Solon

The Athenian statesman, poet, and lawgiver whom later Greeks numbered among the Seven Sages. Made eponymous archon and reconciler about 594 BC amid a crisis of debt-bondage, he enacted the seisachtheia — the shaking-off of burdens that cancelled debts secured on the person and freed those enslaved for them — then rewrote Athens's laws and graded political rights by property rather than birth (Plut. *Solon* 14–16). Among his measures was a law stripping civic rights from any citizen who took neither side in a civil conflict, forcing engagement over apathy (Plut. *Solon* 20). Having bound the Athenians by oath to keep his laws unchanged while he was away, he left on his travels; Herodotus stages his visit to the fabulously rich Croesus of Lydia, where Solon declines to call the king happy and names instead the obscure Tellus of Athens, who died well, warning that one must look to the end of a life before judging it (Hdt. 1.29–33). The meeting is chronologically impossible, and Plutarch — well aware of it — defends keeping so famous and fitting a story (Plut. *Solon* 27). In old age Solon lived to see his kinsman Peisistratus seize the Acropolis, opposing the grant of the bodyguard he foresaw would become a tyrant's guard (Plut. *Solon* 29–30).

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