Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/140

 124 HISTORY OF GKEKCi:. many ways as belonging to the age after Kleisthenes, espeuall/ by the mention of the senate of five hundred, and not of four hundred. Among the citizens who served as jurors or dikasts, Solon was venerated generally as the author of the Athenian laws ; and the orator, therefore, might well employ his name for the purpose of emphasis, without provoking any critical inquiry whether the particular institution, which he happened to be then impressing upon his audience, belonged really to Solon himself or to the subsequent periods. Many of those institutions, which Dr. Thirl wall mentions in conjunction with the name of Solon, are among the last refinements and elaborations of the democrat- ical mind of Athens, gradually prepared, doubtless, during the interval between Kleisthenes and Perikles, but not brought into full operation until the period of the latter (460-429 B. c.) ; for it is hardly possible to conceive these numerous dikasteries and assemblies in regular, frequent, and long-standing operation, without an assured payment to the dikasts who composed them. Now such payment first began to be made about the time of Perikles, if not by his actual proposition; 1 and Demosthenes had good reason for contending that, if it were suspended, the judicial as well as the administrative system of Athens would at once elude both words and matters essentially post-Solonian. so that modifications subsequent to Solon must have been introduced. This admission seems to me fatal to the cogency of his proof: see Schomann, De Comitiis, ch. vii, pp. 266-268 ; and the same author, Antiq. J. P. Att. sect, xxxii. His opinion is shared by K. F. Hermann, Lehrbnch der Griech. Staats Alterth. sect. 131 ; and Plainer, Attischer Prozess, vol. ii, p. 38. Meier, DC Bonis Damnatorum, p. 2, remarks upon the laxity with which the orators use the name of Solon : " Oratores Solonis nomine sajpe ntuntur, ubi omnino legislatorem quemquam significare volnnt, etiamsi a Solone ipso lex lata non est." Herman Schelling, in his Dissertation De Solonis Legibus ap. Oratt. Attic. (Berlin, 1842), has collected and discussed the references to Solon and to his laws in the orators. He controverts the opinion just cited from Meier, but upon arguments no way satisfactory to me (pp. 6-8) ; ths more so, as he himself admits that the dialect in which the Solonian laws ap pear in the citation of the orators can never have been the original dialect of Solon himself (pp. 3-5), and makes also substantially the same admission aa Schomann, in regard to the presence of post-Solonian matters in the sup- posed Solonian laws (pp. 23-27). 1 See Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, book ii, c. 15.