Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are stripping
away You know, the white marble columns, the
pristine statues, and that soft philosophical
lighting we usually associate with ancient Greece.
We are, yeah. We're going back to a time before
the Golden Age, to a version of Athens that feels
less like a university campus and more like a
city on the verge of a violent, nervous breakdown.
It really is a completely different world. We're
dialing the clock back to the early 6th century
BC, so roughly around 630 to 560 BC. And the
man we're focusing on today, Solon. is often
just just a footnote in history classes right
you might remember the name maybe you know he
was a lawgiver but his actual story is wild he's
the man who arguably invented the concept of
the citizen and he did it while writing poetry
and you know managing a society that was about
five minutes away from eating itself alive that's
a massive claim inventing the citizen because
before this if you lived in athens what were
you just a subject or like a member of a tribe
Exactly. You were defined by your family, your
tribe or your debt. You were a subject to the
powerful. Solon comes along and essentially tries
to hack the operating system of Athens. And the
most cinematic part is how he did it. He wasn't
a general who marched in with an army. He was
a poet who was handed absolute autocratic power
by people who were just desperate for someone,
anyone to fix the mess. It sounds like the plot
of a political thriller. The Poet Dictator. But
before we get to his solutions, we have to understand
the problem. Because I think when we picture
Athens, we picture democracy, people voting,
you know, philosophers chatting in the Agora.
But that's not the Athens Solon walked into,
is it? Not even close. That famous democracy
is a century away. The Athens of Solon's time
was, for all intents and purposes, a failed state.
It was a nightmare scenario. Imagine a city that
is completely... paralyzed by inequality, where
the rich have everything, the poor have nothing,
and the tension is so thick you could cut it
with a knife. It wasn't a debate club. It was
a powder keg. So the mission of this deep dive
is to figure out how this one man, Solon, managed
to walk into that burning building and not only
survive, but... but lay the foundation for Western
civilization. It's an incredible story. We're
going to look at his radical economic reforms,
his rewriting of the Constitution, and this fascinating
idea he had of holding a shield of might over
both the rich and the poor. And we're going to
ask the big question, did it actually work? Because
as we'll see, in his own lifetime, the answer
was, well, it was a bit complicated. And just
to flag our sources today, we are pulling from
a great stack. We've got historical records.
We've got the heavy hitters like Plutarch, Herodotus,
and Aristotle. But coolest of all, we have fragments
of Solon's own poetry. Which is so rare. It's
amazing. You get the actual voice of the person
from 2 ,600 years ago. It is. It gives us a window
into his psychology, his motives, that we just
don't get with other figures from this period.
Okay, so let's set the scene properly. Section
one, the crisis. How bad was it really? You use
the phrase nightmare scenario. It was catastrophic.
The primary driver was the wealth gap. But we're
not talking about, you know, the 1 % owning more
stocks than the 99%. No, this is more fundamental.
It's about land and liberty. The arable land
in Attica, that's the region around Athens, was
almost entirely in the hands of a few noble families
called the Eupatrids. Eupatrids, that sounds
fancy. It literally means the well -born or those
with good fathers. Of course it does. They controlled
the politics. the religion, and most importantly,
the economy and the poor. They were suffering
under a brutal, absolutely brutal system of debt.
Let's unpack that debt. Because today, you know,
if you have debt, maybe your credit score tanks,
maybe the bank takes your car. But in Solon's
Athens, the stakes were a little higher. Much
higher. The horror of debt in this period was
that the collateral wasn't your property. It
was your body. It was your body. If you were
a poor farmer, a sharecropper, and you had a
bad harvest or a drought hit, you still owed
your rent or your loan payments to the Eupatrid
Lord. If you couldn't pay, the creditor had the
legal right to seize you. your wife and your
children, and sell you into slavery. That is
absolutely terrifying. You could wake up a free
Athenian, have a bad season of rain, and end
up being shipped across the Mediterranean as
a piece of property. It happened constantly.
The sources described the countryside as being
filled with these visual symbols of oppression
called horos. Horos. I saw that term in the notes.
