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82 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE background for the favourite Greek conception of the Wise Wanderer, We hear, in defiance of chronology, how he met the richest of kings, Croesus, who showed all his glory and then asked who was the 'most fortu- nate' man in the world. Solon named him certain obscure persons who had done their duty and were loved by their neighbours and were now safely dead. The words seemed meaningless at the time, but had their due effect afterx/ards — on Crcesus when Cyrus was in the act of burning him to death ; and on Cyrus when he heard the story and desisted from his cruel pride. Solon was a soldier and statesman who had written love-poetry in his youth, and now turned his skill in verse to practical purposes, circulating pohtical poems as his successors two centuries later circulated speeches and pamphlets. It is not clear how far this practice was borrowed from the great towns of Ionia, how far it was a growth of the specially Athenian instinct for politics. We possess many considerable fragments, elegiac, iambic, and trochaic, which are of immense interest as historical documents ; while as poetry they have something of the hardness and dulness of the practical man. The most interesting bits are on the war against Megara for the possession of Salamis, and on the ' Seisachtheia ' or ' Ojf- shaking of Burdens^ as Solon's great legislative revolu- tion was called. As a reforming statesman, Solon was beaten by the extraordinary difficulties of the time ; he lived to see the downfall of the constitution he had framed, and the rise of Pisistratus ; but something in his character kept him alive in the memory of Athens as the type of the great and good lawgiver, who might have been a 'Tyrannos,' but would not for righteousness' sake.