Плутарх - Plutarch's Lives - Volume I

He regulated, moreover, the journeys of the women, and their mournings and festivals. A woman was not allowed to travel with more than three dresses, nor with more than an obolus' worth of food or drink, nor a basket more than a cubit in length; nor was she to travel at night, except in a waggon with a light carried in front of it. He abolished the habits of tearing themselves at funerals, and of reciting set forms of dirges, and of hiring mourners. He also forbade them to sacrifice an ox for the funeral feast, and to bury more than three garments with the body, and to visit other persons' graves. Most of these things are forbidden by our own laws also; with the addition, that by our laws those who offend thus are fined by the gynaeconomi, or regulators of the women, for giving way to unmanly and womanish sorrow.

XXII. Observing that the city was filled with men who came from all countries to take refuge in Attica, that the country was for the most part poor and unproductive, and that merchants also are unwilling to despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export, he encouraged his countrymen to embark in trade, and made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father, if his father had not taught him a trade. As for Lykurgus, whose city was clear of strangers, and whose land was "unstinted, and with room for twice the number," as Euripides says, and who above all had all the Helots, throughout Lacedaemon, who were best kept employed, in order to break their spirit by labour and hardship, it was very well that his citizens should disdain laborious handicrafts and devote their whole attention to the art of war.

But Solon had not the power to change the whole life of his countrymen by his laws, but rather was forced to suit his laws to existing circumstances, and, as he saw that the soil was so poor that it could only suffice for the farmers, and was unable to feed a mass of idle people as well, he gave great honour to trade, and gave powers to the senate of the Areopagus to inquire what each man's source of income might be, and to punish the idle. A harsher measure was that of which we are told by Herakleides of Pontus, his making it unnecessary for illegitimate children to maintain their father. Yet if a man abstains from an honourable marriage, and lives with a woman more for his own pleasure in her society than with a view to producing a family, he is rightly served, and cannot upbraid his children with neglecting him, because he has made their birth their reproach.

XXIII. Altogether Solon's laws concerning women are very strange. He permitted a husband to kill an adulterer taken in the act; but if any one carried off a free woman and forced her, he assessed the penalty at one hundred drachmas. If he obtained her favours by persuasion, he was to pay twenty drachmas, except in the case of those who openly ply for hire, alluding to harlots; for they come to those who offer them money without any concealment. Moreover, he forbade men to sell their sisters and daughters, except in the case of unchastity. Now to punish the same offence at one time with unrelenting severity, and at another in a light and trifling manner, by imposing so slight a fine, is unreasonable, unless the scarcity of specie in the city at that period made fines which were paid in money more valuable than they would now be; indeed, in the valuation of things for sacrifice, a sheep and a drachma were reckoned as each equal to a medimnus of corn. To the victor at the Isthmian games he appointed a reward of a hundred drachmas, and to the victor in the Olympian, five hundred. He gave five drachmas for every wolf that was killed, and one drachma for every wolf's whelp; and we are told by Demetrius of Phalerum that the first of these sums was the price of an ox, and the second that of a sheep. The prices of choice victims, which he settled in his sixteenth tablet of laws, would naturally be higher than those of ordinary beasts, but even thus they are cheap compared with prices at the present day. It was an ancient practice among the Athenians to destroy the wolves, because their country was better fitted for pasture than for growing crops. Some say that the Athenian tribes derive their names, not from the sons of Ion, but from the different professions in which men were then divided: thus the fighting men were named Hoplites, and the tradesmen Ergadeis; the two remaining ones being the Geleontes, or farmers, and the Aigikoreis, or goat–herds and graziers. With regard to water, as the country is not supplied with either rivers or lakes, but the people depend chiefly upon artificial wells, he made a law, that wherever there was a public well within four furlongs, people should use it, but if it were farther off, then they must dig a private well for themselves; but if a man dug a depth of sixty feet on his own estate without finding water, then he was to have the right of filling a six–gallon pitcher twice a day at his neighbour's well; for Solon thought it right to help the distressed, and yet not to encourage laziness. He also made very judicious regulations about planting trees, ordering that they should not be planted within five feet of a neighbour's property, except in the case of olives and fig–trees, which were not to be planted within nine feet; for these trees spread out their roots farther than others, and spoil the growth of any others by taking away their nourishment and by giving off hurtful juices. Trenches and pits he ordered to be dug as far away from another man's property as they were deep; and no hive of bees was to be placed within three hundred feet of those already established by another man.

XXIV. Oil was the only product of the country which he allowed to be exported, everything else being forbidden; and he ordered that if any one broke this law the archon was to solemnly curse him, unless he paid a hundred drachmas into the public treasury. This law is written on the first of his tablets. From this we see that the old story is not altogether incredible, that the export of figs was forbidden, and that the men who informed against those who had done so were therefore called sycophants. He also made laws about damage received from animals, one of which was that a dog who had bitten a man should be delivered up to him tied to a stick three cubits long, an ingenious device for safety.

One is astounded at his law of adopting foreigners into the state, which permits no one to become a full citizen in Athens unless he be either exiled for life from his native city, or transfers himself with his whole family to Athens to practise his trade there. It is said that his object in this was not so much to exclude other classes of people from the city, as to assure these of a safe refuge there; and these he thought would be good and faithful citizens, because the former had been banished from their own country, and the latter had abandoned it of their own freewill. Another peculiarity of Solon's laws was the public dining–table in the prytaneum. Here he did not allow the same person to dine often, while he punished the man who was invited and would not come, because the one seemed gluttonous, and the other contemptuous.

XXV. He ordered that all his laws should remain in force for a hundred years, and he wrote them upon triangular wooden tablets, which revolved upon an axis in oblong recesses, some small remains of which have been preserved in the prytaneum down to the present day. These, we are told by Aristotle, were called Kurbeis . The comic poet Kratinus also says,

"By Solon and by Draco, mighty legislators once,

Whose tablets light the fire now to warm a dish of pulse."

Some say that the term Kurbeis is only applied to those on which are written the laws which regulate religious matters.

The senate swore by a collective oath that it would enforce Solon's laws; and each of the Thesmothetae took an oath to the same effect at the altar in the market–place, protesting that, if he transgressed any of the laws, he would offer a golden statue as big as himself to the temple at Delphi.