Campbell Corner Language Exchange
Where is SOLON (640-560) when
we need him?
(The Pattern)
by Elf S. Raymond
Presented August 12, 2002 REALIA Conference, Bretton
Woods, NH
Article forthcoming in Contemporary Philosophy
Vol. XXIV
Synopsis: this essay gives a brief account
of Solon's legislation and monetary reform in
the context of the ancient Mediterranean world's
debt crisis soon after paper and money had been
invented. It is based on the relevant sections
of Solon's reforms in 594 BCE in Aristotle's History
of the Athenian Constitution and focuses on
laws promoting nascent democratic institutions
intended to increase prosperity by aiding industrious
individuals and commerce. Solon enacted strict
laws against charging usurious interest on commercial
and agricultural loans. He also expanded the city-state's
moral responsibility with a new legislation that
shielded all of Attica's citizens against enslavement.
Solon, the great Athenian lawgiver, whom Plato
called the wisest of Magna Graecia's seven sages,
would probably somewhat enjoy current revivals
of ancient scandals involving wealth and power:
they would confirm his sense of continuity in
human affairs as well as his observation based
knowledge of the human mind's infinite capacity
to modify the merely given by playing sound and
unsound tricks. Solon, like Odysseus, had the
ability to see through tricks and lies and, countering
ingenuity with ingenuity (symbolized by the caduceus,
the wand of Hermes with the two snakes that is
also the trade mark of healers and messengers)
could bring his renown to bear on behalf of the
good of the citizenry. His words were his deeds
translated into political practice by which he
balanced the scales of justice amidst the perennial
clash of contending social forces in favor of
a truly new measure of justice-as-fairness for
city and countryside.
On the philosophical plane one can observe that
Solon's underlying world view - the hypokeimenon
of the Hellenic culture - was already proto-Platonic
in that the Cosmos was understood, though chance-ridden
and ruled by dour necessity, as endowed with lively
intelligence and informed by justice. Language,
thought and convention-as-law (nomos) had not
yet begun to differentiate between the idioms
of ethics and aesthetics. This fair cosmos was
invented and/or discovered by the Greeks and offered
the invitation to all and sundry to imitate its
qualities and take it for the ideal model fit
for a fair society. A fair society required in
turn fair individuals, i.e. people with self-control
and moderation unblemished by excess who lived
their lives in harmony with and honor of the cosmos
at large. Their number, though small, will grow
over time. Though this was a world view that exalted
harmony, it contained already the tense conflict,
the agon, between being and becoming, sameness
and difference, rest and motion, changelessness
and constant change. Thus the question whether
time or space was primarily responsible for the
constitution of the cosmos was asked and needed
to be answered. Solon, in concert with the pre-Socratic
philosopher Anaximander, ranks time, not space
as reality's foremost constitutive principle.
The cosmic quality of fairness is immediately
buttressed by the evidence of sense perception
and mirrored by the order of justice that rules
all things in the universe. Here is Anaximander's
epochal definition of justice that underlies the
order of time, i.e. the fountainhead of democracy.
THE UNLIMITED "APEIRON" IS THE FIRST
PRINCIPLE OF THINGS THAT ARE. IT IS THAT FROM
WHICH THE COMING-TO-BE OF THINGS AND QUALITIES
TAKES OFF AND IT IS THAT INTO WHICH THEY RETURN
WHEN THEY PERISH BY MORAL NECESSITY GIVING SATISFACTION
TO ONE ANOTHER AND MAKING REPARATION FOR THEIR
INJUSTICE ACCORDING TO THE ORDER OF TIME.
Enough is said for now about the metaphysical
foundation of Solon's legislation and his politics.
Today's readers of the early texts reporting on
the great man's career cannot be but amazed by
the dissonance-containing harmony of his way of
life and his achievements as poet, politician,
and legislator. Even when in 560 BCE Peisistratus
came to tyrannical power in Athens, he kept his
composure and balanced judgment. With amity he
helped the new ruler to govern with wisdom as
a good king and not as self-willed autocrat. In
life and work alike he seems to rely on the personal
knowledge that even the music of the spheres cannot
subsist on harmony alone and needs the prodding
of dissonance to keep on playing. In short, Solon
was a master dialectician before the dialectic
had a name.
Accepting life's transitory nature as it applies
to individuals and entire civilizations, in this
and any number of yet to be discovered other worlds,
he preserved into old age an admirably nimble
unencumbered mind eager to learn something new
by reflecting on his experience from a variety
of perspectives ranging from profound to urbane.
