Solon’s social legislation seems generally designed to reduce the primacy of the family and increase that of the community, or polis. To that extent it can be regarded as embryonically democratic. For instance, his laws on inheritance made it easier to leave property away from the family. He also legislated to restrict ostentatious mourning at funerals and to prevent spectacular burials (“aggressive funerals,” as they were called by one modern Marxist authority), which were potentially a way for aristocratic families to assert their prestige. (And not just a potential way, either: a great noble called Cimon was buried later in the 6th century in true “Lefkandi style”—that is, close to the horses with which he had won three times at the Olympic Games. That burial was surely in defiance of the Solonian rules.) As can be seen from the Antigone of the 5th-century tragic poet Sophocles, death and funerary ritual were always an area in which the family, and especially the women, had traditional functions. For the state to seek to regulate them was a major shift of emphasis.
The whole thrust of Solon’s reforms was to define and enlarge the sphere of activity of the polis. He was concerned to recognize and increase the power of the ordinary Athenian thēte and hoplite, while containing without destroying the privileges of the aristocratic “cream.” By uprooting the horoi, symbols of a kind of slavery, he created the Attica of independent smallholders one encounters as late as the 4th century. And he gave them political rights to match, “as much as was sufficient,” as a poem of his puts it.
One result of Solon’s reforms cannot have been intentionaclass="underline" the abolition of hektemorage created, in modern terms, a “gap in the work force.” From then on it was beneath the dignity of the emancipated Athenian to work for a master. Some other source of labour had to be found, and it was found in the form of chattel slaves from outside. That means that the whole edifice of culture and politics rested on the labour of men and women who by “right” of purchase or conquest had become mere things, mere domestic, agricultural, or mining equipment, and whose presence in Classical Attica rose into the tens of thousands. For by the 5th century, slave owning was not confined to the aristocratic few but had been extended to the descendants of that very class Solon had liberated from another kind of slavery.
Initially the Solonian solution was an economic failure, however true it is to attribute to him the economic shape of Classical Attica. Solon himself was almost, but not quite, a tyrant. The orthodox Greek tyrant was associated with redistribution of land and cancellation of debts, though this association was to a large extent a mere matter of popular perception because wholesale redistribution of land is extraordinarily rare in Greek history.
Solon did cancel debts. He also redistributed the land in the sense that the former hektēmoroi now had control without encumbrance of the land they had previously worked with strings attached. He did not, however, redistribute all the land, because he left the rich in possession of the land the hektēmoroi had previously worked for them. In this respect Solon’s rule differed from tyranny. It also differed in his simple avoidance of the word; after his year of legislative activity he simply disappeared instead of supervising the implementation of that legislation. That was unfortunate for the former hektēmoroi, who needed to be supported in the early years. Growing olive trees, which were a staple of Attica, was an obvious recourse for the farmer in new possession of his own plot, but it takes 20 years for olive trees to reach maturity. Such farmers could hardly look for charity to their former masters, whose wealth and privilege Solon had curtailed. Instead they looked to a real tyrant, Peisistratus. The Peisistratid tyranny
It took more than one attempt to establish the Peisistratid tyranny, but in its long final phase it lasted from 546 to 510. After the death of Peisistratus, the tyrant’s son Hippias ruled from 527 to 510 with the assistance if not co-rule of his brother Hipparchus, who was assassinated in 514.
Hostility to the tyrants on the part of 5th-century informants like Herodotus makes it difficult to ascertain the truth about them. That they ruled with the acquiescence of the great nobles of Attica is suggested by a 5th-century archon list discovered in the 1930s, which shows that even the post-Peisistratid reformer Cleisthenes, a member on his father’s side of what Herodotus calls the “tyrant-hating” Alcmaeonid genos, was archon in the 520s. It is also suggested by the fact that Miltiades, a relative of the gorgeously buried Cimon, went out to govern an outpost in the Thracian Chersonese, hardly against the wishes of the tyrants. Furthermore, even the Peisistratids did not confiscate property indiscriminately, though they did levy a tax of 5 percent. That tax enabled them to redistribute wealth to those who now needed it—that is, those who “had joined him through poverty after having their debts removed (by Solon).” Although a formally ambiguous expression, it must in common sense apply to pre-Solonian debtors, not creditors.
How far Peisistratus, who seems to have started as a leader of one geographic faction, specifically mobilized hoplite support at the outset is uncertain, but such military backing is a little more plausible in his century than in the mid-7th century when the “Isthmus tyrants” were seizing power. (Peisistratus’s position was, however, buttressed by bodyguards; here, for once, is a tyrant who in some ways fits Aristotle’s otherwise excessively 4th-century model.) In any case, Peisistratus’s introduction of “deme judges”—that is, judges who traveled round the villages of Attica dispensing something like uniform justice—was an important leveling step, both socially and geographically, and one should imagine that as an appeal to the goodwill of the hoplite and thetic classes. It also, in the longer term, anticipated (as did the well-attested road-building activity of the Peisistratids) the unification of Attica, which Cleisthenes was to carry much further.
PeisistratusPeisistratus, copper engraving, 1832.Interfoto/Alamy
Whether or not Peisistratus climbed to power with hoplite help, he surely strengthened Athens militarily in a way that must have involved hoplites. Indeed, the Peisistratid period ought to count as one of unequivocal military and diplomatic success, and literary suggestions otherwise should be discounted as products of aristocratic malice. In that period should be put the first firm evidence of the tension between Athens and Sparta that was to determine much of Classical Greek history—namely, Athenian alliances not just with Sparta’s enemy Argos but in 519 with Boeotian Plataea. (The Plataeans, faced with coercion from their bigger neighbour Thebes, sued for this alliance at the prompting of Sparta itself; this, however, is evidence of among other things Spartan-Athenian hostility because Sparta’s motive, it was said, was to stir up trouble between Thebes and Athens.) Moreover, it may have been in the Peisistratid period that the sanctuary of Eleusis, near Athens’s western border and always important for defensive and offensive as well as for purely religious reasons, was fortified. But that is controversial.