These were what, boundary markers? Yes, usually
stone or wooden pillars standing on the farmland.
But they weren't just fences marking where your
land ended and mine began. If you saw a horo
standing on a field, it was a public declaration
of a mortgage. Like a foreclosure sign, but infinitely
worse. Worse, because it meant the person working
that land didn't really own their labor anymore.
It was a sign that said, this land and the people
on it are under obligation to a creditor. It
was a constant physical reminder that you were
living on borrowed time. The farmers working
this land were often called hektomeroi or sixth
parters. Sixth parters. Does that mean they kept
a sixth of their crop or they had to give away
a sixth? Scholars debate it, but the prevailing
view is often that they had to hand over a sixth
of their produce. Or maybe. Even worse, they
only got to keep a sixth. Either way, you're
not getting rich. You're not. You're living on
the razor's edge of subsistence. And if they
missed that quota, it was slavery. So you have
a population that is terrified. hungry, and watching
their neighbors disappear into slavery. That
is the definition of a pre -revolutionary situation.
Exactly. And this economic misery fractured the
city into three distinct rival factions. And
what's fascinating is that the ancient historians
describe these factions geographically. It feels
almost like a fantasy novel or a dystopian YA
book. I love this detail. You had the hill, the
plain, and the coast. Okay, it makes it so visual.
Who were the people of the hill? The hill represented
the poor, the people in the highlands where the
soil was rocky and bad. These were the radical
Democrats, the people who had nothing to lose.
They wanted to flip the table. They wanted a
total redistribution of land. The radicals. Then
you have the plain. I'm guessing that's where
the good farmland was. Right. The rich landowners,
the Eupatrids, they were the oligarchs. They
wanted to keep the system exactly as it was because,
well, it was making them rich. They were the
conservatives. And the coast. The coast was the
middle ground. Traders, fishermen, craftsmen,
they were the moderates. They didn't want the
radical anarchy of the hill, but they didn't
want the stifling oppression of the plain either.
They just wanted stability. They just wanted
stability so they could do business. So you have
the radicals, the reactionaries, and the moderates
all hating each other. And on top of that, the
rich families were fighting each other too. Oh,
the clan rivalries were intense. This wasn't
just class warfare. It was Game of Thrones -style
feuds between powerful families. The city was
paralyzed. They couldn't make decisions. They
were weak. Enter Solon. Who was this guy? Where
did he fit into this three -way cage match? And
that's the key to his rise. He was a living contradiction.
By blood, he was a eupatrid. He was born into
a noble family. He could trace his lineage back
to the legendary King Kodris. Okay. So socially,
he sat at the high table. The witch trusted him
because he was one of them. But he didn't act
like a typical snobby aristocrat? No. His father
had apparently diminished the family fortune
through generosity, so Solon had to work. He
became a merchant. He traveled. He got involved
in commerce. Which was really unusual for nobles
back then, right? Didn't they usually look down
on anyone who had to work for a living? Extremely
unusual. Most nobles thought trade was vulgar.
But this gave Solon a unique perspective. He
understood the economic realities of the traders
on the coast. He understood the struggles of
the poor. But he spoke the language of the rich
on the plain. He was the only person who could
talk to everyone. He also had a bit of a flair
for the dramatic. We have to tell the Salama
story. This is the moment where he goes from
respected merchant to like national hero. This
is a great story. So Athens had been fighting
a long losing war against its neighbor, Megara,
for control of the island of Salamis. It was
a disaster. Total humiliation. Total humiliation.
The Athenians were so demoralized that the assembly
passed a law making it a capital crime punishable
by death to even propose continuing the war.
That is profound denial. Yeah. We are losing
so badly that if you mention the war, we will
kill you. They had completely given up. But Solon
couldn't accept the shame of it. He was a patriot.