Solon shared the Greek conviction, given voice
by Aeschylus, that wisdom drop by drop is distilled
from agony by thoughtful patient re-collection.
He also knew from his own life that such an intellectual
and empathetic process has the power to transform
people as well as circumstances ruled by necessity
and chance toward the better.
There is no wisdom without compassion and no
compassion without wisdom. This is, according
to Simone Weil, how the ancient Greeks intimated
Christianity at the time when in Asia the Buddha
already walked on earth. The influence of Solon's
well-tempered personality on the classical period's
philosophic self-perception and imagination is
anybody's guess but, I feel, difficult to overestimate.
He looks to me very much like the model of Aristotle's
virtuous man and Plato traced the traits and balancing
skills of the mythic figure of the demiurge, creator
of the entire universe in the TIMAEUS, in the
likeness of the historic lawgiver. Socrates' praise
of the Athenian laws in the CRITO also comes easily
to mind as a veiled tribute to the Athenian sage.
In the year 594 BCE Solon was a well-traveled
man of letters, as well as affairs, who owned
his own ship for business and pleasure. He was
at that time about forty-five years of age when
all of Attica suffered once again outbreaks of
violent civil dissensions. The population was
divided into 3 factions, consisting of the relatively
wealthy inhabitants of Athens and the surrounding
plains, the by and large poor rural population
of the hills in Attica's hinterland to the north
and east, and the seafaring mercantile people
of moderate means scattered along the coast. The
conflict among the people in the three regions
and the parties which represented them was endemic
and of immemorial standing. It was further aggravated
by the class opposition between the few and the
many, or the oligarchs and the people. The people
were a mix of peasants, who were tillers or herdsmen
and landless laborers, small and not so small
shop-owners, artisans and their apprentices, traders,
crooks and beggars, minstrels and a non-descript
host of entertainers somewhat related to religious
practices, servants, teachers, nurses, mid-wives,
as well as a mix of managers and members of low
and middling standing in the priestly and medical
professions whose better placed membership partook
of the class of 'notables'. Poets, rhapsodists
and other followers of the Orphic tradition, including
the philosopher Pythagoras, were sparse in numbers
and some of them founded schools and cults. To
get a teaching license and open shop in Athens
one had to apply for permission to open a place
of cultic worship. Slaves, though indispensable
were not admitted as members but were a sub-class
largely unprotected by the civil law.
Neither academicians nor lawyers had yet arrived
on the scene. Everybody had to be verbally adroit
enough to perform as their own attorney and, once
Solon's reform took hold, serve the polis as member
of the jury court in political deliberations and
at civil and penal trials. The opposition between
the few and the many was somewhat concealed by
the different agendas separating the parties representing
Attica's three regions. But the division of the
populace by opposing class interests between the
few and the many is by far the most important
factor in understanding the exemplary nature and
essential fairness of Solon's liberalizing legislation.
In 621 BCE the Athenian government's last pacification
campaign to put down an insurrection ended with
the enactment of the Draconian legislation. Draco's
laws had been so severe that for a while the people,
rich and poor alike, were reduced to a state of
fear and trembling. But not for long. In 594 BCE,
one short generation later, the people started
to revolt and raised Cain thus precipitating a
crisis of unprecedented intensity in the region
that threatened to erupt into full scale internecine
war. What on earth had happened to exhaust the
peasants' proverbial stoic capacity to bear up
under hardship and earn their daily bread in the
sweat of their brows by producing the food for
the ungrateful covetous city? Whence derived the
sheer force of the agrarian hinterland's violent
protest? What was the trigger for the desperate
courage sparking the tinder of revolt? The answer
is the spread of famine among landless laborers
and the rapidly progressing threat of losing their
farms and their freedom among tenant farmers and
freeholders. Many farmers had already lost both
and the entire productive segment of the rural
population found itself pitted against the dreadful
threat of slavery and extinction. Caught in the
crunch of the economic transition from barter
to money, farmers had to borrow money after a
bad harvest at often exorbitant rates of interest
upon the security of their property and their
persons. If the fraction of the principal and
the (usurious) interest due were not paid in timely
fashion, the creditor, often a moneyman from the
City, had legal power to seize the person as well
as the land of the debtor and keeping or selling
both at his discretion. Only the male head of
household could serve as security when a loan
was contracted. Women and children were regarded
by the law as household chattel. They had to fend
for themselves when the head of household lost
his free status and was under the then prevailing
laws of custom (nomos) branded as slave for the
rest of his life without chance of redemption.
