Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and RomansPlutarch
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch
Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
and, above all, an abundance of laborers about Sparta, who should not be
left idle, but be kept down with continual toil and work, did well to
take off his citizens from laborious and mechanical occupations, and
keep them to their arms, and teach them only the art of war. But Solon,
fitting his laws to the state of things, and not making things to suit
his laws, and finding the ground scarce rich enough to maintain the
husbandmen, and altogether incapable of feeding an unoccupied and
leisurely multitude, brought trades into credit, and ordered the
Areopagites to examine how every man got his living, and chastise the
idle. But that law was yet more rigid which, as Heraclides Ponticus
delivers, declared the sons of unmarried mothers not obliged to relieve
their fathers; for he that avoids the honorable form of union shows that
he does not take a woman for children, but for pleasure, and thus gets
his just reward, and has taken away from himself every title to upbraid
his children, to whom he has made their very birth
a scandal and reproach.
Solon's laws in general about women are his strangest; for he permitted
any one to kill an adulterer that found him in the act; but if any one
forced a free woman, a hundred drachmas was the fine; if he enticed her,
twenty; except those that sell themselves openly, that is, harlots, who
go openly to those that hire them. He made it unlawful to sell a
daughter or a sister, unless, being yet unmarried, she was found wanton.
Now it is irrational to punish the same crime sometimes very severely
and without remorse, and sometimes very lightly, and, as it were, in
sport, with a trivial fine; unless, there being little money then in
Athens, scarcity made those mulcts the more grievous punishment. In the
valuation for sacrifices, a sheep and a bushel were both estimated at a
drachma; the victor in the Isthmian games was to have for reward a
hundred drachmas; the conqueror in the Olympian, five hundred; he that
brought a wolf, five drachmas; for a whelp, one; the former sum, as
Demetrius the Phalerian asserts, was the value of an ox, the latter, of
a sheep. The prices which Solon, in his sixteenth table, sets on choice
victims, were naturally far greater; yet they, too, are very low in
comparison of the present. The Athenians were, from the beginning, great
enemies to wolves, their fields being better for pasture than corn.
Some affirm their tribes did not take their names from the sons of Ion,
but from the different sorts of occupation that they followed; the
soldiers were called Hoplitae, the craftsmen Ergades, and, of the
remaining two, the farmers Gedeontes,
and the shepherds and graziers Aegicores.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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