The Athenians were aroused. They went with him across the narrow strait, and Salamis, the “lovely island,” thenceforward was their own, destined to serve them as refuge in their hour of greatest need. Solon used his popularity, thus acquired, in no self-seeking way. Chosen archon and virtual dictator he moulded proletariat and noble to his own noble will. Again and again his verse reënforces his pedestrian arguments. “The black earth is enslaved,” he says, and presently the mortgage stones, dotted over the farms, are mere cancelled records. Many such, of a later date, have been found. The “Penurious Man” in Theophrastus “inspects his boundary stones daily to make sure that they are in place.” Solon proudly appeals to the constituency of the future to justify his laws:— “Be witness unto this before the bar of time, Thou greatest Mother of the gods Olympian— Aye witness best—black Earth, whose mortgage border-stones Fixed here and there on every side, I took away, And she who erst was slave is set at liberty.” Again, even more proudly, he says:— “I set myself as border stone inscribed betwixt Contending factions.” The citizens, he says, by their folly and their greed would themselves destroy the city, but Athena, the Watcher, is there upon the hill:— “Never by Zeus’s decree nor by will of the blessed immortals Ruin shall come to our town, causing our city to fall. Never, while yonder that great-hearted Guardian, sired majestic, Pallas Athena above stretches her sheltering hands.” In the Athenian memory as well as in these vigorous elegiacs he embedded the epithet of “Guardian” (ἐπίσκοπος) that would in after days lend significance to the great bronze statue, overlooking the city and sea, and would remain after Macedon had come and gone as a semi-official title of the goddess. Legend tells us that Solon in his old age, when the tyranny had now come, piled his armour in front of his house door—probably near the Market-place of Pisistratus—and turned from politics to a serene enjoyment of the pleasures of ear and eye and intellect to which he had, indeed, never been a stranger. His life had always been consistent with his own epigram:— “And still as I age, learning many a lesson.”