But he couldn't speak out legally. So Plutarch
tells us he feigned madness. He pretended to
have a mental breakdown. He put on a traveler's
cap, which was weird to wear indoors in the city,
and he ran into the marketplace, jumped up on
the herald's stone, and just started screaming
a poem he had written. A poem, of course. It
always comes back to poetry with this guy. It
was a nationalist anthem. Let us go to Solomus
to fight for the lovely island and wipe away
our shame. Because he was acting mad, he couldn't
be prosecuted under the law. That's brilliant.
But the poem was so powerful and his performance
was so electric that the crowd got fired up.
He literally rafted his way into a military campaign.
Essentially. The young men grabbed their weapons,
Solon was put in charge, and they actually won.
They took the island back. That showed he had
charisma. He could manipulate public opinion.
Exactly. So fast forward to 594 BC. The debt
crisis is peaking. The poor are sharpening their
farming tools, ready to revolt. The rich are
terrified of being slaughtered in their homes.
And both sides look at Solon, the hero of Solomus,
the noble merchant, and say, you fix it. He was
chosen as archon, right? Chief magistrate. Yes,
the chief magistrate. But they gave him extraordinary
powers. He was basically made a dictator for
a limited time to rewrite the laws and save the
city. So no pressure. You have absolute power.
Everyone hates everyone. And if you fail... The
city burns. Where does he even start? He starts
with the most immediate source of pain, the debt.
He enacts a set of reforms known as the Scythia.
Scythia, that's a great word. What does it translate
to? The shaking off of burdens. It's poetic,
but the action was concrete and immediate. He
ordered the removal of the Horus markers. So
those stones in the fields, he just said, rip
them out. Rip them out, smash them. He annulled
the contracts. If you owed money that was secured
by your land or your person, that debt was wiped
out. Gone. It was a massive debt jubilee. That
is radical. Oh. But the biggest change was the
one about slavery, right? Yes. This was the fundamental
shift. He prohibited for all time the practice
of using a person's body as collateral for a
loan. He established a fundamental human right
for Athenians. No matter how poor you are, you
cannot be enslaved by your fellow citizen. So
he didn't just cancel the current debts. He changed
the rules of the game forever. He even went further.
He used state funds to track down Athenians who
had been sold abroad into slavery, bought them
back and brought them home. The sources say some
of them had been gone so long they had forgotten
the attic. That is an incredible image. These
people returning home, relearning their language,
regaining their freedom. But there is always
a but. I have to imagine the people who were
owed that money were absolutely furious. Oh,
the rich were livid. He was destroying their
wealth. He was vaporizing their assets. And to
make matters worse, there was a huge scandal.
A scandal, do tell. Well, the story goes that
shortly before Solon announced the Sisekdea,
he confided in a few close friends aristocrats
with names like Conan and Clinius. He told them,
hey, I'm going to cancel the debts, but I'm not
going to redistribute the land. Oh, no. That
sounds like insider information. It was. These
friends immediately went out and borrowed huge
sums of money. They used that cash to buy up
massive amounts of land. A few days later, Solon
cancels the debts. So they keep the land. They
keep the land they just bought, but they don't
have to pay back the loans. They made a killing.
That looks terrible. It looks like Solon rigged
the system to enrich his buddies. It looked incredibly
suspicious. Solon was accused of being in on
the con, he had to publicly defend himself, and
his defense was basically, look, I lost money
too. He claimed he had loaned out five talents
of his own money, which was a fortune, and he
canceled those debts along with everyone else's.
He argued, why would I cost myself a fortune
just to help these guys? I'm broke too, so I
must be innocent. It's a bold defense. It worked
enough to keep him in power. But here's the kicker,
and this really shows the tightrope he was walking.
The Scythia made the rich hate him because they
lost money, but the poor were angry too. Why?
He saved them from slavery. They wanted more.
They wanted what the hill faction promised, land
redistribution. They wanted Solon to take the
big estates of the wealthy and chop them up into
equal plots for everyone. But Solon refused.
He refused. He said, I gave you your freedom.
I'm not going to destroy the social order completely.
He described himself in his poetry as a wolf
surrounded by yapping dogs. He was being attacked
from all sides. That brings us to the shield
metaphor we mentioned. He wasn't trying to make
one side win. He was trying to stop the fight.
