The Solonian laws seem to have borne more or less upon all the great departments of human interest and duty. We find regulations political and religious, public and private, civil and criminal, commercial, agricultural, sumptuary, and disciplinarian. Solon provides punishment for crimes, restricts the profession and status of the citizen, prescribes detailed rules for marriage as well as for burial, for the common use of springs and wells, and for the mutual interest of conterminous farmers in planting or hedging their properties. As far as we can judge, from the imperfect manner in which his laws come before us, there does not seem to have been any attempt at a systematic order or classification. Some of them are mere general and vague directions, while others again run into the extreme of speciality. By far the most important of all was the amendment of the law of debtor and creditor which has already been adverted to, and the abolition of the power of fathers and brothers to sell their daughters and sisters into slavery. The prohibition of all contracts on the security of the body, was itself sufficient to produce a vast improvement in the character and condition of the poorer population,—a result which seems to have been so sensibly obtained from the legislation of Solon, that Boeckh and some other eminent authors suppose him to have abolished villenage and conferred upon the poor tenants a property in their lands, annulling the seignorial rights of the landlord. But this opinion rests upon no positive evidence, nor are we warranted in ascribing to him any stronger measure in reference to the land, than the annulment of the previous mortgages.[224] [224] See Boeckh, Public Economy of the Athenians, book iii, sect. 5. Tittmann (Griechisch. Staatsverfass. p. 651) and others have supposed (from Aristot. Polit. ii, 4, 4) that Solon enacted a law to limit the quantity of land which any individual citizen might acquire. But the passage does not seem to me to bear out such an opinion.