Download SOLON - Hellenic Link

Date:11/18/07
SOLON: THE WEST'S FIRST STATESMAN(Part I)
Solon, the Athenian poet, lawgiver, and statesman, rescued Athens from the bloody
ravages of civil war and in so doing established the political foundations that made
democracy possible. In addition, his insights regarding justice, rule of law, and
public service remain timeless paradigms,as valid for the politics of today as they
were 2600 years ago.
A HELLENIC LINK LECTURE in the HELLENIC HERITAGE SERIES (1)
by
Michael A. Soupios
Professor of Political Science
Long Island University
Thank you all very much!
This evening a few observations on Solon. I will begin with a very brief biographical
sketch. The facts are always dubious in these situations because we go all the way back to
the 600s BC , we have some conflicting versions of stories, chronology is very difficult to
pin down, but we have some confidence in that he was born in the vicinity of 630 BC and
that he probably died 80 years later. Some of the ancient sources say that he was
extremely long lived and that he lived to be 100, we find this questionable, again he had
approximately 80 years of life. He was born a member of eupatridae, which in ancient
Greek literally means “of good fathers,” that is he was an aristocrat. Aristocrat is a term
we will be mentioning at length as we proceed from here. At the same time, however,
economically he tended to be more middle class, the tradition is that his family had
bankrupted itself, had essentially spent a great deal of its inherited fortune for public
service activities on behalf of the city of Athens, so even before Solon himself became
involved in these activities, the tradition is that his family and his father had done the
same thing which explains the relative reduction of his status as his life went on.
We know he was well traveled. There are different traditions about this, but at a
minimum, we believe he spent some time in Egypt, in Cyprus, Cilicia, Sardis; there are a
few very famous alleged episodes, e.g., his meetings with Croesus and with the Egyptian
Pharaohs, Amasis. Chronologically, these are impossible meetings, but they have become
part of the aura of Solon.
I would mention to you, as some of you know, that there were seven ancient sages, wise
men, in the Greek world. This list varies from source to source. Plato has a very famous
list in one of his Dialogues, but Solon is the only one of the 7 great wise men of ancient
Greece, who was consistently placed in every one of the lists. He was the universal sage
despite the variation of membership of all others.
The critical date in this man’s life and in some sense of Western culture is the year 594
BC. In this year, Solon was elected Archon in Athens. Archon refers to a magistrate
position, an administrator. He was chosen as the Chief Magistrate of Athens at that time.
I will point out, as we go along, he could have gotten much more than simply a
magistrate’s position. What he was offered was the Tyranny. They offered him full
power, complete, unabridged , total authority and to the remarkable credit of this man he
refused the tyranny and I want you all understand what that meant back in those days.
Every ancient Greek despised one political prospect more than anything else, that is to
become subservient to the will of another person. This explains a great deal about Greek
history. This is the reason why the Greeks found the concept of nationhood very elusive.
There is no Greece, folks! There were 1200 city states, each one fiercely independent and
antagonistic towards the next city down the road. At the same time no one wants to be
subservient to the will of another man, in the heart of every Greek there is also the
aspiration to be King. So, the fact that he turns his back on the tyranny, is really an
extraordinary thing. It speaks absolute volumes as to the character and worth of this
man.What he will offer not as a tyrant, but as a public servant, is genuine service to his
community. And as I will state in my concluding remarks,these are qualities rarely
matched by modern politicians.
Well, as far as the situation in 594 is concerned, Athens was on the brink of disaster and
it was a potential devastation that had already swept through a good part of the ancient
Greek world.
The operative term here was “stasis”, which can be translated into English as revolution;
this is internal revolution, this is internecine civil war, this is brothers fighting brothers
inside the same city state. The fuel of stasis is socioeconomic. This is essentially classwarfare within the same Greek city state; the upper class versus the lower class; the
“demos”(they do not use this word yet) against the “aristoi", against the aristocracy.
We have some awful descriptions, just absolutely abhorrent descriptions in the ancient
sources of what this meant: many tears and much blood. If you go to Thucydides, at the
beginning of his history, you will find a description of the Corcyraan stasis and its terrible
carnage. The same happened at Mytilene,against Syracuse and at the city state of Miletus,
on the coast of Asia Minor.
The poor gathered the children (this is the description from Miletus) of the rich, they
bring them to the milling site and throw the children of the rich under the grinding wheel.