Exactly. But once he stopped the immediate bleeding
with the debt relief, he had to perform the surgery.
He had to fix the broken system that caused the
mess in the first place. He had to rewrite the
Constitution. This is Section 3. And this is
where so long really changes history. Because
up until this point, Power in Athens was all
about your bloodline. It was about who your daddy
was. Correct. It was an aristocracy. Solon shifted
the entire basis of political power from aristocracy
to timocracy. Timocracy. That's a word we don't
hear often. It means power based on wealth, or
more specifically, power based on production.
Solon looked at Athens and said, it shouldn't
matter if your last name is Codrus. It matters
what you contribute to the economy. So he divided
the citizens into four classes based on how many
measures of agricultural produce their land yielded.
So he created a tax bracket system that doubled
as a political hierarchy. Let's run through the
classes. Who was at the top? At the very top,
you had the Pentecostal Indemnoy. Pentecostal
Indemnoy. Try saying that three times fast. It
translates to 500 measurements. These were the
super rich. Their estates produced 500 bushels
of grain or measures of oil. And because they
produced the most, they were eligible for the
highest offices. Archon, general, treasurer.
They paid the most taxes, but they held the executive
power. Okay, next level down. The Hippaeus. This
means knights or horsemen. They produced... 300
measures. The name tells you their social function.
They were rich enough to own and maintain a war
horse, so they served as the cavalry in the army.
Then the middle class. The zugate, the yoke men.
They produced 200 measures. The term yoke refers
to a yoke of oxen. These were the solid farmers,
the backbone of the state. And in a war. In a
war, they could afford the bronze armor and shield
to fight as hoplites, the heady infantry. And
finally, the vast majority of people. The feats.
Anyone producing less than 200 measures. These
were the manual laborers, the landless, the poor
sharecroppers. Under the old system, these people
were political zeros. They had no voice, no power,
nothing. Oh, Solon changes that. He does. And
this is the democratic breakthrough, even if
it didn't look like full democracy yet. Solon
admitted the feats to the ecclesia, the assembly,
and to the helia, which were the jury courts.
Okay, so they couldn't be archon. They couldn't
run the city. But they could vote on who did
run the city? Yes, they could vote in elections.
But even more powerful was the jury. Solon allowed
the common people to sit in judgment of the powerful.
If an archon was corrupt or stole money or abused
his power, a jury of common citizens could put
him on trial after his term was over. That is
huge. Accountability. Aristotle called Solon
the first people's champion because of this.
He didn't give the poor the steering wheel, but
he gave them the emergency brake. He gave them
the power to protect themselves from the government.
It's a brilliant check and balance. The rich
get the prestige of office, but they have to
answer to the poor if they mess up. Precisely.
Solon also supposedly created a council of 400,
100 men from each of the four tribes to steer
the assembly and prepare its business. He compared
the council and the old aristocratic court, the
Areopagus, to two anchors holding the ship of
state steady. He was obsessed with balance. So
he rewires the economy. He rewires the government.
But he didn't stop there. He started getting
into what we would call social engineering. And
some of these laws are, frankly, weird. They
are weird to us, but they were very strategic.
He wasn't just fixing laws. He was trying to
fix the culture. Let's look at his economic policy.
He banned the export of all agricultural products
except for olive oil. Why specifically olive
oil? Well, think about the terrain of Attica.
It's rocky. It's dry. It's sun -baked. It is
terrible for growing wheat, but olive trees.
They love that environment. They love it. Solon
realized farmers were starving because they were
trying to grow grain on land that wanted to grow
olives. So he forced a shift. He pushed Athens
toward a cash crop economy. We are going to be
the olive oil capital of the world. And it worked.
But think about the knock -on effects. If you're
exporting massive amounts of oil, what do you
need? You need containers. So the Athenian pottery
industry explodes. Those famous black figure
and red figure vases, that starts here. Right.
