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For I suppose life is to be measured, not by hours, but sensations. Are you ready for the morning start? O, that Solon were here! what exquisite mirth should we have! Milo is something; but Solon were more. 'Fausta, Fausta, cried Gracchus, 'when will you be a woman? 'Never, I trust, replied Fausta; 'if I may then neither laugh, nor cry, nor vex a Roman, nor fight for our Queen.
Projecting from it at the centre, and hewn out of the same rock, is the bema or stone platform from which the great orators from the time of Themistocles and Aristides, and perhaps of Solon, down to the age of Demosthenes and the Attic Ten, addressed the mass of their fellow-citizens.
"In proportion to the culture of men they become his scholars." "How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night to be his men! His contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so.
He knew so much that he was called a sage, and he loved to meet and talk with wise people. Solon changed many of Draco's severe laws, arranged that the farmers and poor people should no longer be treated badly by the rich, and even took care of the slaves. He also gave the Athenians a court of law called A-re-op´a-gus.
But Pisistratus, having got the command, so extremely courted Solon, so honored him, obliged him, and sent to see him, that Solon gave him his advice, and approved many of his actions; for he retained most of Solon's laws, observed them himself, and compelled his friends to obey.
As before Lycurgus the Spartan commonwealth was largely without law, so was Athens before Solon. In those days the people of Attica of which Athens was the capital city were divided into three factions, the rich, the middle class, and the poor.
When this was told Cyrus, who was a wiser man than Croesus, and saw in the present example Solon's maxim confirmed, he not only freed Croesus from punishment, but honored him as long as he lived; and Solon had the glory, by the same saying, to save one king and instruct another.
Fortunately, however, the affairs of the state were in that crisis which is ever favourable to the authority of an individual. There are periods in all constitutions when, amid the excesses of factions, every one submits willingly to an arbiter. With the genius that might have made him the destroyer of the liberties of his country, Solon had the virtue to constitute himself their saviour.
Now when these laws were enacted, and some came to Solon every day, to commend or dispraise them, and to advise, if possible, to leave out, or put in something, and many criticized, and desired him to explain, and tell the meaning of such and such a passage, he, knowing that to do it was useless, and not to do it would get him ill-will, and desirous to bring himself out of all straits, and to escape all displeasure and exceptions, it being a hard thing, as he himself says,
The story that his ashes were scattered about the island Salamis is too strange to be easily believed, or be thought anything but a mere fable; and yet it is given, amongst other good authors, by Aristotle, the philosopher. Such was Solon. To him we compare Poplicola, who received this later title from the Roman people for his merit, as a noble accession to his former name, Publius Valerius.
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