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
Since the country has but few rivers, lakes, or large springs, and many
used wells which they had dug, there was a law made, that, where there
was a public well within a hippicon, that is, four furlongs, all should
draw at that; but, when it was farther off, they should try and procure
a well of their own; and, if they had dug ten fathom deep and could find
no water, they had liberty to fetch a pitcherful of four gallons and a
half in a day from their neighbors'; for he thought it prudent to make
provision against want, but not to supply laziness. He showed skill in
his orders about planting, for any one that would plant another tree was
not to set it within five feet of his neighbor's field; but if a fig or
an olive, not within nine; for their roots spread farther, nor can they
be planted near all sorts of trees without damage, for they draw away
the nourishment, and in some cases are noxious by their effluvia. He
that would dig a pit or a ditch was to dig it at the distance of its own
depth from his neighbor's ground; and he that would raise stocks of bees
was not to place them within three hundred feet of those which another
had already raised.
He permitted only oil to be exported, and those that exported any other
fruit, the archon was solemnly to curse, or else pay an hundred drachmas
himself; and this law was written in his first table, and, therefore,
let none think it incredible, as some affirm, that the exportation of
figs was once unlawful, and the informer against the delinquents called
a sycophant. He made a law, also, concerning hurts and injuries from
beasts, in which he commands the master of any dog that bit a man to
deliver him up with a log about his neck, four and a half feet long; a
happy device for men's security. The law concerning naturalizing
strangers is of doubtful character; he permitted only those to be made
free of Athens who were in perpetual exile from their own country, or
came with their whole family to trade there; this he did, not to
discourage strangers, but rather to invite them to a permanent
participation in the privileges of the government; and, besides, he
thought those would prove the more faithful citizens who had been forced
from their own country, or voluntarily forsook it. The law of public
entertainment (parasitein is his name for it) is, also, peculiarly
Solon's, for if any man came often, or if he that was invited refused,
they were punished, for he concluded that one was greedy, the other a
contemner of the state.
All his laws he established for an hundred years, and wrote them on
wooden tables or rollers, named axones, which might be turned round in
oblong cases; some of their relics were in my time still to be seen in
the Prytaneum, or common hall, at Athens. These, as Aristotle states,
were called cyrbes, and there is a passage of Cratinus the comedian,
By Solon, and by Draco, if you please,
Whose Cyrbes make the fires that parch our peas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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