Solon: The Creator of Athenian Political Culture
From Werner Jaeger's, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture
Sections
Solon — The Keystone of Athenian Culture
The voice of Athens was heard for the first time in the choir of Hellas about the year 600. At first she seemed only to imitate and elaborate the melodies of others (and above all of her Ionian kinsmen), but soon she wove them into a nobler harmony as a background for her own clearer and more commanding tones. Her genius did not reach its full power until it created the tragedies of Aeschylus a century later; and we are fortunate to know even a little of its achievements before that. Nothing survives from the sixth century except considerable fragments of Solon's poetry. Still, it is not mere chance which has preserved them. For centuries, as long as there was an Athenian state with a free spiritual life of its own, Solon was revered as a keystone of its culture. Boys at the beginning of their schooling learned his poems by heart; and they were constantly cited as the classical expression of the soul of Athenian citizenship by advocates in the lawcourts and orators in the public assembly. Their influence lived on until the power and glory of the Athenian empire passed away. Thereafter, in the inevitable nostalgia for past greatness, the historians and philologists of the new age collected and preserved their remains. They even prized Solon's poetical self-revelations as valuable records of historical fact: it is not long since they were so regarded even by modern scholars.
Solon is the first embodiment of this truly Attic spirit, and at the same time the greatest of its creators. For, although the Athenian spirit was predestined, by the strange harmony of its spiritual powers, to some great accomplishment, the early appearance of a creative personality to direct these powers helped to mould its future history. Constitutional historians, who weigh a great man by his tangible work, estimate Solon chiefly by his part in moulding the Athenian constitution, the seisachtheia. But in a history of Greek culture the essential thing is that Solon's work as the political teacher of his nation far outlasted his historical influence, and makes him an important figure even to-day. And so we must consider him chiefly as a poet. His poetry reveals the motives behind his political actions, which by the greatness of their ethical feeling rise high above the level of party politics. We have already observed that legislation was one of the greatest forces in forming the new civic sense. Solon's poems are the clearest illustration of that truth. Their special value for us is that they show us, behind the impersonal abstractions of the law, the spiritual personality of the lawgiver, a visible embodiment of that educational force of law of which the Greeks were so vividly aware. [^]
Why Athens Was Supreme
Think for a moment what a loss we should have suffered if no a fragment of his poems had survived. We should hardly be able to comprehend the noblest and strangest quality in the great Attic tragedies, and in fact in the whole spiritual life of Athens — the inspiration given to all her art and thought by the idea of the state. So fully did her citizens realize that the intellectual and artistic life of each individual had both its origin and its purpose in the community, that the Athenian state dominated the lives of its members to a degree unparalleled outside Sparta. But Sparta, for all the nobility and firm resolution of her communal life, left no room for the individual will to develop, and, showing more and more clearly her inability to change her ethos with changing times, gradually became a fossilized relic of the past. The Ionian city-state, on the other hand, found in the ideal of justice the organizing principle of a new social order; and at the same time, by abolishing class privilege and establishing the liberty of all its members, gave each individual citizen room for the free development of his own potentialities. Yet, while it made these concessions to ordinary human nature, it was unable to develop powers which might unite the surging new individual energies in a higher effort to serve and strengthen the community. These two moments-the educational force which is evidenced by the new supremacy of law within the state, and the untrammeled liberty of speech and thought enjoyed by the Ionian poets-were not yet linked by a single purpose. The culture of Athens was the first to strike a balance between the outward-striving energy of the individual and the unifying power of the state. Despite the great debt of political and intellectual education which Athens owed to Ionia, it is always easy to trace the fundamental difference between the libertarianism of Ionia, which is centrifugal, and the constructive genius of Athens, which is centripetal. That distinction explains why the first great expressions of the Greek spirit in the sphere of education and culture were Athenian. The mightiest achievements of Greek political thought, from Solon to Plato, Thucydides, and Demosthenes, are without exception the work of Athenian citizens. They were possible only in a state which could subordinate all spiritual activities to the life of the community and yet make them part of that life. [^]
Solon’s Glory
Here and elsewhere Solon clearly grasps the conception of the inner rule of law in social life. It should be remembered that at the same time in Ionia the Milesian natural philosophers, Thales and Anaximander, were moving boldly towards the conception of a permanent law in the eternal coming-to-be and passing-away of nature. Solon, like them, was impelled to demonstrate the existence of an immanent order in the course of nature and human life, and with it an inherent meaning and an essential norm in reality. He is clearly presupposing a law connecting cause and effect in nature, and expressly setting forth as a parallel to it the rule of law in the social order, when he says elsewhere, 'From the clouds come snow and hail, thunder follows the lightning, and by powerful men the city is brought low and the demos in its ignorance comes into the power of a despot.' Tyranny--the domination of one noble family and its head, supported by the common people, over all the rest of the aristocracy--was the most dreadful danger which Solon could predict for the Attic Eupatrids, for it meant the immediate end of their centuries-old mastery of the state. Significantly enough, Solon does not threaten them with the imminence of democracy. The masses were still politically inexperienced, so that democracy was far away: it could not come until the aristocracy had been brought low by the Pisistratid tyrants.
