Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/105

 SOLON g9 former, are our principal sources of information respecting thia remarkable man ; and while we thank them for what they have told us, it is impossible to avoid expressing disappointment that they have not told us more. For Plutarch certainly had befor him both the original poems, and the original laws, of Solon, and the few transcripts which he gives from one or the other form the principal charm of his biography : but such valuable materials ought to have been made available to a more instructive result than that which he has brought out. There is hardly anything more to be deplored, amidst the lost treasures of the Grecian mind, than the poems of Solon ; for we see by the remaining fragments, that they contained notices of the public and social phenomena before him, which he was compelled attentively to study, blended with the touching expression of his own personal feelings, in the post, alike honorable and difficult, to which the confidence of his countrymen had exalted him. Solon, son of Exekestides, was a eupatrid of middling fortune, but of the purest heroic blood, belonging to the gens or family of the Kodrids and Neleids, and tracing his origin to the god Po- seidon. His father is said to have diminished his substance by prodigality, which compelled Solon in his earlier years to have recourse to trade, and in this pursuit he visited many parts of Greece and Asia. He was thus enabled to enlarge the sphere of his observation, and to provide material for thought as well as for composition : and his poetical talents displayed themselves at a very early age, first on light, afterwards on serious subjects. It will be recollected that there was at that time no Greek prose writing, and that the acquisitions as well as the effusions of an intellectual man, even in their simplest form, adjusted themselves not to the limitations of the period and the semicolon, but to those of the hexameter and pentameter : nor in point of fact do the verses of Solon aspire to any higher effect than we are ac- customed to associate with an earnest, touching, and admonitory prose composition. The advice and appeals which he frequently addressed to his countrymen 2 were delivered in this easy metre, doubtless far less difficult than the elaborate prose of subsequent 1 Plutarch. Solon, i ; Diogen. Laert iii, 1 ; Aristot Polit. iv. 9, 10.
 * Plutarch, Solon, v.