. There's a reversal to these factional politics, lots of infighting and then eventually someone seizing power again. So in that respect it didn't all go well. What happened when he came back?

Yet we're not really told except that we're told that and this is really 30 years or so after his reforms that he saw this tyrant by Cisteratus who's been mentioned emerging and warned people about that. But whether that's true, it's chronologically just about possible but he would have been very old at that time, but it's possible. There's one poem in which he seems to say that, more or less, telling people, there's a time coming now, but it's your own fault, you know, you shouldn't have trusted this guy.

So that made me one of his last poems if he genuinely referred to by Cistertus. But what happened in between the 30 years, we really don't know, I think. The stories don't tell us. But we do know quite a bit about his poetry, Bill Allen, I presume. So what poetry did he write, and who was the audience? and can you give us some, can you flesh that out? Yeah, so he's the first Athenian poet we have who survives. There's a whole century between him in Iskolis, the second, the great tragic dramatist.

He writes on a variety of topics, so we have fragments on travel, on food, on a homosexual desire. But it's mainly with the political poetry that survived. That's partly because he's a great political poet, and also because the ancient sources are primarily interested in sight and his poetry to prove his wisdom as a statesman. He is writing for different performance venues. He wants everybody to hear it. He wants the audience to be all Athenians.

So he's writing poetry that will appeal to a broad spectrum of the population. And he writes for all the different performance venues of poetry. So at one end of the spectrum, the symposium, the aristocratic drinking party. And there his persona in the poetry is, I'm an aristocrat. You're my fellow aristocrats. I've got some advice for you. Look, chaps, if you don't give up some of your power, some of your wealth, there's going to be an almighty revolution here.

You might lose everything. Whereas the poetry he's writing for more public festivals, more egalitarian in open settings, he's addressing the poorer citizens as well, and he's boasting of the fact that he liberated them from slavery and debt. It's not a bad thing to boast of, is it really? That's right.

And he also unusually revels in the fact that everybody hates him. So the poor hate him, because he didn't redistribute the land, and the wealthy hate him, because he's curtailed their privilege and power. And he actually wears that as a badge of pride. He's succeeded as a reconciler because everybody hates her.

Can you, is it possible give us two or three lines of his poetry or is, not in Greek, please, but in translation? Yeah, I mean, there are some wonderful images. There's an image in poem 5 where he says, I stood with my shield over both sides, allowing neither side an unjust victory. And there he's picturing himself as this heroic hop-light warrior in the first line of battle.

But paradoxically, he's not protecting just one side. He's protecting both sides, the rich and the poor. And the image there, he's playing with that hermeric hop-light image, or hemeic and hop-light image, to emphasise the fact that he's impartial and protects everyone. And you've got another one? A lovely image at the end of poem 36, where he says, I try to prevent civil war

and now you Athenians are turning on me and I have to defend myself like a wolf amongst a pack of dogs and again that's a lovely image because he's been the social the communitarian right the ultra social politician he's being treated like the anti-social predator the wolf they're the pack of dogs

have turned against him so he's got these lovely images that they're all geared towards proven that he's being treated unfairly and that his reforms were just but he's playing with these traditional images to underline that idea. I say, Melissa, can we continue with a poetry for a while and talk a bit more about the metaphors?

Yeah, so there are a number of other wonderful metaphors that he uses. So one of them is also to describe himself as a boundary stone that's set between the rich and the poor, demarcating the space for each of them. And I think that's quite important, again, when you asked, you know, what made him successful, what made people think that he could succeed. one of our later sources says he was asked, did you give the Athenians the best laws? And he says, I gave them the best that they would receive. So, you know, they might not be the best laws, but he's making them tolerable to both sides, even though both sides might not like them, as Bill was saying. Another image that he uses, again, to show that he didn't become a tyrant in the poems is to say, you know, another person might have tried to skim off the cream. But I didn't do that. I didn't try to skim the cream. I was sort of, again,

distributing fairly. So the sense that he's the sort of unique solo bulwark of civil peace, demarcating fair terms between rich and poor really pervades the poetry. Do we know anything about his popularity or his lack of it at the time? At the time was imposing these laws of his. Well, you know, I think we have to kind of infer from on the one hand the laws survive. So clearly, you know, he does strike a balance that people. are willing to live with. The images of himself as the wolf and so on, as Bill was saying,

suggests that, you know, there is opposition. You know, the elite, his fellow elite, might see him as having sold them out in some way, but the poor feel he didn't go far enough. He didn't redistribute the land, as Hans was saying before. So, you know, there seems to be both a sort of grudging acceptance in a way, you know, nobody loves him, but everyone's willing to accept him. And in a way, you know, it's perhaps the opposite of the saying that all political careers end in failure. In a way, he ended in success, but a success that, you know, no one kind of would have claimed for their own. Hans, can we talk about these wooden boards? Now, it said they stood for centuries.