And you need ships to carry the oil, so the merchant
navy expands. Which eventually turns Athens into
a naval superpower. Exactly. One law about olives
eventually leads to the Athenian Empire. It's
an incredible chain of events. He also had a
law about fathers and sons, right? Something
about trades. Yes. He decreed that a father must
teach his son a trade. If he didn't, the son
had no legal obligation to care for the father
in his old age. I love that. Teach me a skill,
Dad, or you're on your own when you're 80. It
was brilliant. Athens was attracting immigrants,
but they couldn't own land. Solon needed to give
them a way to survive. He wanted to dignify labor.
In many aristocratic societies, working with
your hands was considered shameful. Right. Solon
said, no, a tradesman is a valuable citizen.
He even offered citizenship to foreign craftsmen
who moved their families to Athens permanently.
That's a brain drain strategy. Stealing the best
talent from other cities. It is. Now, here is
the law that I think is the most provocative
for us today. The law against neutrality. This
one blew my mind. Tell us about it. Solon passed
a law stating that if the city is in a state
of stasis, civil strife or civil war, any citizen
who does not take up arms and pick a side is
disenfranchised. You lose your citizenship. That
feels completely backwards. Usually we think
the good citizens are the ones who stay out of
the street fights. Solon is saying. If you don't
fight, you're out. It's so counterintuitive,
but follow his logic. He was terrified of apathy.
He believed that the fanatics, the extremists,
the people who want to burn the city down, they're
always motivated. They will always show up. But
the moderate, reasonable people just want to
stay home and lock the doors. Exactly. And if
the reasonable people stay home, the fanatics
win. Solon wanted to force the sensible center
to get into the ring. He figured that if the
moderates were forced to pick a side, they would
dilute the extremism and bring about a settlement
faster. So neutrality isn't a virtue. It's a
dereliction of duty. He demanded skin in the
game. If you want the rights of a citizen, you
have to risk your safety for the state. It's
a radical idea. We also have to touch on his
social laws regarding women and morality. This
wasn't exactly a feminist paradise. No. Not at
all. Solon's laws regarding women were restrictive
and mostly focused on property. For example,
he regulated dowries to prevent men from marrying
just for money. And he had very specific laws
for the epiclarus, the heiress. How did that
work? If a father died with no sons, his daughter
carried the estate. But she didn't... own it
in the modern sense, Solon mandated that she
had to marry her nearest paternal relative, usually
an uncle or a cousin, to keep the property within
the clan. That sounds incredibly awkward. Sorry,
you have to marry your uncle because of the real
estate. It was strictly business. Marriage was
about the transmission of property and citizens.
But Solon also regulated morality in other ways.
There is a claim by the playwright Philemon that
Solon established state -funded brothels. The
government ran the brothels. That's the claim.
The idea was to democratize pleasure. to make
it affordable and available to all men, and supposedly
to protect respectable women from seduction.
It fits his theme of moderation and order, even
if it seems strange to us. And he also regulated
the gymnasiums, the wrestling halls. Yes, specifically
regarding pederasty, the relationships between
older men and boys. He banned slaves from entering
the wrestling schools or engaging in these relationships.
He was drawing a hard line. This is for citizens
only. He was reinforcing the exclusivity of the
citizen club. Now, practically speaking, how
did people know all these laws? Did they have
like a handbook? They had the axons. These were
large wooden pillars. Some sources say they were
four sided. Some say triangular that rotated
on an axis. They were set up in the praetania
in the center of government. So you could literally
walk up, spin the pillar and read the law. Yes.
It was a tangible, interactive user interface
for the law. Before this, the law was whatever
the noble judge said it was. Now the law was
written down, public, and accessible to anyone
who could read. It was a huge step. So, Solon
does all this work. He rewires the economy, the
government, the culture. He must be the most
popular man in Athens. Far from it. He was miserable.
Because he compromised, he managed to annoy everyone.
The rich were nagging him about their lost debts.
The poor were nagging him about not getting any
land. People were stopping him in the street
to critique his poetry and his laws. Sounds exhausting.
