Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/174

 158 HISTORY OF GIJEKCK. tive, favoring the good and punishing the bad, though sometimes very tardily. But his compositions on special and present occa- sions are usually conceived in a more vigorous spirit ; denounc- ing the oppressions of the rich at one time, and the timid submission !o Peisistratus at another, and expressing, in emphatic language, bis own proud consciousness of having stood forward as champion of the mass of the people. Of his early poems hardly anything is preserved ; the few lines which remain seem to manifest a jo- vial temperament, which we may well conceive to have been over- laid by the political difficulties against which he had to contend, difficulties arising successively out of the Megarian war, the Kylonian sacrilege, the public despondency healed by Epimenides, and the task of arbiter between a rapacious oligarchy and a suf- fering people. In one of his elegies, addressed to Mimnermus, he marked out the sixtieth year as the longest desirable period of life, in preference to the eightieth year, which that poet had ex- pressed a wish to attain ; l but his own life, as far as we can judge, peems to have reached the longer of the two periods, and not the least honorable part of it the resistance to Peisistratus oc- curs immediately before his death. There prevailed a story, that his ashes were collected and scat- tered around the island of Salamis, which Plutarch treats as absurd, though he tells us at the same time that it was believed both by Aristotle, and by many other considerable men : it is at least as ancient as the poet Kratinus, who alluded to it in one of his comedies, and I do not feel inclined to reject it. 2 The inscrip- tion on the statue of Solon at Athens described him as a Salan;i- nian : he had been the great means of acquiring the island for his country, and it seems highly probable that among the new Athenian citizens who went to settle there, he may have received a lot of land and become enrolled among the Salaminian demots. The dispersion of his ashes in various parts of the island connects him with it as in some sort the oekist; and we may construe that 1 Solon, Fragment 22, ed. Bcrgk. Isokrates affirms that Solon was the first person to whom the appellation Sophist in later times carrying with it so much obloquy was applied, (Isokrates, Or. xv, I)e Permutatione, p 344; p. 496, Bck.)
 * Plutarch, Solon, 32; Kratinus ap. Diogen. Lai'rt /', G2.