The debt crisis worsened and the descent into
slavery accelerated. Farmer after farmer had been
torn from his home and sold into exile to foreign
masters, while others were cultivating as slaves
the lands of their wealthy new owners in Attica.
Freedom's core meaning, today just as much as
at the beginnings of historic time is quite simply
not to be a slave: The proverbial fate worse than
death.
Permit me at this point a comment on what I take
to be the present state of affairs: Antiquity's
horrific forms of slavery have not been left behind
by modern times. They have proliferated. Ever
growing numbers of people find themselves living
under the debasing pitiless vicissitudes of bondage
at the beginning of the third millennium. Reduced
to faceless desperation, no drop of wisdom can
be extracted from the pain; apathy and violence
rule around the clock and new forms of bondage
are generated every day. Conditions of slavery,
under many euphemisms, thrive within and across
borders, not recognized by but embedded in globalization's
rigidly dogmatic institutional matrix. This matrix
was created with hope and good intentions in Bretton-Woods
in 1944. Guided by the liberal shrewd spirit of
John Maynard Keynes, a latter day Solon, new global
monetary institutions were created to make the
peoples of the globe prosper. Now, almost sixty
years later, bureaucracy and corruption have wrought
havoc on the Bretton-Woods new order and terror
is endemic the world over. Combating terror is
the mandate of the hour now. But doing so effectively
requires the re-emergence of Solon's fair wisdom
to countervail the rapacity of the world of power-and-greed.
Thus let us return to democracy's origins and
grasp the pattern of Solon's legislation from
the record.
Aristotle in his History of the Athenian
Constitution (v.2) describes the situation
in Athens and Attica: "The land was divided among
few owners and loans were secured on the person.
Such being the system in the polity, and the many
being enslaved to the few, the people rose against
the notables. The party struggle being violent
and the parties being arrayed in opposition to
one another for a long time, they jointly chose
Solon as arbitrator and archon and entrusted the
government to him, after he had composed the elegy
that begins: "I watch, and sorrow fills my breast
to see Ionia's oldest land being done to death".
In this poem Solon casts himself as doing battle
on behalf of each party against the others. He
enters the fray as moderator and mediator and
exhorts all factions jointly to stop the quarrel
that prevailed between them. Solon was by birth
and reputation of the first rank, but by wealth
and position belonged to the middle class, as
is admitted on the part of the other authorities,
and as he himself testifies in poems exhorting
the wealthy not to be covetous:
"Refrain ye in your hearts those stubborn
moods,
Plunged in a surfeit of abundant goods,
And moderate your pride! We'll not submit,
Nor even you yourselves will this befit".
And he always assigns the blame for the civil
strife to the oligarchs' love of money, overweening
pride and insolence." (End of quote.)
As soon as Solon was installed as archon (principal
magistrate) with full executive powers he instituted
measures to safeguard the civil status of all
citizens by outlawing loans secured on the person.
Those sold into slavery he bought back with government
funds so they could return from exile; those enslaved
at home he restored to free citizenship and set
free by law by canceling their debts. At the same
time he also undertook a bold currency reform
in tandem with a land reform bill. Farming families
who had lost their land during the debt crisis
would be compensated and have a fresh start. These
measures were as beneficial as they were controversial
and have become known as the Seisachtheia,
i.e. the Shaking-Off of the Burdens. Yet, soon
after the new laws were enacted as well as publicly
celebrated they proved a mixed blessing and the
reports of what happened in the wake of the new
reforms are disconcerting and perplexing.
Some two-hundred-fifty years later Aristotle sorts
this out in his History of the Constitution
of Athens where he defends Solon's measures
and reputation: "In these matters some people
try to misrepresent him; for it happened that
when Solon was intending to enact the Shaking-off
of the Burdens he informed some of the notables
beforehand and, afterwards, as those of popular
sympathies say, he was out-foxed by his friends,
but according to those who want to malign him
he himself also took a share. For these persons
borrowed money and bought up a quantity of land,
and when not long afterwards the cancellation
of debts took place they were rich men; and this
is said to be the origin of the families subsequently
reputed to be ancestrally wealthy. Nevertheless,
the account of those of popular sympathies is
more credible; for considering that he was so
moderate and public-spirited in the rest of his
conduct that, when he had the opportunity to reduce
one of the parties to subjection and so to be
tyrant of the polis, he chose to incur the enmity
of both, and valued honor and the safety of the
state more than his own aggrandizement, it is
not probably that he besmirched himself in such
worthless trifles. And that he got this opportunity
is testified by the disordered state of affairs,
and also he himself alludes to it in many places
in his poems, and everybody else agrees with him.
