Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/159

home; and the marks of hopeless mortgaging disappeared from the land. Men who had lost their land entirely could not indeed recover it; but Solon seems to have tried to give these a new start in life by turning their attention to art and trade. To cheapen the ordinary products of the country he forbade their exportation, except in the case of olive oil, of which there was the greatest abundance. To bring Athens into closer connection with the great trading and colonising cities of Chalcis and Corinth he introduced the Euboic coinage, which was in use there, in place of the older system of Athens' natural enemies, Ægina and Megara. Many other measures are mentioned, of which the general purpose seems to have been the same — to revive native industry, to keep the population employed, and so to enable all to acquire a certain amount of wealth.^[1] Equality in the distribution of wealth has never yet been realised, but absence of startling inequality was the safeguard of the City-State. Aristotle long afterwards pointed out this law in an admirable chapter, which is as true now as on the day on which he wrote it.^[2] It is destruction, he teaches, for a city to be made up of masters and slaves, and not of men who are really, as well as technically, free. The State is a social union of friends, and would be, if it could,

1. For the Seisactheia, read especially Plut. Solon, 14-17, Ath. Pol. 6, and Solon's Poems, fragments 4 and 36. Useful summaries of other evidence will be found in Busolt, Gr. Gesch. i. 524, and Gilbert, i. 130.
2. Pol. 1295 A and B, on the advantages of τὸ μέσον. Cf Newman, vol. i. 502, note 1.