[259] Plutarch, Solon, 30; Diogen. Laërt. i, 49; Diodor. Excerpta., lib. vii-x, ed. Maii. Fr. xix-xxiv. It is gratifying to learn that Peisistratus, whose conduct throughout his despotism was comparatively mild, left Solon untouched. How long this distinguished man survived the practical subversion of his own constitution, we cannot certainly determine; but according to the most probable statement he died the very next year, at the advanced age of eighty. We have only to regret that we are deprived of the means of following more in detail his noble and exemplary character. He represents the best tendencies of his age, combined with much that is personally excellent; the improved ethical sensibility; the thirst for enlarged knowledge and observation, not less potent in old age than in youth; the conception of regularized popular institutions, departing sensibly from the type and spirit of the governments around him, and calculated to found a new character in the Athenian people; a genuine and reflecting sympathy with the mass of the poor, anxious not merely to rescue them from the oppressions of the rich, but also to create in them habits of self-relying industry; lastly, during his temporary possession of a power altogether arbitrary, not merely an absence of all selfish ambition, but a rare discretion in seizing the mean between conflicting exigencies. In reading his poems we must always recollect that what now appears common-place was once new, so that to his comparatively unlettered age, the social pictures which he draws were still fresh, and his exhortations calculated to live in the memory. The poems composed on moral subjects, generally inculcate a spirit of gentleness towards others and moderation in personal objects; they represent the gods as irresistible, retributive, favoring the good and punishing the bad, though sometimes very tardily. But his compositions on special and present occasions are usually conceived in a more vigorous spirit; denouncing the oppressions of the rich at one time, and the timid submission to Peisistratus at another,—and expressing, in emphatic language, his own proud consciousness of having stood forward as champion of the mass of the people. Of his early poems hardly anything is preserved; the few lines which remain seem to manifest a jovial temperament, which we may well conceive to have been overlaid by the political difficulties against which he had to contend,—difficulties arising successively out of the Megarian war, the Kylonian sacrilege, the public despondency healed by Epimenidês, and the task of arbiter between a rapacious oligarchy and a suffering people. In one of his elegies, addressed to Mimnermus, he marked out the sixtieth year as the longest desirable period of life, in preference to the eightieth year, which that poet had expressed a wish to attain;[260] but his own life, as far as we can judge, seems to have reached the longer