We are bound therefore to consider this charge
to be false."
With the great lawgiver's reputation intact,
perhaps we should ask before looking at some of
the laws more closely at how modern they are.
There's no account of a vision in a cave or of
writings on the wall, or reports of burning bushes,
trumpets, lightening and loud thunderclaps. No,
there is not even a strong wind from any of the
four directions. All the paraphernalia of ancient
lawgiving are absent and no supernatural revelation
or inspiration is invoked by anybody as authoritative
source; least of all by Solon himself. Priestly
as well as prophetic talk both is tinged by irony.
Solon's reputation for probity and wisdom is deemed
sufficient by the leaders of the three contending
factions. They entrust Solon with legislative
as well as executive powers to fairly balance
and reconcile their vital differences. He in turn
consolidated what was best in Greek tradition
and, with keen foresight made laws that promote
and safeguard the citizenry's common good for
the next hundred years.
In retrospect one may wish to wonder how Solon
with his live-and-let-live nonchalance, his sober
self-knowledge and modesty, his businessman's
grasp of risks could be willing to take on the
labor to come up with laws that would save the
ship of state from sinking and set it on safe
course. The ancient sources are silent. So permit
me a few moments to speculate on this matter:
It would be foolish to entertain the possibility
that this man was inured against feeling flattered
by the request, or immune against the temptation
of fame and glory. And it would be equally foolish
to maintain that greed for earthly and/or eternal
rewards was able to hold him in chains for long.
Solon, if we know anything about the man, had
a genuinely philosophic disposition. He knew time,
reason and justice to be constitutive of the cosmos
at large, as well as of the city state and each
of its citizens in health and crisis. Slaves,
though necessary as labor force at the time, were
human and their unfortunate situation needed to
be remedied sooner rather than later. Solon's
laws and writings show his affinity to the concept
of evolution already anticipated by Anaximander's
moral law of the universe quoted above. Cosmic,
political and personal 'reality' is understood
by him as primarily constituted by the order of
time. That means it is open-ended and ongoing,
subject to changes people can initiate and not
a closed self-replicating hierarchical structure
in space. If life's order is experienced as 'becoming'
rather than 'being', change ceases to be seen
as threat. For those of intelligence and imagination
the inevitability of change may even come to serve
as an invitation to overcome inertia and actively
envision possibilities for small and big improvements.
Solon, by his understanding of the moral nature
of the temporal within the universal order was
delivered from the tyranny of fear that so often
cripples our mental faculties. He was free to
use his ingenuity, inventiveness, empathy and
imagination to invent and discover new ways for
people to live together not just enduring but
actively enjoying to do their part in ordinary
and extraordinary situations.
When the representatives of the three warring
parties asked Solon to assume the office of presiding
archon of the Athenian city state, he accepted
the request. With deliberation he proceeded with
negotiations that led to a dynamic and fairly
equitable reconciliation of the three warring
factions' vital interests. This reconciliation
was based on some hard won compromises that redounded
over time to Athens' and Attica's benefit. In
the concrete circumstances of economic and political
crisis Solon performed the required balancing
act and remade his riven society. His laws were
not mysteries from on high but the tools of the
trade for the politician-statesman. He tinkered
with the existing situation and cobbled together
as best he could a new arrangement where all citizens
were protected against the dreaded descent into
slavery. Enmity among the factions was reduced,
wars avoided, usurious lending practices punished,
the crafts and arts, especially the language arts
were assiduously cultivated, and trade within
the country and with other regions expanded rapidly.
Since the new political arrangements, Solon's
pattern, were all based on mutual compromise no
faction was completely satisfied. But the spreading
discontent was kept in check most of the time
by the economic and social improvements which
were real enough so they could not be effectively
gainsaid by would be demagogues as long as the
people had enough food and freedom to hold on
to their common sense. By instituting a most ingenious
judicial system where the people who could pass
the means test had to serve as jurors and obtained
the corollary right to bring suite he balanced
the state's power in favor of civilians, guarded
against tyranny and increased the individual citizens'
awareness for his own stake in the common good.
An Athenian citizen's dues were proportionately
payable in time and money.
Solon's non-utopian measures proved sufficient
for the fledgling democracy, the first open society
based on the rule of man-made laws to start its
astonishing precarious career. Laws protecting
the right to private property of citizens and
desirable foreign residents were enacted as spur
to increase the city-state's wealth. New inheritance
laws tied property to the individual, male or
female, overriding tradition's and convention's
claims that all personal property of the deceased
automatically belonged to the family and/or clan.
