Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/149

THE LAWS OF SOLON. 133 included in any gens or phratry could therefore have had no ac- cess to it. The conditions of eligibility were similar, according to ancient custom, for the nine archons, of course, also, for the senate of areopagus. So that there remained only the public as- sembly, in which an Athenian not a member of these tribes could take part : yet he was a citizen, since he could give his vote for aichons and senators, and could take part in the annual decision of their accountability, besides being entitled to claim redress for wrong from the archons in his own person. while the alien could }nly do so through the intervention of an avouching citi- zen, or prostates. It seems, therefore, that all persons not included in the four tribes, whatever their grade of fortune might be, were on the same level in respect to political privilege as the fourth and poorest class of the Solonian census. It has already been remarked that, even before the time of Solon, the number of Athe- nians not included in the gentes or phratries was probably con- siderable : it tended to become greater and greater, since these bodies were close and unexpansive, while the policy of the new lawgiver tended to invite industrious settlers from other parts of Greece to Athens. Such great and increasing inequality of poli" tical privilege helps to explain the weakness of the government in repelling the aggressions of Peisistratus, and exhibits the im- portance of the revolution afterwards wrought by Ivleisthenes, when he abolished (for all political purposes) the four old tribes, and created ten new comprehensive tribes in place of them. In regard to the regulations of the senate and the assembly of the people, as constituted by Solon, we are altogether without in- formation : nor is it safe to transfer to the Solonian constitution the information, comparatively ample, which we possess respecting these bodies under the later democracy. The laws of Solon were inscribed on wooden rollers and trian- gular tablets, in the species of writing called boustrophedon (lines alternating first from left to right, and next from right to left, like the course of the ploughman), and preserved first in the acropolis, subsequently in the prytaneium. On the tablets, called kyrbeis, were chiefly commemorated the laws respecting sacred tites and sacrifices :' on the pillars, or rollers, of which there were 1 Plutarch, Solon, 23-25. He particularly mentions the sixteenth ~t*r-