So what does he do? He pulls the ultimate mic
drop. He extracts a solemn oath from the Athenians
that they will not change his laws for 10 years.
And then he leaves. He just takes a vacation.
A 10 -year vacation. A sabbatical. He realized
that if he stayed, he would become a de facto
tyrant. People would constantly ask him to interpret
the laws or tweak them. He wanted the laws to
rule, not Solon. He wanted the Athenians to learn
to live by the written word without their daddy
holding their hand. That is profound self -restraint.
So where did he go? He went on a grand tour.
He went to Egypt, which was seen as the center
of ancient wisdom. He hung out with the pharaoh
Amasis II and the priests of Sais. Is this where
the Atlantis connection comes in? It is. According
to Plato, the Egyptian priests told Solon the
story of the lost civilization of Atlantis. Solon
wrote it down, intending to turn it into an epic
poem. He never finished it, but the notes passed
down through his family to his descendant, Plato.
That's amazing. Solon is the reason we have the
Atlantis myth. Where else did he go? He went
to Cyprus and helped a local king design a new
capital city. The king was so grateful he named
the city Soloi after him. Nice to have a city
named after you. But the most famous stop was
Lydia, right? To meet King Croesus. Yes. This
is the centerpiece of Herodotus' history. Croesus
was the king of Lydia, a man of unimaginable
wealth. The phrase, rich as Croesus, exists for
a reason. So Solon, the wise philosopher, meets
Croesus, the billionaire. Croesus gives Solon
the grand tour. He shows him the gold, the treasury,
the jewels. He's flexing. And then he asks Solon
a loaded question. Who is the happiest man you
have ever seen? And obviously he expects Solon
to say, you, your majesty, it's you. Naturally,
but Solon thinks for a moment and names an obscure
Athenian named Tellus. Croesus must have been
insulted. Who on earth was Tellus? Solon explains.
Tellus lived in a flourishing city, he had fine
sons, he saw his grandchildren born, and he died
a glorious death in battle defending his country
and was honored with a public funeral. So a good
life and a good death. Croesus is annoyed, but
he asks, OK, who is the second happiest, expecting
to be at least the runner up? Solon names Cleobus
and Byton, two brothers from Argos. What was
their story? They were strong athletes who died
in their sleep after performing a great act of
devotion to their mother. Again, a noble life
and a peaceful end. Croesus finally snaps. He
yells, what about me? Is my happiness nothing
to you? Look at all this gold. And this is where
Solon drops the wisdom bomb. Solon says, count
no man happy until he is dead. That sounds incredibly
grim. It sounds grim, but it's practical. He
explains to the king, life is long and full of
changes. You are rich today, but a lucky man
is not the same as a happy man. Disaster can
strike at any moment. Until the story is over,
we can't judge the quality of the life. He's
saying happiness isn't a state of being. It's
the final score at the end of the game. Exactly.
Croesus dismisses him as a fool and sends him
away. But history has a way of proving Solon
right. Years later, Croesus loses his kingdom
to the Persians. He is captured by Cyrus the
Great. And he's about to be executed, right?
Burned alive. He is tied to a pyre to be burned
alive. And as the flames are being lit, the reality
hits him. He remembers Solon's warning and he
starts screaming, Solon! Solon! So what? Talk
about a callback. Cyrus hues him and asks, who
are you calling for? Is it a god? Croesus tells
him the story of the Greek sage who warned him
that wealth doesn't equal happiness. Cyrus is
so moved by the story, realizing that he too
is just a man whose luck could change, that he
orders the fire extinguished and spares Croesus'
life. So Solon's philosophy literally saved a
king's life years after he said it. That is a
powerful legacy. It is. But unfortunately, his
legacy back in Athens wasn't quite as secure.