With Ionian scientific ideas as a pattern, it was easier for Solon than for anyone before him to establish the fact that the political life of a community is subject to definite laws. He had as material for this induction the history of numerous Greek cities on both sides of the Aegean, in which during more than a century the same processes had run their course with remarkable uniformity. Because the political development of Athens started late, he was enabled to use the history of other states for his own prognosis, and by that educative act he earned his lasting fame. But it is typical of human nature that, in spite of his early prediction, Athens too was compelled to pass through a stage of tyranny. [^]
Political and Moral Courage as the Greeks Man's Duty
Recognition of the universal truth that every community is bound by immanent laws implies that every man is a responsible moral agent with a duty to be done. Thus in Solon's world there is far less scope for the arbitrary interference of the gods than in the world of the Iliad; for it is governed by law, and attributes to the will of men many events which in the Homeric world were the gifts or inflictions of heaven. Accordingly, the gods merely carry into execution the effects of the moral order, which is identical with their will. The Ionian poets of Solon's time, who were quite as deeply conscious of the problem of suffering, offered no solution except melancholy resignation, and could only lament man's fate and its inevitability. But Solon, who called his fellow men to act in full consciousness of their responsibility, himself set the example by his political and moral courage, which stands as a clear proof of the inexhaustible energy and moral earnestness of the Athenian character. [^]
The Core Religious Doctrine that Created Attic Tragedy
Though a busy politician, Solon was a deep thinker too. His great elegiac prayer to the Muses, which has been preserved entire, recurs to the problem of responsibility, and shows its paramount importance in his thought. Here it appears at the centre of his general reflections on man's effort and his destiny: which proves, even more clearly than the political poems, how fundamentally religious was Solon's attitude. The elegy is inspired by the old aristocratic moral code--known to us chiefly from Theognis and Pindar, as well as from the Odyssey--with its traditional emphasis on material wealth and social prestige. But it revises that code to harmonize with Solon's deep faith in law and divine justice. In the first section Solon limits the natural impulse to possess, by teaching that wealth must be rightously gained. Only the riches given by the gods, he says, will last: riches won by injustice and violence only foster até, which comes swiftly.
Here, as throughout his poetry, the thought recurs that injustice can maintain itself only for a brief time, and diké always comes sooner or later. But here, the idea advanced in his political poetry, that 'divine punishment' is immanent in the social order, is replaced by the religious image of 'the retribution of Zeus', which falls as rapidly as a tempest in spring. 'Suddenly it scatters the clouds, stirs the depths of the sea, rushes down on the fields and ruins the fair work of men's hands; and then it rises up again to heaven, the sun's rays shine out on the rich earth, and no cloud is to be seen. Such is the retribution of Zeus, which lets none escape. One man makes amends soon, another late; and if the guilty man escapes punishment, his innocent children and his descendants suffer in his stead.' This is the very core of the religious doctrine which, a century later, created Attic tragedy. [^]
Solon Created a New Ideal in the Athenian Citizen
Solon's attitude to the problems of ordinary life, as to political questions, is determined by this same new sense of the submission of all things to inherent laws. He expresses himself with the curt simplicity of a Greek proverb. Natural things are always simple, when one recognizes them. 'But the hardest thing of all is to recognize the invisible Mean of judgment, which alone contains the limits of all things.' These words of Solon seem designed to give us the correct standard by which to measure his greatness. The idea of the mean and the limits--an idea of fundamental importance in Greek ethics--indicates the problem which was of central interest to Solon and his contemporaries: how to gain a new rule of life by the force of inner understanding. The nature of this new rule cannot be defined: it can be comprehended only through sympathetic study of Solon's words, his character, and his life. For the mass of men it is enough to obey the laws which are laid down for them. But the man who makes these laws needs a higher standard, which is not written. The rare quality by which he can find it Solon calls gnomosyné, 'judgment', because it always suggests the gnomé—which is both true insight and the will to put it into action.
That is the clue to understanding the unity of Solon's spiritual world. The unity was not given to him: he had to create it. We find that the conception of justice and the rule of law, which was the focal point of Solon's political and religious thought, already prevailed in Ionia: but there, as we have seen, it seems to have found no voice in poetry. The other aspect of Ionian thought, expressed all the more enthusiastically by the Ionian poets, is a shrewd practical wisdom and a hedonistic individualism. For that side too Solon has a deep sympathy. What is new in his thought is that he brings the two poles of Ionian philosophy together into a unity which is clear and perfect in his poetry. His poems reflect the rare completeness and harmony of his life and character. He put aside individualism, but he recognized the claims of the individual's personality: more, he was the first to give those claims an ethical basis. Because he brought together the state and the spirit, the community and the individual, he was the first Athenian. By creating that unity he struck out the type to which all the men of his race were to conform. [^]