Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/112

 - t Q HISTORY OF GREECE. attested by the poems of Solon himself, even in the short frag- ment?, preserved to us : l and it appears that immediately preced- ing the time of his archonship, the evils had ripened to such a point, and the determination of the mass of sufferers, to extort for themselves some mode of relief, had hecome so pronounced, that the existing laws could no longer be enforced. Accord- ing to the profound remark of Aristotle, that seditions are gen- erated by great causes but out of small incidents, 2 we may conceive that some recent events had occurred as immediate stimulants to the outbreak of the debtors, like those which lend so striking an interest to the early Roman annals, as the in- llaming sparks of violent popular movements for which the train had long before been laid. Condemnations by the archons, of insolvent debtors, may have been unusually numerous, or the mal- treatment of some particular debtor, once a respected freeman, in his condition of slavery, may have been brought to act vividly upon the public sympathies, like the case of the old plebeian centurion at Rome, 3 first impoverished by the plunder of the enemy, then reduced to borrow, and lastly adjudged to his credi- 1 See the Fragment irepl rr/f 'Atiyraiuv iro^i-cias, No. 2, Schncidewin. Ar/uov #' riyepovuv udiKOf vooc, olaiv KToifiof . . . . OW iepuv KTEUVUV ovre n drjfioaiuv beiSofievot, KAiirrovaiv if upirayy uAAotfev u/liloc, Ovde dvXaaoovTC!. oeftvu diKtjg #e/ir#Aa. . . . .Terra fiev h> 6fi/i<j crpt^erai KCLKU TUV <5e Trevt^pOv 'iKvevvrat Tro7JXot yalav if uTOwdaxTiv TlpadevTEf, d<r[iolai T' uEiKehioiai tie&evTff. 3 Livy, ii, 23 ; Dionys. Hal. A. R. vi, 26 : compare Livy, ri, 34-36. " An placeret, foenore circnmvcntam plebem, potius quam sorte creditum eolvat, corpus in ncrvum ac supplicia dare ? et grcgatim quotidie de fora addictos duci, et repleri vinctis nobiles domos ? et ubicnnque patricius habi- tct, ibi carcerem privatara esse ? " The exposition of Niebuhr, respecting the old Roman Inw of debtor and creditor (Rom. Gesch. i. p. 602, scq. ; Arnold's Roman Hist., ch. viii, vol. i, p 135), and the explanation which he there gives of the nexi, as distinguished from the addicti, have been shown to be incorrect by M. von Savigny. in an excellent Dissertation Uber das Alt-R6mische Schuldrecht (Abhandlungen Berlin Academ. 1833, pp. 70-73), an abstract of which will be found in an Appendix, at the close of this chapter.
 * Y/?ptof CK fie-yu^-rjf aXyea ITO/.?M iradelv.
 * Aristot. Polit. yiyvovrai 6e at oruaeis ov irepl piKpuv, d?.A' in fiiKpcJv.