To understand the literature of the sixth century, we must remember that the ancient citadel town of the prehistoric kings had long since overflowed into the district at its immediate base, absorbing, as time went on, various original townships adjacent to the Acropolis. Although the name of king and some relics of royal authority survived in the person of the King Archon, yet, unlike the relation of Sparta to Laconia or Thebes to Bœotia, Athens was not a mere royal centre for the Attic demesmen. All Attica was Athens. All its free inhabitants, class by class, became included in the citizenship, albeit the republic was an aristocracy, first of birth, then of wealth. Solon’s readjustment of the laws for rich and poor determined the trend towards government by the people, and even the inevitable tyranny, postponed by Solon, only served, when it came, to retard the current and to dam up a reservoir of irresistible democratic consciousness which was to sweep away the tyrants and to render the Attica of Marathon inaccessible to the returning despot. The picture of the old city of Theseus is vague to our imagination, but the Athens of Solon’s administration emerges somewhat more clearly as we take away, one after another, some of the prominent features of the later Athens that we know best. The Acropolis lacked the Propylæa, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum, its barrenness being relieved by little save the “old” temple of Athena Polias. Not only the Dionysiac theatre, but even its earliest forerunner were things of the future. The drama was yet unborn. The Market-place of later centuries, adorned with statues and stoas, was represented by a simpler centre of civic life at the west end of the Acropolis, where were the public buildings of administration, the communal winepress of the Lenæum and the old Callirrhoë spring. Yet Solon calls Athens a great city, and he was to make it still greater. Into that early Market-place he came and, if we accept the picturesque details handed down by tradition, feigning madness in order to violate with impunity the law forbidding citizens to re-open the question of conquering Salamis, he cried:— “Forward to Salamis, forward, to fight for the isle that we yearn for, Thrusting dishonour aside, casting off grievous disgrace.”