When the aristocracy came back into power, they gather up the children of the poor and
cover them in pitch and light them on fire. This is the kind of fratricidal madness that was
sweeping the Greek world back in Solon’s times.
As I said, Athens is on the brink of incurring exactly the same kind of violence. Athens
came so close to it just as Solon takes over as archon. Literally, he rescues the Athenians
from drinking this bitter gall of civil war.
What was Solon’s agenda? Well, he comes on the scene politically not as a tyrant, as I
said, not as an autocrat, not as a dictator, but the word is “diallaktes”, which means
mediator, he is going to be a referee.
I do not know, whether you are aware of the fact, we have some wonderful poetry that
has survived from Solon. He was a statesman, but he was also a sort of pedagogue. I
mean, a great deal of his political activity can only be properly understood as pedagogic.
The poems and the laws that he writes are meant to be didactic, they are meant to instruct
the Athenians about “eunomia”, good order. The way to avoid stasis is to maintain good
order. That is what his laws and his poetry aim to promote. In one poem, he describes
himself as a moderator: “I am holding a shield and I am protecting the poor against the
rich and the rich against the poor. I am not choosing sides, I am not a partisan; I am not
an advocate, I am the public servant, who has the best interest of all the people at heart.
What the common man wants back in those days is “isomoria", which means a general
redistribution of the land. The little peasant farmers in Attica, that is the vicinity around
the city of Athens, want a redistribution of the great estates , which had become the
Greek equivalent of Rome’s “latifundia.” That was their excess, their immoderate
demand.Now, on the part of the rich, their excess, their madness was the intent to drive
the small peasant farmers into slavery. They want to subjugate the small peasants into a
state of inventured service, very much analogous to what the Spartans did among the
helots.
Well, again to his credit, Solon takes one look at this and says: this is insane, this is
madness, if we are to have peace and order here and if we are going to avoid the
nightmare of stasis, then we must make “compromise and moderation keys to our public
policy. If you want peace, if you want order, if you want stability, you must be willing to
negotiate, you must be willing to be reasonable. No one should doggedly maintain their
position, should push their position without restraint. This is a recipe that leads to blood
and tears. I would remind you in the context of moderation two of the most famous
aphorisms or apothegms, you have heard, one “know thyself” (lots of people attribute this
to Socrates, Solon said it first) and secondly “moderation in all things.” These are the
inscriptions placed inside the temple of the Oracle at Delphi. They are offered as fruits of
Greek wisdom to the gods. All the walls inside the temple were decorated with the
wisdom of the Seven Sages including the words of Solon which stress the necessity of
moderation.
Now, the first thing that he does—and this is the most controversial thing of his policies
is to initiate “seisachthia”, which in ancient Greek refers to a “shaking off of burdens.”
What it means is that he cancels all debt unilaterally, across the board, all debt is to be
eliminated. Now, remember what I said was the aspiration of the rich eupatridae, they
aspired to drive the poor into slavery and the way in which they were entrapping people
along these lines was to make loans available to small peasant farmers. They would bury
“horoi", mortgage stones in the farmers’ land, so that everybody understood that this farm
is on mortgage, it is on pledge to somebody who made the loan against the property. If
you default on the loan, then the property, of course, goes to the man who made the loan.
So, first stage in this process is to accumulate the land; that is how estates become bigger
and bigger. They allowed the farmer to stay on the land, but under the following
condition: he must now turn over 1/6 of his agricultural produce every year, this has to to
go to the man who acquired the property, the man who made the initial loan. If under
these terms the farmer defaults, he is now a slave, because security in the second
arrangement in this loan process is made against the individual, security is made “epi
somasi,” on the person. You default, you become a slave, your family becomes enslaved,
your children become enslaved. Solon takes one long look at this and, of course, he is
quick to see where this is going. Even the Greek peasants are not going to sit back and
allow themselves to be enslaved, sooner or later this is going to lead to armed rebellion
and there is going to be stasis that has affected many other places in the Greek world. So,
this is the motivation for his cancellation of the debt, this is his motivation for
seisachthia. Now, this of course produces an outrage among the rich, because they are
losing tremendous amounts of money, as these loans are washed down the drain. They
see him as a betrayer, because he is one of their class, but here is the difference and this is
the reason Solon could weather the storm. The ancient sources say that Solon himself had
lent money under these terms. When he erased the debt, the ancient sources tell us that
Solon lost between 5 and 7 talents of silver himself. A note here about what a talent is. It
is not capacity, it is a weight measure. A talent is approximately fifty seven modern
pounds of silver. You could have a gold pound also. The Athenians did not have much
access to gold, but they had those wonderful Larium silver mines in southern Attica,
some of you may have seen. So, a talent for the Athenians was about 57 pounds of silver
from which you would strike 6,000 drachmae.
