Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/113

AIICHONSHIP OF SOI.OX. 97 tor as an insolvent,--- ivho claimed the protection of the people in the foram, rousing their feelings to the highest pitch by the marks of t je slave-whip visible on his person. Some such incidents had probably happened, though we have no historians to recount them ; moreover, it is not unreasonable to imagine, that that public men- tal affliction which the purifier Epimenides had been invoked to appease, as it sprung in part from pestilence, so it had its cause partly in years of sterility, which must of course have aggravated the distress of the small cultivators. However this may be, such was the condition of things in 59-i B. c., through mutiny of the poor freemen and thetes, and uneasiness of the middling citizens, that the governing oligarchy, unable either to enforce their pri- vate debts or to maintain their political power, were obliged to invoke the well-known wisdom and integrity of Solon. Though his vigorous protest which doubtless rendered him acceptable to the mass of the people against the iniquity of the existing system had already been proclaimed in his poems, they still hoped that he would serve as an auxiliary, to help them over their diffi- culties, and they therefore chose him, nominally, as archon along with Philombrotus, but with power in substance dictatorial. It had happened in several Grecian states, that the governing oligarchies, either by quarrels among their own members or by the general bad condition of the people under their government, were deprived of that hold upon the public mind which was es- sential to their power ; and sometimes, as in the case of Pittakus of Mitylene, anterior to the archonship of Solon, and often in the factions of the Italian republics in the Middle Ages, the collision of opposing forces had rendered society intolerable, and driven all parties to acquiesce in the choice of some reforming dictator. Usually, however, in the early Greek oligarchies, this ultimate crisis was anticipated by some ambitious individual, who availed himself of the public discontent, to overthrow the oligarchy, and usurp the powers of a despot ; and so, probably, it might have happened in Athens, had not the recent failure of Kylon, with all its miserable consequences, operated as a deterring motive It is curious to read, in the words of Solon himself, the temper in which his appointment was construed by a large porticn of the community, but most especially by his own fncnds: and we arc FOJ: in. 5 7ou