Right. So Solon eventually returns to Athens
after his 10 years. He's an old man now. Does
he find the stable, law -abiding city he dreamed
of? Sadly, no. He returns to find the factions
fighting again. The system was straining. And
worst of all, a new threat was rising. A man
named Pisistratus. Who was Pisistratus? He was
a relative of Solon. He was a war hero, charismatic,
and very ambitious. He was positioning himself
as the champion of the hill. the poor. He was
promising them the land redistribution that Solon
had refused. So he's a populist. A classic populist
demagogue. Solon saw right through him. He warned
the Athenians. He went into the Agora and told
them, he is a fox. Do not trust him. But the
people were charmed. Mr. Stratus pulled a stunt
to get power. A famous one. The oldest trick
in the book. He wounded himself, cut his own
body, and had his mules wounded, and then rode
into the marketplace covered in blood. He claimed
his political enemies had tried to assassinate
him because he loved the people so much. Look
what the elites did to me. I need protection.
Exactly. He asked the assembly for a bodyguard
of club bearers. Solon begged them not to do
it. He knew a bodyguard was the first step to
a private army. There's a dramatic image of Solon
here that I really like. His last stand. Yes.
Old Solon, now in his 70s, went into his house,
put on his full military armor, took his shield
and spear, and stood outside his door. What was
he trying to say? It was a symbolic protest.
He told the Athenians, I am holding out alone
to defend my country and its laws. He called
them cowards for letting Pasistratus fool them.
He said, it is easy to stop a tyranny while it
is young, but hard to cut it down when it has
grown tall. But they didn't listen. No, they
voted for the bodyguard. Pisistratus used the
club bearers to seize the Acropolis and declared
himself tyrant. That is heartbreaking. Solon
spent his whole life trying to prevent tyranny,
and he has to watch it happen right before he
dies. He died shortly after, around 560 BC. His
ashes were scattered by his request on the island
of Selemis, the island he won back for Athens.
So we have to ask the hard question. Was Solon
a failure? If you look at the short term, yes,
absolutely. The constitution failed. Tyranny
took over. But if you zoom out... Absolutely
not. How so? Because Pasistratus, the tyrant,
was actually a smart guy. He didn't tear up Solon's
laws. He kept the structure. He kept the archons,
the assembly, the courts. He just made sure his
friends won the elections. So the hardware remained,
even if the software was hacked. Exactly. And
because the structure survived, the idea survived.
Solon had broken the monopoly of the bloodline
aristocracy. He established the principle that
A citizen is someone who participates in justice.
That idea of the jury, that a poor man can judge
a rich man, that didn't go away. It didn't. Solon
created the mental space for democracy. He planted
the seeds. It took another generation for Cleisnes
to come along and do the next round of reforms,
and then Pericles later on. But Solon did the
heavy lifting. He moved Athens from a tribal
oligarchy to a state based on written law. And
he did it by refusing to be a tyrant himself.
That's the thing that sticks with me. He had
the power. He could have been to sister at us,
but he chose to walk away. He chose the law over
himself. And I think the best way to sum him
up is to go back to his poetry. He used that
metaphor of the shield, the shield of might.
He wrote before them both. I held my shield of
might and let not either touch the others. Right.
He saw himself as the protector of both the rich
and the poor. Protecting the rich from the poor's
desire for total confiscation and protecting
the poor from the rich's desire for slavery.
And that is a thankless job. You end up hated
by both sides. But that is the burden of a true
lawgiver. He wasn't trying to be popular. He
was trying to be just. It's a fascinating legacy.
I can't stop thinking about that neutrality law
we discussed. That seems like the most relevant
takeaway for us. The law against apathy. Yes.
We live in such a polarized world now. You often
hear people say, I hate politics. It's toxic.
I just want to stay out of it. I'm just going
to tend my garden. And Salon would say that is
the most dangerous attitude of all. Exactly.
He would tell us that neutrality isn't a virtue.
It's a surrender. He would say that if you care
about the stability of your state, you have to
get in the ring. You have to pick a side. Or
at least pick up your shield and stand for something.
Because if the reasonable people disengage, the
unreasonable people take over. Well, on that
provocative note, we will leave you to think
about Solon, the poet politician who invented
the citizen. Thanks for diving deep with us.
It was a pleasure. See you next time.