Wouldn't they rot and all the rest of it? How did they stand for centuries? Yes, yeah. Well, they rot it eventually. And there's some references. There's a comic reference, admittedly, that says, you know, people are roasting their breakfast. barley corn on them now. Evidently by then they disintegrated.

But it is interesting that they were written on wood. And actually not strictly boards, I suppose. There seem to have been wooden blocks with more than one side with text on them, mounted on a frame on an axle so you could turn them around. So I guess the idea

is you have a lot of space to write lots of laws. And people can access them by turning the blocks. I mean it is striking because I don't know if any parallel for that of Greek laws being specifically written on wood or on that format. But on the other hand,

laws written on stone are actually pretty rare at this point still. I mean, that later on becomes a common thing. But the very earliest we know of from Crete are more or less the same generation, maybe a generation earlier where someone inscribed a law on a block of stone

for permanence. And that becomes increasingly common, as I say. But perhaps for a solon's time, the wooden text presumably white washed board with painted text on them, would have perhaps been the norm. And later on, Briggs still use that a lot for all kinds of public documents that needed to be advertised. Rather than to put it on stone, you paint it on a board. And they were put on the acropolis.

And so, you know, to give them a degree of sanctity, I guess. But they were later moved, apparently, this is what we're told anyway, into the agorah. So, you know, down from the acropolis into an even more public space. So yes, it is quite remarkable that they would last. Bill Allen, how successful are these reporters do we know? We do to some extent. So on the legal side, for example, his laws remained largely the foundation of the Athenian system for many centuries, many generations to come.

When the Athenians recodified their laws at the end of the 5th century, so 403 BC, they're said to have kept the greater part of So-Lon's laws. And if you look at the surviving judicial speeches, about 100 of them from the 4th century, the orators and the plaintiffs are still referring to their legal system as the Solonos Nomoy, the laws of Solon. So there's a remarkable durability there. On the political side, then I think there's a big, as I mentioned this key figure, Kleisthenes in 508 BC. Kleisthenes really is building on the institutions and the ideas that Solon first presented,

these absolutely core democratic ideas that you must have equal access to the Assembly and the law courts. And those two ideas, isonomia, equality before the law, equal access to the law, and democratia, the power of the people. They're already there and so on,

and Klyssinese gives them an extra boost and creates the classical form of democracy that we know. So it was foundational in that sense for Athenian democracy. Absolutely. And he was literally worshipped as a hero. So he enjoyed hero cult right through antiquity. Hero cult means you sacrifice an animal blood sacrifice

to the powerful dead. So he had hero cult shrines and he was worshipped as a powerful ancestor who would still protect and guide Athens from beyond the grave. Melissa. So well two thoughts. I mean one is I think that the idea that people have a significant role of power is there in Solon

but the word democratia is a fifth century. word. So that comes later, but many later authors retrojected and think that Solon was already laying the foundation kind of avant la letter of the democracy. The other thing that we haven't mentioned is that one of the important things that Solan had done was to reorganize the population, so to set up four property classes, and in particular perhaps introduce a top property class. But one of the reasons that was important was that it moved away from just birth to wealth. And so in a way, it opened things up because now you could be in a property class and have a share of higher political power if you'd made your fortune

as a traitor, as perhaps he had done, you know, even if you hadn't been born, an aristocrat, as he also had been. And Kleisthenes then reorganizes the people further and makes them into 10 tribes, which all kind of draw from different geographic parts of Athens and the countryside of Attica. So that's sort of organizing of the people to give them new affiliations, new identities, that's a very important part of kind of refounding the social identity as a lawgiver, both for Solon and then for what Kleisthenes also does. Those property classes are really interesting and complex, but a lot hangs on them, I think, in that, as Melissa says,

I mean, it is clear that they define access to political offers by wealth and not by birth, so that's a big change. But actually, how widely they allocate this, or how widely they share this power, it depends a lot on how you interpret these divided, lines, about which we are told partly the names of these classes and partly the property qualification

in quantitative indication. And the latter, if you work it out, actually, your other suggests that the property threshold was quite high, so maybe democratic, certainly, but a sort of a property elite democracy at this point, and that becomes wider

only later. Do we have any direct evidence that as a result of his laws? Athens generally became, in the general sense, richer, more powerful, stronger. You're not going away, Minnesota. No, I mean, I think so. I think as I mentioned, you know, he really took an interest in the economic situation in immigration and exports and inheritance law.

You know, he reformed all of these things. And so, you know, it's really from this period that Athens becomes really distinctive and different from other Greek Palaes. And, you know, within the next century, we really see its emergence to the point that it can, you know, a significant role alongside Sparta in leading the Greeks against the Persians in the early 5th century, and then we sort of really move into the heyday of the Athenian Empire after that. So Solon really is at the beginning of that rise of Athens over the next century or so. Does it make any sense, Bill, to talk of Solon's work as a cohesive ideology?

