Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/110

 94 HISTOivi ur GIJEECE. despotism of Peisistratus, the latter standing forward as the leader of the diakrii, and as champion, real or pretended, of the poorer population. But in the time of Solon these intestine quarrels were aggra vatedby something much more difficult to deal with, a gen- eral mutiny of the poorer population against the rich, resulting from misery combined with oppression. The thetes, whose con- dition we have already contemplated in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, are now presented to us as forming the bulk of the pop- ulation of Attica, the cultivating tenants, metayers, and small proprietors of the country. They are exhibited as weighed down by debts and dependence, and driven in large numbers out of a state of freedom into slavery, the whole mass of them, we are told, being in debt to the rich, who are proprietors of the greater part of the soil. 1 They had either borrowed money for their own necessities, or they Tilled the lands of the rich as de- pendent tenants, paying a stipulated portion of the produce, and in this capacity they were largely in arrear. All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor, once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world, combined with the recogni- tion of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one 1 Plutarch, Solon, 13. "Airaf ftiv yap 6 diifiof r/v inrxpeuf TUV ?i yup kysupyow EKEIVOIC /tra TUV yivopsvuv TshovvTEf, eKTTjfwpioi irpooayo- psvopevoi Kal i??)ref ?/ %pea ha/xfluvovTef eirl rote vufiaaiv, uyuy 1/201 TO!{ fiaveiovmv fycav ol plv avTov 8ov"hevovTe<;, ol de ird rf/ %kvrf tnT KOI iraldaf I6iov fyvuynu.&VTO TTU?IEIV, Kal TTJV ir67i.iv TUV daveiaruv. Ol de TrAetoroi Kal f>u/ia?ifM Kal TtapEKuhovv u/WjyAoi'f pr] nspioppv, etc. Eef.pcctmg these hektemori, " tenants paying one-sixth portion," we find little or no information : they are just noticed in Hesychius (v, 'E/cr^opot, 'Em/ioprof) and in Pollnx, vii, 151 ; from whom we learn that errifiopTof yr) was an expression which occurred in one of the Solonian laws Whether they paid to the landlord one-sixth, or retained for themselves only one-sixth, has been doubted (see Photius, He/lura*)- Dionysius Hal. (A. R. 5i, 9) compares the thetes in Attica to the Roman clients : that both agreed in being relations of personal and proprietary dependence is certain ; but we can hardly carry the comparison farther, nor in there nny evidence in Attica of that sanctity of obligation which is said to have bound the Koman patron to his clitnt.