Free The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox Page B

they brought the debtor the accompanying risk of default, real or alleged: there was no idea of ‘collateral’ and as the security (a person) was so much more valuable, it was tempting for a creditor to foreclose unjustly. Debts thus led to the unacceptable enslavement of one Athenian by another. Solon also enlarged the process of justice by extending the right to prosecute offenders to third parties outside the particular crime. Solon promoted ‘active citizenship’, while believing in abstract, impersonal justice which was sustained by written law, not by his personal tyranny.
    Earlier scholars of this period, who were familiar with the Old Testament prophets in Israel, ascribed this Greek concern with ‘justice’ and ‘fair play’ to Greece’s prophetic centre, the Delphic oracle. Prophetic Delphi, it was believed, inspired this new ‘rule of law’ and the moral revulsion from tyranny. In fact, Solon probably joined a ‘Sacred War’ in order to rid Delphic Apollo of a priesthood which was declared to be unjust and too partisan. Lawgivers like Solon did not claim divine inspiration or the gift of prophecy from the gods. Rather, they addressed social crises in the belief that human laws would avert them and that by giving up some of their interests, the protagonists could cohere in a new, sustainable order.
    Solon’s legislation had a scope and detail which certainly qualify it as a ‘code’. We can compare it with our best-attested collection of laws for an early Greek community, those which were publicly inscribed in the Cretan city of Gortyn,
c.
450 BC . 7 Some of these laws were newor recent, but others were much older, contemporary with Solon’s. They had not grown up year by year, as if each year’s magistrates routinely added to the laws which they inherited: in Greek city-states, the annual magistrates did not publish their year’s judgements as a body of laws when they left office. They had surely been collected up into a single text by a public decision. In Gortyn, special ‘law commissioners’ had, in my view, been appointed to collect up existing laws and publish whatever they could find.
    These Cretan laws address vexed questions of inheritance which also concerned Solon in Attica: bequests are a source of social inequality and potential tension, especially within an upper class. Throughout, the laws’ penalties for offences vary hugely according to social class. If a free man raped a household slave, he had to pay a fine about a hundred times smaller than the fine for a slave who raped a free person. The laws at Gortyn accepted the existence of semi-free ‘serfs’ (called
woikeis
) and inferiors (
apetairoi
) who were excluded from the dining-groups of the free citizens. 8 The codification of these laws did not bring freedom or equality for everyone who came within their scope.
    Solon, too, accepted and upheld the distinctions of social class. However, all Athenians were declared free by him, and the legitimate slaves in Attica would henceforward be foreigners only. What, though, of relations between the Athenian ‘people’ and the new ‘upper class’ of nobles and rich men which Solon had recognized? Solon denied the hopes of those Athenians who wanted ‘equal shares’ in the land of Attica and a redistribution of property. The ‘people’, or
d ē demos
, he tells us, did have its ‘leaders’, but they were probably not drawn from the very poor, as if they were engaged in a straight class-conflict with the rich. They are more likely to have been lesser landowners, men from the newly armed hoplites, the sort of people who had supported a tyrant elsewhere. Traditionally, even before Solon the citizens of Attica had been categorized as those who owned a horse, those who owned a ‘yoke’ of two oxen and those (the
th ē tes
) who owned neither but worked for others. The Attic hoplites were the oxen-owners, people with lands from about ‘seven acres and two cows’ up to about