Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/139

 ANALYSIS OF SOLONIAN 1XSTITUTIO.NS. 123 illations of the senate of five hundred, the numerous public dikasts or jurors taken by lot from the people, as well as the body annually selected for law-revision, and called nomothets, and the prosecution, called the graphe paranornon, open to be instituted against the proposer of any measure illegal, unconsti- tutional, or dangerous. There is, indeed, some countenance for this confusion between Solonian and post-Solonian Athens, in the usage of the orators themselves ; for Demosthenes and ^Eschines employ the name of Solon in a very loose manner, and treat him as the author of institutions belonging evidently to a later age for example, the striking and characteristic oath of the heliastic jurors, which Demosthenes 1 ascribes to Solon, proclaims itself in 1 Demosthcn. cont. Timokrat. p. 746. vEschines ascribes this oath to 6 vo/iodeTTie (c. Ktesiphon. p. 389). Dr. Thirlwall notices the oath as prescribed by Solon (History of Greece, vol. ii, ch. xi, p. 47). So again Demosthenes and JEschines, in the orations against Leptines (c. 21, p. 486) and against Timokrat. pp. 706-707, compare JEschin. c. Ktcsipli. p. 429, in commenting upon the formalities enjoined for repealing an ex- isting law and enacting a new one, while ascribing the whole to Solon, say, among other things, that Solon directed the proposer " to post up his project of law before the eponymi, " (induvai -xpoG&Ev TUV 'Eiruvv/iuv :) now the eponymi were ("the statues of) the heroes from whom the ten Kleisthcnean tribes drew their names, and the law making mention of these statues, pro- chums itself as of a date subsequent to Kleisthenes. Even the law denning the treatment of the condemned murderer who returned from exile, which both Demosthenes and Doxopatcr (ap. "Walz. Collect. Rhetor, vol. ii, p. 223) call a law of Drako, is really later than Solon, as may be seen by its men- tion of the ufuv (Demosth. cont. Aristok. p. G29). Andokides is not less liberal in his employment of the name of Solon (see Orat. i, Do Mysteriis. p. 13), where he cites as a law of Solon, an enactment which contains the mention of the tribe JEantis and the senate of five hun- dred (obviously, therefore, subsequent to the revolution of Kleisthenes), be- sides other matters which prove it to have been passed even subsequent to the oligarchical revolution of the four hundred, towards the close of the Pe- loponncsian war. The prytanes, the procdri, and the division of the year into ten portions of time, each called by the name of a prylany, so inter- woven with all the public proceedings of Athens, do not belong to the So- Ionian Athens, but to Athens as it stood after the ten tribes of Kleisthenes. Schomann maintains emphatically, that the sworn nomothctiB, as they stood in the days of Demosthenes, were instituted by Solon; but he admits nt the same time that all the allusions of the orators to this institution in-