Remember what I said to you. Solon forfeits by his action 5-7 talents of his own wealth,
he is leading by example, he is not asking others to accept this financial hardship without
himself accepting such hardship on a massive basis. What does a talent mean, what does
a drachma mean back in these days? Well, it is hard to say back in the Sixth Century BC,
but in the Fifth Century we have a very good reading on this. One drachma is the average
day salary for a laborer, one drachma is a day’s wage for a worker. Remember, 6,000
drachmae per talent, he just gave up 5-7 talents, that is 6,000x7, this was a massive loss
on his part, but he absorbs the loss on behalf of the welfare of the society. He cannot ask
the eupatridae to suffer this without himself suffering, so he accepts this burden as part of
his obligation as a public servant.
The next thing he does is to completely revitalize the social structure of Athens,
specifically he changes the "tele". The original social configuration in Athens was set up
by Theseus, who is a mythological figure more than anything else, but there was an
original structure attributed to him.. He changes that structure, he comes up with four
units of so called property classes. Here are the the 4 units and this is a completely
different arrangement with a completely different value system attached to it. The first
class is the
"pentecosmiomedemnoi, that means those people who can produce 500 bushels of
agricultural produce per year from their agricultural holdings, in other words these were
the rich people, the highest social class, the highest economic class. The next class
beneath are the "hippies" (as in horse); they are the knights, not quite as rich as the class
on top, but these people are rich also (300-500 bushels of agricultural produce per year).
They are the same class, which formed the cavalry of the Greek army. (Wherever you see
the “hippos” attached to an ancient Greek name, it means that the so named persons were
aristocratic, because only the rich people could afford horses; for example, Socrates’ wife
Xanthippe, her name meaning “fair horse” in ancient Greek indicates that she had an
aristocratic background). The next class were the "zygotai", who produced 2-3 hundred
bushels of agricultural produce per year. The lowest class were the "thetes"; these were
the poor who could produce at least 100-200 bushels.
Here is what Solon does. He says, both your social status as well as your political
privilege will from this point on be attached to this economic model. That may not sound
like a big deal, but it is an extremely important transformation, because previous to this
all the status and political privilege was determined by birth lineage, by your blood. The
problem with blood lineage is you cannot change the determinant in these matters, you
are born and you are attached to a certain cast and there is no alteration possible , there is
no such thing as what we would call upper mobility. What he does by changing the blood
system to an economic system is create the possibility for upper mobility among those of
the lower classes.
This is a very important shift and also leaves open the future possibility that money
instead of agricultural produce can become a means for this upper mobility. This is all in
the offing as a result of this sagacious move on his part.
Now, there were certain restrictions --- if you want to be a magistrate, if you want to be
an occupant of the highest administrative posts--- those will be referred to the two highest
classes, the hippies and the pentecosmiomedemnoi. The lower classes have lower
responsibilities and the thetes in particular will not be allowed at this point of Athenian
history to occupy administrative jobs; later on, when democracy becomes much more
vital, let us say what Aristotle would call radical, by the Fifth Century and Fourth
Century, this type of restriction was completely waived. But, even in Solon’s days, he
does something that is very important in his balancing act; he says, I cannot let thetes
become archons, but we ought to allow them full membership in the popular assembly
and most significantly full membership and participation in the popular courts. If you are
familiar with Aristotle’s history of the Athenian Constitution, he says that this is the
critical move that leads to Athenian democracy, this is the key. Aristotle says, whoever
controls the ballot in the court is to have control of the government. This is how Aristotle
believed Solon turned the system over to the people.
While it would be a misstatement on our part to say that Solon was a democrat or that
Solon invented Athenian democracy, still in the absence of Solon’s reforms there might
have not been an Athenian democracy. So this man is the person who tills the soil, he
prepared the ground to take the seed of democracy that eventually is planted in the
following century by the democrats; this could not have happened without Solon, it
would be impossible.
