Free The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox Page A

they brought the risk of military failure.
    In short, tyrants helped to stop spiralling ambition and faction by an ultimate act of ambitious faction: their own coup. Usually, it involved bloodshed, and, as tyrants regarded their rule as the inheritable asset of their family, their dominance passed on to a second generation. Inevitably, some of these heirs were much less discreet or able than their fathers. Amazing stories circulated about Periander, the second tyrant of Corinth (how he made love to his wife’s corpse, how he threw brothel-keepers into the sea), or Phalaris in Sicily (how he roasted his enemies in a big bull of bronze: the story was probablyinspired by one of the tyrant’s surviving bronze sculptures). Tyranny had a basic illegitimacy, and observant citizens were well aware of its drawbacks. Within decades of the first tyrants some of the Greek communities were already trying to find an alternative way of resolving tensions. Their preferred option was the use of law, prescribed by contemporary lawgivers.
    Among the aristocrats, there had already been individual lawgivers, but the social and political crisis of the mid-seventh to sixth centuries BC gave them a new scope. From Dreros, on Crete, we have our earliest inscribed Greek law (probably
c.
650 BC ). It limited unduly prolonged tenure of the main civic magistracy, just the sort of ‘disorder’ which might result in a tyranny. In Athens, in the 620s, faction-fighting broke out after the foiled coup of a would-be tyrant acting with foreign backing. To restore social harmony, laws were set out and displayed in writing by the Athenian nobleman Draco, of harsh ‘Draconian’ fame. In 594 BC , again at Athens, a tyranny was within easy reach of Solon, another aristocrat. However, Solon preferred to ‘call the people together’, 4 as the chief elected magistrate of that year, and then to write down wide-ranging laws which regulated anything from boundary disputes to excessive display at weddings and funerals, provocative insults of a man’s dead ancestors and the due sacrifices in the year’s religious calendar.
    Solon is the best-known and most admirable lawgiver in early Greece. He was also a poet and he defended his reforms in vigorous verse. To Solon, we owe the first surviving statement that the conflict leading to tyranny was ‘slavery’: freedom, therefore, was a value for citizens to prize and fight for, not just against foreign enemies, but also within their own community. 5 Tyranny sharpened men’s sense of what they had lost. To avoid it, Solon installed a second council beside the nobles’ monopoly of the Areopagus council, and opened magistracies to the rich in Attica as well as to the nobly born. Famously, he abolished the ‘dues’ which had been payable to noble overlords by lesser landowners throughout Attica. In return for a noble’s ‘protection’, landowners had been paying one-sixth of their harvest; the non-nobles did own the land in question and could buy and sell it, but the ‘charge’ remained attached to the land, whoever bought it. Graphically, Solon describes in verse how he set the ‘blackearth’ free by uprooting the markers on which this ancient ‘due’ was recorded. 6 The earth, too, had been ‘previously enslaved’: now, thanks to Solon, it was free.
    These ‘dues’ had probably been exacted by the nobles in Attica since the turbulent years of the ‘dark ages’. By 594 BC many who paid them were the new hoplite-soldiers and so they no longer depended on their nobles for their military safety. The payments had become unjust, and even the nobles acquiesced in their ending. For them, the crucial point was that Solon had not gone on to redistribute lands from the rich to the poor: the nobles’ own properties were left intact. What he did do was to ban the bad practice of creditors who demanded their debtor’s free person as security for his debts. Most of these debts would be small and short-term, but