Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/155

V In the last few generations it is plain that the privileged of Attica have become richer, and the unprivileged poorer. This was a disease to which the City -State was always peculiarly liable, as Aristotle well knew, and we shall have to recur to it later on; it was indeed one of the leading causes of the ultimate decay of this form of State. And in Attica wars, bad harvests, increasing commerce, pestilence, and the harsh law of debt, all had their share in magnifying the disproportion between wealth and poverty, and between the political power of the rich and the political helplessness of the poor. Yet it was the peculiar good fortune of Athens that, severely attacked as she was by troubles of this kind, she found a physician so single-minded and so self-restrained that she had good reason to be for ever grateful to him. Solon, the friend of Epimenides, was Archon in 594 (the traditional date); and in due accordance with the tendency we have been pointing out, he was also then or shortly afterwards entrusted with an abnormal power which placed him in the position of arbiter, and was even pressed in some quarters to become tyrant — a temptation he steadily refused.

Solon and his work form a most important landmark in the history of the City-State. He made it possible for one such State at least to reach the highest point of development of which this form of social union was capable. He was at once the prophet and the lawgiver of Athens, whose memory