Solon

In the early sixth century BCE an Athenian aristocrat and poet named Solon was given the task of calming a city close to civil war. His laws ended the enslavement of Athenians for debt, opened the citizen assembly to the poor and replaced birth with wealth as the test for office, and later Athenians looked back on him as the founder of their democracy. Almost everything about him, however, comes from fragments of his own verse and from writers who lived centuries later.

Solon was probably born around 630 BCE, though some modern estimates place his birth up to a decade earlier. He came from a noble Athenian family; his father was probably Execestides, and later tradition traced the line back to Codrus, the legendary last king of Athens. According to Plutarch, Solon's mother and the mother of the future tyrant Pisistratus were cousins.

He first won fame in Athens' quarrel with neighbouring Megara over the island of Salamis. Ancient accounts say a rousing poem of his revived Athenian spirits after a run of defeats, and that he then led the forces that took the island, perhaps around 595 BCE. When Megara refused to accept the loss, the matter went to Sparta for arbitration, and the Spartans found in favour of Athens.

Diogenes Laërtius dates his election as archon, the chief magistrate, to 594 BCE, though some scholars think his special law-making powers came some years later. Athens was then divided between rich landowners and poor farmers, many of whom had pledged their own bodies as security for debts and could be sold as slaves. Solon's answer, later celebrated as the seisachtheia, or "shaking off of burdens", cancelled the obligations marked by boundary stones on mortgaged land, banned loans secured on a person and freed Athenians already enslaved. In his poems he boasts of bringing home citizens who had been sold abroad. Scholars still argue over whether this amounted to a cancellation of all debts or the end of a kind of dependent tenancy.

He repealed the harsh code of Draco, except its laws on homicide. According to the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, he sorted citizens into four classes by the annual yield of their land, from those producing 500 measures of grain down to the labouring thetes, and tied eligibility for office to these classes. All citizens could now sit in the assembly and in a popular court that could hold magistrates to account. He also encouraged olive growing and banned the export of other produce, and offered citizenship to foreign craftsmen who settled with their families.

Having finished his work, Solon gave up his powers and, by ancient accounts, left Athens for ten years so that he could not be pressed to change his laws. He is said to have visited Egypt, where Herodotus has him meet the pharaoh Amasis, and Cyprus. Herodotus also tells of a meeting with Croesus of Lydia, who was told to count no one happy until his life had ended, advice Croesus recalled only after Cyrus the Great had defeated him. Plato, who was descended from Solon's brother according to Diogenes Laërtius, has a character claim that Egyptian priests told Solon the story of Atlantis.

Faction fighting returned within a few years of his departure, and in the end his kinsman Pisistratus seized power as tyrant. Ancient writers say the elderly Solon openly opposed him, standing outside his house in armour to urge resistance. He died soon afterwards, by tradition in Cyprus, at around seventy or eighty.

Solon was counted among the Seven Sages of Greece. Orators of the fourth century credited him with almost every Athenian law, which makes it hard to know what was truly his. Aristotle's school called him the first champion of the people, while his surviving poems show a man who saw himself as a mediator between rich and poor.

Our 500 BCE map shows the Greek world a generation after Solon, with the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus's successors now reaching the Aegean and present-day Greece divided among city-states.