The Commonwealth was finally reduced to complete anarchy, without law, or order, or system in the administration of justice, when Solon, who was descended from Codrus, was raised to the office of first magistrate (594 B.C.). Solon was born in Salamis, about 638 B.C., and his first appearance in public life at Athens occurred in this wise: A few years prior to the year 600 the Island of Salamis had revolted from Athens to Megara. The Athenians had repeatedly failed in their attempts to recover it, and, finally, the odium of defeat was such that a law was passed forbidding, upon pain of death, any proposition for the renewal of the enterprise. Indignant at this pusillanimous policy, Solon devised a plan for rousing his countrymen to action. Having some poetical talent, he composed a poem on the loss of Salamis, and, feigning madness in order to evade the penalty of the law, he rushed into the market-place. PLUTARCH says, "A great number of people flocking about him there, he got up on the herald's stone, and sang the elegy which begins thus: 'Hear and attend; from Salamis I came To show your error.'" The stratagem was successful: the law was repealed, an expedition against Salamis was intrusted to the command of Solon, and in one campaign he drove the Megarians from the island. Solon the poet, orator, and soldier, became the judicious law-giver, whose fame reached the remotest parts of the then known world, and whose laws became the basis of those of the Twelve Tables of Rome. Says an English poet, Who knows not Solon, last, and wisest far, Of those whom Greece, triumphant in the height Of glory, styled her father? him whose voice Through Athens hushed the storm of civil wrath; Taught envious Want and cruel Wealth to join In friendship, and with sweet compulsion tamed Minerva's eager people to his laws, Which their own goddess in his breast inspired? --AKENSIDE. Having been raised, as stated, to the office of first archon, Solon was chosen, by the consent or an parties, as the arbiter of their differences, and invested with full authority to frame a new Constitution and a new code of laws. He might easily have perverted this almost unlimited power to dangerous uses, and his friends urged him to make himself supreme ruler of Athens. But he told them, "Tyranny is a fair field, but it has no outlet;" and his stern integrity was proof against all temptations to swerve from the path of honor and betray the trust reposed in him. The ridicule to which he was exposed for rejecting a usurper's power he has described as follows: Nor wisdom's palm, nor deep-laid policy Can Solon boast. For when its noblest blessings Heaven poured into his lap, he spurned them from him; Where was his sense and spirit when enclosed He found the choicest prey, nor deigned to draw it? Who, to command fair Athens but one day, Would not himself, with all his race, have fallen Contented on the morrow?