small proprietors, for whom he legislated,—yet trembling under the rod of the eupatrid archons, and utterly inexperienced in collective business,—should have been found suddenly competent to fulfil these ascendent functions, such as the citizens of conquering Athens in the days of Periklês,—full of the sentiment of force and actively identifying themselves with the dignity of their community,—became gradually competent, and not more than competent, to exercise with effect. To suppose that Solon contemplated and provided for the periodical revision of his laws by establishing a nomothetic jury, or dikastery, such as that which we find in operation during the time of Dêmosthenês, would be at variance, in my judgment, with any reasonable estimate either of the man or of the age. Herodotus says that Solon, having exacted from the Athenians solemn oaths that _they_ would not rescind any of his laws for ten years, quitted Athens for that period, in order that he might not be compelled to rescind them himself: Plutarch informs us that he gave to his laws force for a century absolute.[211] Solon himself, and Drako before him, had been lawgivers, evoked and empowered by the special emergency of the times; the idea of a frequent revision of laws, by a body of lot-selected dikasts, belongs to a far more advanced age, and could not well have been present to the minds of either. The wooden rollers of Solon, like the tables of the Roman decemvirs,[212] were doubtless intended as a permanent “fons omnis publici privatique juris.” [207] Meursius, Solon, _passim_; Sigonius, De Republ. Athen. i, p. 39 (though in some passages he makes a marked distinction between the time before and after Kleisthenês, p. 28). See Wachsmuth, Hellenische Alterthumskunde, vol. i, sects. 46, 47; Tittmann, Griechische Staatsverfassungen, p. 146; Platner, Der Attische Prozess, book ii, ch. 5, pp 28-38; Dr. Thirlwall, History of Greece, vol. ii, ch. xi, pp. 46-57. Niebuhr, in his brief allusions to the legislation of Solon, keeps duly in view the material difference between Athens as constituted by Solon, and Athens as it came to be after Kleisthenês; but he presumes a closer analogy between the Roman patricians and the Athenian eupatridæ than we are entitled to count upon. [208] Dêmosthen. cont. Timokrat. p. 746. Æschinês ascribes this oath to ὁ νομοθέτης (c. Ktesiphon. p. 389). Dr. Thirlwall notices the oath as prescribed by Solon (History of Greece, vol. ii, ch. xi, p. 47).