Where is SOLON (640-560) when we need him?
(The Pattern)
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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