Now, Political Institutions. He changes them extensively at Athens. First, the
"Areopagos". This was a very elitist council of the eupatridae. This was their special
domain within the political system, a bastion of the elite. He does not directly tamper
with this, but by changing the system I mentioned earlier he does create a long term
possibility that the aristocratic control of the Areopagos could be diluted with those
people moving up the ladder. So, if you change class, you become a candidate for
membership in Areopagos.
The Archonships. Traditionally, we have ten Archons. He organizes them into a
board.He makes a council out of the Archons. Why? Well, as I will explain in a couple of
moments, like all ancient Greeks, he is extremely suspicious of power. It is a good idea to
be suspicious of power, folks! Always! That is fine. There is a famous saying by Lord
Acton, a British author from the late Nineteenth Century, even though long before Lord
Acton the Greeks had it down pat, they understood it. Solon understands it very
well.Lord Acton says: “power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Solon has full grasp of that ugly potential, that ugly reality, he understands it very
well;the reason he organizes the archons into a board, he wants these people to sit at the
same table, at the same time discussing their positions and what their plans are, so that
they can counteract one another, this is like “checks and balances” at the administrative
level, a very clever thing to do.
Also, a couple of other things along the same lines. He sets up a council, a new council.
There had been an assembly a long time before Solon, but there had not been a “boule”;
this is a council of 400 representatives from each of the four traditional tribes that
comprised the Athens population and this boule is going to serve as a check and balance
on the popular assembly. The boule had what we call a probouletic authority over the
popular assembly, the "ecclesia". What does this mean? The agenda for the ecclesia is
established by the boule. The ecclesia just can’t convene and start doing whatever they
feel like doing, the agenda has to be set for them before every meeting by this other body,
which means just you can control excesses from the popular assembly. You see, this is
like a “checks and balances” kind of thing.
There are other examples of this as well, which I will point to as we go along, but this
notion making sure that no single institution has too much power is not a modern
concept. Again, this is a fundamental idea of democracy, including our democracy among
the Founding Fathers, for as I said earlier, they were indeed indebted to this thinker.
The problem with most political philosophers is they do not trace the connections far
back enough, they start with 17th Century England, in effect with the Revolutions of
1640 or 1688 as the source of all our democratic principles, but this is nonsense. Just read
Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson constantly quoted Greek literature and Greek political
theory.
New Legislation. Here are some categories. We have new laws involving prostitution,
homosexuality, libel and abusive language, vagrancy,inheritance rights, marriage, public
ostentation and also filial obligations. Why do the ancient Greeks think that the Athenians
need laws on public ostentation? Because, this is a very status-conscious society, they are
very quick to draw invidious comparisons along economic lines between themselves. In
other words, I am rich, so when I bury my father, I can spend all this money to bury my
father and you can’t. That is the message. This ostentation is divisive. It breeds
factionalism, it breeds ill-will. So, again, do you want stasis, go right ahead and continue
this practice, do you want to eliminate the possibility or marginalize the possibility of
stasis, then you have to pass legislation restricting this cancer, which is exactly what
Solon does.The objective of his legislation is very easy to summarize. He wants to
reconfigure political thought on the part of the Athenians. He is interested in creating a
new spirit of public consciousness. He is trying to draw the loyalties and mentalities
away from the clan or immediate family unit, he is trying to elevate that perspective to
understand that we have to think in terms of the greater community. This is a big problem
that Greeks have. If you read Plato’s Republic carefully, years and years later, Plato is
still wrestling with the same question about creating larger loyalties. There is a famous
image he offers of society, which, he says, is analogous to the human body: if you slice
your finger, it is not merely the finger that feels the pain, the entire body experiences the
pain, and that is what both Plato and Solon want for the city-state.
