Whatever his date, Solon’s poetry sheds much light on the social and economic circumstances of his day, circumstances which led to the Athenians’ granting him near-dictatorial powers. First, debt-slavery in Athens had reached critical proportions. In pre-Solonian Athens - as elsewhere in Greece in general - it was possible to borrow using, in lieu of anything else, one’s own person as security. In the case of default, the creditor claimed the debtor’s person - until such time as the loan was repaid, the debtor remained the creditor’s slave. Solon himself describes the steps which he took to address the problem of rampant debt-slavery in Athens:
To their god-founded native land of Athens I brought back many Athenians who had been sold - some legally, others illegally - as well as those who had fled to escape pressing debt, although they no longer sounded like Athenians when they spoke, so far had they wandered; and others who lived here at home in degrading servitude. . . (Fr. 36 West, lines 8-14)
Several things emerge clearly enough from these verses. First, Solon freed “debt-slaves” in Athens and redeemed those whom their creditors had sold abroad. Second, he allowed those who had gone into exile abroad on account of their debts to return. Solon, then, seems to have carried out a general cancellation of debts - what Plutarch called the seisachtheia or “shaking off of burdens.” Both Plutarch (Sol. 15) and “Aristotle” (Ath. Pol. 6) add that Solon also made the use of the person as security illegal in Athens.
One could, of course, borrow using other security than the person; for example, one could take out a loan against one’s land. Solon wiped out such debts as well by destroying the proof of the mortgage as a few more verses from the same poem show:
Let the dark Earth be my witness. . . from whom I pulled out many pegs (apparently mortgage markers, thus Plut. Sol. 15) that once in many places had been thrust in - she who once lay in servitude is now free. (Fr. 36 West, lines 3-7).
As a result, the creditor had no way to prove that the debtor owed a thing.
A second piece of evidence is a law of Solon’s which prohibited the export from Athens of any natural produce other than olive oil (see Box 8.2). Olive trees are planted on second-rate land which cannot produce staple crops, in particular grain. Solon had no objection to the export of what the second-rate land produced; he was worried about the export of what the first-rate land produced - grain - which he wished to retain in Athens. For it was to obtain grain that people were mortgaging their land or their own persons.
From these two pieces of evidence a picture emerges of a society which was having difficulty feeding itself, not necessarily so much because of the land’s inability to produce enough, but because landowners were sending abroad much of what the land did produce in order to acquire other commodities through trade. What grain remained in Athens, by the inexorable law of supply and demand, became even more costly. Whoever had no direct access to the means of production had to purchase through trade or to borrow. Even those who did own some land were having difficulty and were borrowing against what little land they still held.
Driving all of this was the rapid population growth discussed in chap. 4. Greek inheritance customs, whereby all sons inherited equally, compounded the problem. That is to say, if a man had four sons, his land was quartered upon his death. Subdivision over several generations could leave a small landholder in desperate straits if that fragment of an originally sizable estate were now capable of supporting a family in good years only. A bad harvest could force the landholder to borrow against the land itself - thus placing even that remaining fragment at risk. Those who had already lost their land were in an even more difficult position.
Most Greek communities in the eighth and seventh centuries had dealt with the problem of a burgeoning population through colonization (see chap. 5), but in Athens a crisis did not arise until the sixth century. But by Greek standards Athens did possess a large amount of territory to begin with, and, second, war with Megara had gained for Athens the entire Plain of Eleusis, one of the most fertile areas in Greece (see chap. 5). These two factors could not ultimately prevent, but clearly did postpone the crisis.
Solon’s response to the crisis, moreover, amounted to nothing more than an additional postponement. He freed the debt-slaves, but did little to address the causes of the debt-slavery. His prohibition of the use of the person as security, ironically, made it even more difficult for those in need to borrow in order to feed themselves. The prohibition of the export of grain is more difficult to judge, but it can only have had efficacy if landowners kept the level of production exactly the same as before - if the level of production, with the removal of an economic incentive to produce (e. g., the value of the grain abroad), actually dropped in response to Solon’s law, then matters could well have become even worse. Solon’s response may have provided welcome and immediate relief, but clearly did not solve the problem.
That required not an “elective,” but rather a conventional tyrant, Peisistratus (see below).
World History
