Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/359

 ■CHAP. VI, TIIK CLIENTS BECOME FKEE. 353 owned nothing ? Men are not much accustomed, in any society, to lend to the poor. The assertion is made, it is true, on the faith of the translator of Plutarch rather than on Plutarch himself, that the borrower mortgaged his land; but, supposing this land was his property, he •could not have mortgaged it, for mortgages were not then known, and were contrary to the nature of pro- prietary right. In those debtors of whom Plutarch speaks we must see the former clients; in their debts, the annual rent which they were to pay to their former masters; and in the slavery into which they fell if they failed to pay, the former clientship, to which they were again reduced. Pei'haps Solon suppressed the rent; or, more proba- bly, reduced the amount of it, so that the payment became easy. He added the provision, that in future the failure to pay should not reduce the laborer to servitude. He did more. Before him these former clients, when they came into possession of the soil, could not become the owners of it; for upon their fields the sacred and inviolable bounds of the former patron still stood. For the enfranchisement of the soil and of the cultivator, it was necessary that these bounds should disappear. Solon abolished them. We find the evidence of this great reform in some verses of Solon himself: "It was an unhoped-for work," said he ; "I have accomplished it with the aid of the gods. I call to witness the god- dess Mother, the black earth, whose landmarks I have in many places torn up, the earth, which was enslaved, and is now free." In doing this, Solon had accomplished a considerable revolution. He had put aside the an- cient religion of property, which, in the name of the immovable god Terminus, retained the land in a small 23