Solon was trying to create a new collective consciousness and all his laws aim at this
goal. Many of his laws seem mysterious to us today. We look at them and they seem
strangely counter-intuitive, very confusing by modern standards. For example, he says
that every one has to be allowed to bring public prosecution, he wants everybody
involved in a legal system that allows any man to go to a court and lodge a charge against
any one else in the society. You have to remember something here: in ancient Greece
there were no public prosecutors, no District Attorneys. Before Solon put this on the
books, the only people who could bring prosecutions were those immediately effected by
the alleged crime. Only the family could do it. What is the problem with that? We know
what the problem was: blood feuds and vendettas. Now Solon inserts the state in that
equation. He wants anybody to be free to bring prosecution, but once the prosecution is
brought, then the state mechanism takes over the prosecution. You are not allowed to go
out and seek blood revenge. This is a very deeply entrenched mentality among the
ancient Greeks, there was even a religious dimension to this, the dimension is that the
shade or eidolon, the spirit that is, will be angry at the family unless the family seeks
revenge on behalf of the person harmed or killed. Just read Homer, ladies and gentlemen,
even in the context of war, in the middle of a big battle one Greek is afraid to kill this
other guy, a Trojan, because there was a family connection between the two households:
he says, if I kill him his family will come after me, even if I am victorious and shed his
blood, I am vulnerable to an attack by his family. This is in the context of war, and he is
thinking this way. War is one category where you would assume this vendetta idea would
be suspended, as it is understood that people will be killed. Even here the vendetta
persists. So, Solon in inserting the state into this equation is saying that the state will take
over after the initial filing of the prosecution and this is the way we are going to settle all
our disputes. Anybody who fails to go along with rulings handed down by the state will
be prosecuted by the state, not by a family, not by some clan, not by some brotherhood,
but by the state. This is a very important thing that he did.
Here is one of the most bizarre of all the laws initiated by Solon: the ancient sources tell
us Solon actually passed a law prohibiting political neutrality during times of
factionalism. The law prohibited citizens from remaining neutral during political
conflicts. You would say to yourselves: “what on earth was Solon thinking here?” The
Greeks never needed a law to encourage them to be partisan, never! Here is a law that
Solon puts forth, which says that this is exactly what we want.
Well, there are two explanations for this. Number one, Solon is saying, he actually says it
in one of his poems, if you sit on the fence during times of heated political discussion,
you are being derelict in your responsibilities as a citizen of the society. It is a dereliction
of your duty as a member of the community simply staying on the sideline. He wants
people to be involved, but the other logic, which we think is part of this, is the following.
I think Solon also recognized that if you let the firebrands, those who are really
entrenched in some partisan position, just go off and do their own thing, then you might
have a very dangerous situation on your hands. What I think Solon was suggesting, he
wanted the less heavily involved people to attach themselves to one position or another,
because this would dilute the fervor and the potential for violence by having these people
who are not as heavily involved associate with one or the other position. This is a strategy
of dilution, in other words. This is how you can water down the poison that might
actually brew to a point of violence on the part of one of these groups. In other words,
Solon wants to have cooler heads become involved in these groups. That seems to be the
logic and if that is true, it is a remarkably insightful position on the part of Solon. This
notion of Solon is not unique as it may sound. There is a very interesting phrase that
occurs in Pericles’ Funeral Oration. This is the most famous speech in Western
Civilization. It was the model for Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was
presented in the first year of the Peloponnesian War and was allegedly taken down more
or less verbatim by Thucydides, who was a literary genius in his own right. Inside the
oration, there is a reference to people who stand alone and the Greek word is “?d??ta?,”
from which the English word “idiot” comes from. This is what Pericles says “we do not
look upon such people who stand off to the sides as being simply neutral, we think they
are useless.” Well, Solon is saying the same thing. We do not want useless citizens, we
expect everybody to be involved, we want every one to understand that the stakes are
important to them. We do not want people sitting on the fence, they’ve got to jump out
into the fray and take a side and hopefully they will sort out the difference.
(CONTINUED IN PART II)
-----------------------------
1 This Lecture given under the auspices of the Advisory Council on Hellenic
Education of the Hellenic Link, Inc. and co-sponsored by the Cathedral
Fellowship,was presented to members of the community at the Holy Trinity
Cathedral Center, Manhattan, New York, on March 15, 2007 at 7:00 p.m.
Date:11/18/07
SOLON:THE WEST'S FIRST STATESMAN (Part II)
A HELLENIC LINK LECTURE in the HELLENIC HERITAGE SERIES (1)
by
Michael A. Soupios
Professor of Political Philosophy
Long Island University
(Continued from Part I)
Economic Reforms. As I said, this man understands political economy thoroughly. He
had a very good grasp of this. He understands that you cannot have stabilized politics
unless you have stable economics. Karl Marx would have agreed.
