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 88 HISTORY OF GREECE. timorous consciences of rich men : l but they enjoyed no re* spect with the general public, or with those to whose authority the public habitually looked up. Degenerate as they were, however, they were the legitimate representatives of the prophet and purifier from Knossus, to whose presence the Athenians had been so much indebted two centuries before : and their altered position was owing less to any falling off in themselves, than to an improvement in the mass upon whom they sought to operate. Had Epimenides himself come to Athens in those days, his visit would probably have been as much inoperative to all public purposes as a repetition of the stratagem of Phye, clothed and equipped as the goddess Athene, which had succeeded so com- pletely in the days of Peisistratus, a stratagem which even Herodotus treats as incredibly absurd, although, a century before his time, both the city of Athens and the demes of Attica had obeyed, as a divine mandate, the orders of this magnificent and stately woman, to restore Peisistratus. 2 CHAPTER XI. SOLONIAN LAWS AND CONSTITUTION. WE now approach a new era in Grecian history, the first known example of a genuine and disinterested constitutional reform, and the first foundation-stone of that great fabric, which afterwards became the type of democracy in Greece. The ar- chonship of the eupatrid Solon dates in 594 B. c., thirty years after that of Drako, and about eighteen years after the conspir- acy of Kylon, assuming the latter event to be correctly placed B. c. 612. The life of Selon by Plutarch and by Diogenes, especially the 1 Eurip. Hippolyt 957 ; Plato, Republ. ii, p. 364 ; Thcophrast. Charact e. 16. I
 * Herodot. i CO.