Yes. from the point of view of subsequent generations of Athenians, there's more than one ideology in the sense that the Democrats, if you ask a Democrat, he'll say, oh yeah, he's pro-democratic. If you ask a more conservative figure,

they'll claim him as his own. But if you strip aback those party politics, as it were, if you look at his words, the poetry that survived, then you can see a coherent body of thought, a coherent line, an ideology, if you like, which is built around these ideas

of the community, the cohesion of the community, the idea that the wealth of the community should be for the benefit of all, that it should be used moderately, and that everyone matters. Everybody has a right to participate in the political community. And this continues.

This is something he sets out. This is something he kicks into life and on it goes for the next two and a half thousand years. Indeed. You're nodding? Yes, Melissa. Yes. I mean, I think one of the things that does change, though, again, is that we've been stressing that Solon was making a boundary and a kind of balance between the rich and the poor. The rich already had the power and that he curbs them

and gives a share to the poor. Once you get into the classical period of Athenian democracy, you could say the balance tips, really. And now most of the power is with the poor. That is the cratos of the demos, the democritia. The poor role in the juries, in the assembly, and the council is really decisive. And there's still some role for the elite, but the sort of balance of the powers. I think there is a kind of flip, but by even giving a share to the poor,

he kind of opened that door that then eventually would lead to that tipping. It doesn't quite mean that it really continues for two and a half thousand years in that theory. So I had a little thing called the Roman Empire and the Middle Age, it's for intervene. But the important thing is these ideas behind Solon and also in later Greek philosophy

have picked up again, certainly from the Renaissance onwards, and then really influence how people rethink democracy. I guess it's only fair to say that modern democracy, being a representative or a direct democracy, is fundamentally different and probably has really different origins as well from, you know, Athenian democracy. But at the level of theory, political thought, there's definitely important continuities.

Yeah. I mean, I would stress actually there's some important moments in Solon's work the idea that the people can hold the magistrates to account, which is ascribed to him, at least in Aristotle's politics, the idea that the people get to choose the highest office holders, even if they don't hold those offices themselves, and then can hold them to account, I think that's actually a fundamental idea

that is continuous between ancient democracy and modern representative democracy, that accountability is something that actually both systems of democracy have in common. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Melissa Lane, Hansman Weiss and William Allen, and to our studio engineer Duncan Hanant. Next week, Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking work on criticism, a room of one's own. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we miss out, Melissa? No, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think we could say more about the very figure of the lawgiver, which is just a really interesting thing that emerges in Greece at this time. And it's an interesting way of thinking about politics,

the idea that there's a lawgiver who had a purpose, a kind of set of values that they thought that the laws should embody. And to me, one of the things that's interesting is it's not that they invent the idea of law itself. Law seems to have kind of evolved. But at some kind of moment of crisis or a turning point, the lawgivers come in,

they overhaul the laws, they look to laws of other societies as well. so it's not at all a parochial kind of role. Part of the wisdom that it requires is knowing about laws elsewhere. And they sort of lay this foundation for the values of society through laws, which then later generations can kind of look back to. So that is a kind of organizing trope of politics, I think, is something that Solon participates in and is really distinctive of Greece in this period.

Hans, you want to? Yeah. One thing is I'm sort of thinking again about the, the significance of the franchise, the right to vote as opposed to the right to hold office, because our sources tell us mainly, almost exclusively, really, about the right to hold office. And so, because we're used when thinking about the history of democracy

to think so much in terms of the franchise, I think we assume, I think, and we're really only assuming that this was a thing that Solon did, give everyone the vote. But if you think back to, for example, Homeric Epics, assembly scenes in the Iliad or Odyssey, there's a general call, the herald goes out, people gather. It's not obvious that this is a limited body.

It sounds as if the whole town is invited to come together. And now and there, they don't have a vote as such, but there is a sort of sounding out of public opinion. So this idea that the whole community is at some level involved in public decision-making might be already there. And so whether Solon is actually giving people the vote as such, or rather formalising the idea that the community should be involved and then allowing them specifically the point was made to vote for magistrates

who might previously have been picked by this ruling council and that obviously would be a major transfer of power to the assembly but maybe the idea of an assembly that a popular assembly that votes or even a council that votes might not be entirely new or as revolutionary as you might assume because we have no positive evidence that it did exist before that. lawgiver before Solon who made as big a mark as he did?

Well, I mean, so in Athens there's Draco. You mentioned he did make a mark but only in a negative sense that people thought his laws were much too severe. There's a couple of others that I mentioned. There's a Carondas who is mentioned over a Greek city in southern Italy.