He changes the currency and “weights and measures” system in Athens. He completely
revamps them. And he does so because by changing to the Euboean (island of Euboea)
system, he can open up for the Athenians market places in the West and in the East. The
Euboean system is being used in places like Sicily, Southern Italy, the areas colonized by
Greeks since the 8th Century BC. This is the area the Romans called Magna Grecia.
Well, that is a rich area for trading purposes, Sicily is a very rich island and still is and
the new system provides access to Athenian produce and trade. The same is true in the
East, The Athenians, as you well know, had one chronic problem in term of foods supply,
the soil in Attica is unyielding, this is not a hospitable soil for agriculture, especially
grain production. So, the Athenians who always suffered from bread shortage now would
have access to the Black Sea Markets as a result of this currency alteration. In 600 BC, I
should note, the Athenians were so concerned about grain, they would fight a war to
siege an area close to the Dardanelles, because they wanted a presence there on the “corn
route” coming down the Black Sea intothe Mediterranean. So, Solon also changed the
currency system for which he changed specifically the mina, which is a unit of 100 Attic
drachmae. In the old system, one mina was valued at 70 drachmae, in the new system it
was revalued to 100 drachmae. Do you know what this does? It allows the poor to more
easily pay-off their debts and therefore helps stabilize the society.
He also prohibits the exportation of certain agricultural products; as a matter of fact, he
put a ban on virtually all agricultural exports with one exception: olive oil.They had lots
of olive oil, even back in those days, so you can send oil overseas to sell but nothing else
could be sold. What was happening, at least some of the farmers in Athens were taking
their produce and selling them overseas on a speculative basis; what that does, of course,
is raises the prices for the produce domestically. Much less produce is available for the
people at home, when you take the bulk of it and send it overseas to cash it at a higher
price. This inflates the cost and makes it more difficult for people to make ends meet in
Athens; so, he suspends all exportation of agricultural products with the exception of
olive oil. This is the origin of the word “sycophant”, which means “revealer of figs;” in
other words, a sycophant is somebody who reveals the contraband figs being sent
overseas for commercial reasons, in violation of the lawby Solon. In a political context,
sycophant is a person who blackmails a political rival.
Skilled Labor. Again, as part of his economic reform, Solon passes a law that says every
father must by law equip his sons with a practical skill. He must be equipped to make a
living . If the father fails to do that, then what? The son is relieved of his obligations
under the law to care for his father in old age. That is the “trade off,” that is the quid pro
quo. If you don’t equip your child, then your child has no duty to take care of you when
you are old. If a man fails under Athenian law to take care of his father when he gets old
and the father had done him right when he was a child, then he suffers “atimia”, i.e., he
will be dishonored. What that means is he will be stripped of his citizen’s rights, he can
no longer go to the assembly, he can’t speak publicly in a political context, he is now
publicly disgraced.
What else? He allows people to come from the outside of Athens with the purpose of
receiving citizenship. He wants skilled labor from around the Greek world to feel
welcome at Athens and if they spend a certain amount of time--- I am not sure how
long—and if they behave themselves and make a contribution, then they are awarded
Athenian citizenship. The Athenians are not jealous of their citizenship status as they
would become in the 5th and 4th Centuries BC, this is a very sensitive thing later on, but
at this point Athens needed skilled labor and Solon understands that, he understands that,
so he makes this attractive offer, the word spreads and they have lots of people called
"metoikoi" come to Athens as “ resident aliens.”
Many of these revisions, many of these economic reforms will be continued with the next
gentleman who runs Athens, who was a very different person than Solon, this is
Peisistratos who was a tyrant. Now, I should explain that the word tyrant does not have
the same connotation as it has for us today. We hear the word tyrant and think of very
negative things about some political figure; we think Saddam Hussein, we think Hitler,
we think Stalin. ( The word tyrant is not a Greek word, by the way. It is a Lydian word,
first used in the 7th Century BC by an iambic poet named Archilochus and it means
somebody with unlimited authority; there is no judgment regarding the word being
positive or negative. It simply means someone with power unbridled by any sort of
restraint, so you can have a good ruler who is also a good tyrant). Peisistratos was
generally speaking a quite benign figure actually, but he craved that power. Solon is a
much more controlled and more restrained person in terms of his own mentality, values
and character, when they offered him the tyranny, it was not a seduction for him.
