Solon of Attica

I read in "Persian Fire" that the sage, Solon, was descended from an Athenian king; yet he was able to sympathize enough with the poor to persuade the elites to give them some dignity. Do you think this was genuine humanism? Nobless oblige, perhaps?

I think that the real Solon is much shrouded in mystery -- Herodotus has him involved in what has to be a fictional meeting with Croesus for example -- but I believe he may have been both a pragmatist and an idealist, in that he saw opportunities to let policy raise Athens up while achieving real reform for the disenfranchised. Only elites would have had an opportunity to effect this kind of change in Solon's time, so there is little doubt that he was of higher station than the common thetes.

PS Persian Fire is outstanding history!

It's the same kind of dilemma we have with all "democratic" leaders and rabble-rousers in antiquity: were they genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor? Or were they just political opportunists?

In reality, I think it was both of the above. But that's not to say what he did was bad, in its context. For instance, he divided society up based on wealth; sounds kind of lame to us, until you remember that their society was based on heredity so if you were from a "good" family it didn't matter if the guy down the street had just as much money as you... you were still "better". In this way, Solon sort of leveled the playing field. But at the same time, he was careful to not piss off any one group too much, by not caving to any one interest to any extreme. For instance, that example broke up the monopoly the "big families" had on status at Athens, while allowing people who were rich through their own work to attain higher status. At the same time, Solon cancelled debt slavery, which made the poor ecstatic, but made the rich angry.

Of course almost right after he instituted these reforms, he took off, probably because he was afraid of how he'd basically alienated everybody even by helping most of them. This in and of itself may be construed as showing how he actually felt about the situation... i.e., not willing to die for it, we can assume....but who knows, really.

I look as Solon's departure as a kind of self-exile. As it was, in the short term his reforms were only partially successful, but in the longer term he laid the foundation for a society that while stratified and elite-central by our standards, became more egalitarian than any other major state of its day. As you point out, Feicht, the division by wealth rather than birth was rather radical in its day.

You guys just answered my second question: If he was so concerned with Athens and the poor, why did he take off on a Meditarranean cruise? I should have thought of that. Even semi-radical changes can be lethal to the instigator.

Also, this is one of books with lots of meaty information in relatively few pages. I'm lovin' it.

I love Holland's novelistic writing style. I guess that comes from being a novelist by trade rather than a traditional scholar who is more concerned with giving dry as dust papers at conferences and whatnot. He really makes the characters come alive, to an extent which I sometimes had to backtrack and make sure he was actually talking about who I thought he was; making one dimensional characters from a textbook into real people can do that to you, I guess ;-)

I guess I hadn't noticed that about types of writers. I'll be looking for it in future excusions, however.

It's something I've absolutely come to notice the more and more books I read; in many cases it makes all the difference in the world.

Sometime you do just need a "sourcebook"... but it's a lot easier to enjoy a book if the author's style makes it likely ;-)