Sons and daughters had no automatic right to inheritance.
Daughters had a right to dowry and sons the right
to an education which meant most of all ample
access to schooling in writing, reading and public
speaking. In one stroke Solon had invented the
social conditions for the (nearly) self-made democratic
individual to enter the stage of world history.
The democratization of education was essential
to make the new institutions work well and the
birth of democratic government, rhetoric and philosophy
is no accident: all three are rooted in tradition
and in Solon's reforms. Today the question to
ask is whether our generation will be able to
prevent the demise of democratic government which
is under grievous assault from many quarters from
within and without the republic. In other words:
can this generation help to enable Solon's pattern
to improve and prevail?
Giving generous time and thought to this question
might help enhance the chance for a new quickening
of the democratic process itself provided two
things are remembered and firmly kept in mind.
The first is that wealth's moral worth,
its social desirability hinges on the condition
that it is obtained by fair means and managed
with prudence and foresight which is the Greek
pair of 'phronesis' and 'pronoia'.
Never mind how much glamour the entertainment
media bestow on crime nor how much material wealth,
especially in the fungible form of money is idolized,
sober decency of work and worker is democratic
prosperity's bedrock. The second is intimately
connected to the first. It concerns the core skills
of cultural transmission that enable individuals
to stay clear of the illusion of pleasure and
thus of ideational obsessions and behavioral
compulsions. Each individual, Solon knew,
has to acquire the ability to carefully moderate,
not repress, his natural drive toward insatiability,
Saint Augustine's and Freud's libido, i.e.
what the Greeks called pleonexia. The threat
of pleonexia, the pleasant-seeming yet
absolutely relentless brutal tyranny of insatiability,
whether manifest in private or public excess,
is ever present to play havoc with the interlocking
personal, civic and global orders' precarious
balances, imperfect as they are. Democracy's abiding
task is to moderate human insatiability by turning
it from curse to benefit.
Solon knew of no forms of government which could
prevent insatiability's insidious power other
than the democratic pattern he enacted. He had
traveled far and wide and had not encountered
a polity that could provide a pattern to be adopted
by imitation. Crete's fabled Minoan civilization
had already faded. Perhaps the Egyptian pharaonic
system knew how to curb the King's appetites,
but in Egypt political rule was the monopoly of
priests. Persia's despotism was not a pattern
to be imitated especially since Persian insatiability
for territory was a threat to Hellas. How about
Sparta? This ancient city state had become Hellas'
most admired due to the rules Lycurgus had four
generations earlier successfully imposed. Though
Sparta in the Greek self-understanding of the
time was not a tyranny, the Spartan constitution
of grim autarchy and totalitarian militarism was
not acceptable to a life and people loving cosmopolitan
individualist from Athens. Solon, knowing his
Homer, based his pattern for democracy not on
raw power and slave labor, but on the belief that
time will favor people who love language and the
arts, are quick-witted as well as devoted to a
full measure of prosperity for themselves and
their trading partners. They all, in their different
ways, rely on ingenuity and industry to flourish.
A politician-statesman of great skill and eloquence
he succeeded to spread the peaceful influence
of the Athenian city state by art and trade across
the regions of the Mediterranean world. His influence
was midwife to Periclean glory and, in this corrupted
form, still lingers on today. In 404 BCE Sparta
won the power contest against Athens on the ground
while Solon's democratic pattern in various contextual
forms may be winning the great contest in historic
time. This contest's agony is far from over and
has entered on September eleven 2001 a new vexatious
phase. Today Solon's pattern of democracy is not
well understood by the very people who are its
heirs. The pattern has been shamelessly perverted
by the very people who use the word 'democracy'
most often. Yet there is no point in fighting
for democracy as word alone. The fight is only
desirable as well as moral if what is fought for
is the 'real thing': The justice-as-fairness pattern
that made Athens's citizenry free and turned their
freedom into a beacon is but a premonition for
a time where the present moment is no longer sacrificed
in a Faustian bargain for immediate sensations
of gain and illusory pleasure but joined to the
slow beat of time's unchanging law of cosmic justice
in concord with the moments that may arrive tomorrow.
In sum: this excursus into Solon's Athens is but
an attempt to direct a compressed, memorable American
saying "Attention must be paid" toward tomorrow
and the day thereafter.
Bibliography is available on request.
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