Solon as political pundit. This is about the last thing I will say and if you have any
questions, I will be happy to take some. Here are a couple of points.
Remember, he is a public servant as opposed to what happens today. There is a
distinction that has to be made continuously by us concerning a public servant versus a
politician. These are not the same things. What we have today---and there were lots of
them in the ancient world--- are professional politicians and not public servants. They do
not have a sense of duty, they do not have the moral substance, they do not have the
spiritual conviction about justice and right and equity that a public servant has.This man
was a public servant, not a politician, not a professional politician.He was interested, as I
said, in eunomia, good word, and he understood that moderation and restraint were
absolutely essential in this regard. He understood that power corrupts, he understood that
you need checks and balances, he understood as well that rule of law is absolutely
fundamental to peace and social harmony and I want you to understand this, too. I think,
sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, we take law for granted. Just as we casually talk about
the Constitution, we also casually talk aboutstatutory production in Congress. Men like
Solon did not take law casually anymore than Plato took it casually (look at Book 8 of the
Republic, in terms of this discussion). Solon believed that Law must be crowned King.
Because, law is your salvation, he says. You will not be able to participate in any of the
benefits, any of the civilized existence in the absence of law. In the absence of law, the
will of the stronger prevails, in the absence of law you become subject to the rules of the
jungle. Solon understands what the alternative to the rule of law is. Might will make right
in the absence of law. So, we have to preserve the rule of law at all costs. Everybody
must respect the law; everyone must be willing to compromise and sacrifice on behalf of
maintaining it. No one can be allowed to operate above the law, that is his complaint
about all tyrants who are above the law. You cannot have that. It is dangerously
destructive to society.
In addition to what I just said, in my opinion, this is the true measure of Solon’s genius:
I have not used the word wisdom once tonight, but this is it, this is the place to use it.
Solon, after talking about the law, says the following: even if you have legal due process,
still it does not guarantee justice . You may have all the laws in the books you want, but
you do not necessarily have a guarantee of justice, because justice is the spiritual
community’s commitment to right and that does not necessarily follow, it does not
necessarily happen because you just have the law on axons, the wooden planks the
Athenians wrote their laws on. You can write all the laws you want and still not
necessarily have justice; I hope you understand that you can in our own society as well
have your day in court and you may not receive justice. Solon understands this all the
way back here. So, the reason I started my lecture this evening by saying to you that he is
not only a law giver but also a poet and a pedagogue, was because Solon used his laws
and his poetry to instill the sense of justice inside the hearts and minds and souls of his
people. It is not about writing on axons, it is about writing laws on the souls of men , that
is the only way you receive justice.One of the problems with American society goes back
all the way to the Founding Fathers. If you read Federalist # 10 by Madison, he made a
decision that directly contradicts the position of Solon. Madison said: we have 2 models
we can follow in setting up this Democracy and this Republic. One is the system of
checks and balances and the other is a system in which the State becomes actively
involved in instructing people, teaching people. You have, either checks and balances to
protect you against abuse of power or you have instruction as a means of protecting you
against abuse of power. Madison and the Founding Fathers went in the direction of
structure. What Solon said was you need both, you need checks and balances, but this is
not good enough, because justice is not about procedure, justice is about down in here
(heart) and up in here (head), and if you do not make provision in your culture to instill
this in the hearts and minds of men, then there are ultimately no guarantees against the
arbitrary application of power. The laws will be circumvented, eroded, manipulated and
become the plaything of partisan interests and that is is exactly what is happening in
contemporary society.
So, how would I summarize Solon? Well, this is a man who had the courage, the
conviction, the decency and the wisdom to sacrifice his own self interest on behalf of the
larger community --- and there are very very few men and women in western history I
can describe in these terms, very very few. As a result, I can offer in conclusion this
observation: he remains, and justifiably so, the timeless paradigm of the selfless
statesman and he is the standard by which we should measure all of our politics today. I
thank you all!
If there are any questions, I will see if I can answer them.
-----------------------1 This Lecture given under the auspices of the Advisory Council on Hellenic
Education of the Hellenic Link, Inc. and co-sponsored by the Cathedral
Fellowship,was presented to members of the community at the Holy Trinity
Cathedral Center, Manhattan, New York, on March 15, 2007 at 7:00 p.m.