But there we only have, I mean, he was like Solon, reputed as a great thinker and wise person. But we don't get a good sense, I think, of what his laws were all about. But where are lawgivers in other civilizations? Yeah. I mean, so, well, in Greece, we also have Zalaiucos, who's thought it, also in an Italian cities, which has thought it to be the first. We have like Kyrgyz and Sparta, who's probably

the most significant other than Solon. The Romans would refer to him as the lawgiver, even above Solon. And his laws are very interesting. We could talk more. But in other civilizations, I mean, it's interesting. Later, Greek authors actually think about Moses on the model of a Greek lawgiver. So Philo and Gis. Seifus looked back at Moses and say he was an even greater lawgiver than the Greek lawgivers, and they kind of write specifically to compare them. And of course, much before that, you had Hamarabi. But one of the things that's interesting about Hamarabi is that he combines the role of king and

lawgiver. And whereas we were stressing that Solon kind of separates them, he's the lawgiver, but he doesn't become a king. What was Hamarabi? What were Hamarabi's days? So that's much earlier, I think, 2200 BC. Yeah, 1800, right. Yeah.

Well, he went quite a long way laying down as laws, didn't he? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So that's very important. And I think those Near Eastern models, and the Greeks are aware that Egyptian and Near Eastern societies have more ancient political systems. I mean, they're very conscious of that fact. Yeah, on the legal side, I'd say the sources stress,

they do emphasise that he makes the system less harsh, less traconian coming the generation after Draco was basically had the death penalty for almost every offence and the saying was that his laws were written not an ink but in blood and the sources emphasised that so on makes the system as a whole more humane

he abolishes the capital punishment except for cases of homicide and that ties in with his wider persona in his poetry is someone who cares for everyone and believes in moderation rather than go into excess. These New Eastern law codes, I mean, Hamurabi and even earlier, I sort of go back even in the third millennium, they're interesting that you also quite frequently,

the kings express an interest in stopping the strong from harming the weak and so forth. So that sentiment in Solon that he's out to, protect the vulnerable, in Greek literature that seems quite new, but the Near Eastern kings use the same kind of trope. They also quite often cancel, I think actually on a regular basis, cancel debt. So when a new king comes to power, all debts are cancelled for the duration. So the chronological and I think maybe also geographical gap is too great, really, to assume that Solon was borrowing that. But the rhetoric at least exists even there.

And those were clearly not, you know, democratic or egalitarian societies, but nevertheless, the idea that it's a responsibility of those in power to look after the week is there already. Yeah, and I think also in Homer's poetry, you know, the idea that there's the image of the king or the ruler should be the shepherd of the people. So that idea that the fundamental responsibility of the ruler is to care for the good of the people is already there often honored only in the breach, but still there as a kind of.

of ideal. I thought another fun thing to mention might just be the Greek word for the cancellation of debt, which is Seis Achea, which means literally it's from Seis like the seismic, you know, shaking. So it's the kind of shaking off of burdens, like we talk about an earthquake. It's, it has that sort of valence of a shaking of the burdens and sort of freeing people from those burdens. So there's a nice route there. We need to be entirely sensible to think of the idea that the lawmaker and the king were in one person to trace that right through to Christianity. Interesting. Certainly Christian medieval kings, I think, did very much.

It's the same idea. That tradition. I think the Near Eastern tradition there, you can probably trace more clearly throughout than the democratic tradition. Although the Hellenistic kings, also the king is described as a living law. So there is that ideal in the Greeks, which then sort of that ideal is a monarch, and that's, you know, just in the centuries just before the emergence of Christ. So I think that idea is definitely

in the culture at that moment. Bill, do you understand anything? Yeah, maybe come back to what Melissa said earlier about the seven sages. It's interesting. The Athenians, I think what you've got here is different cities competing with each other, the Greeks love competition.

So each one puts forward a sophos, a wise man, Thouis from Miletus, Kail and from Sparta. And it's interesting, just that the Athenians, as it were put forward so on as their Sophotatos most wise man if you think of the number

that they had to choose from. The classic number seven isn't attested I think until Plato it might go back a few generations. But you already see in Herodotus who's writing in the 440s 430s 420s he has this wonderful scene

where Solon is visiting Cresis the King of Lydia in Sardis so what's now southwestern Turkey and he explains, gives Krizes warnings about the dangers of excessive wealth and

the uncertainty of human life. Basically he gives him the warnings that are in the political poetry that survived. And of course, Krizes being a crazy king, doesn't take it. He sees the Persian empire rise. He thinks, oh, I might take them on. He sends on a

delegation to the Oracle at Delphi and asks, what should I do? And the oracle says, if you go to war, you'll destroy a great empire. And he thinks, yes, gotcha. And of course, doesn't factor in the inscrutability and vagueness of oracles. And of course does go to war and gets roundly smashed, having not paid attention to so on. Well, thank you all very much.

I think we're being approached by Luke here. That was fantastic. You all like a cup of tea?