Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
Trenches and pits he ordered to be dug as far away from another
man's property as they were deep; and no hive of bees was to be placed
within three hundred feet of those already established by another man.
XXIV. Oil was the only product of the country which he allowed to be
exported, everything else being forbidden; and he ordered that if any
one broke this law the archon was to solemnly curse him, unless he paid
a hundred drachmas into the public treasury. This law is written on the
first of his tablets. From this we see that the old story is not
altogether incredible, that the export of figs was forbidden, and that
the men who informed against those who had done so were therefore called
sycophants. He also made laws about damage received from animals, one of
which was that a dog who had bitten a man should be delivered up to him
tied to a stick three cubits long, an ingenious device for safety.
One is astounded at his law of adopting foreigners into the state,
which permits no one to become a full citizen in Athens unless he be
either exiled for life from his native city, or transfers himself with
his whole family to Athens to practise his trade there. It is said that
his object in this was not so much to exclude other classes of people
from the city, as to assure these of a safe refuge there; and these he
thought would be good and faithful citizens, because the former had been
banished from their own country, and the latter had abandoned it of
their own freewill. Another peculiarity of Solon's laws was the public
dining-table in the prytaneum. Here he did not allow the same person to
dine often, while he punished the man who was invited and would not
come, because the one seemed gluttonous, and the other contemptuous.
XXV. He ordered that all his laws should remain in force for a hundred
years, and he wrote them upon triangular wooden tablets, which revolved
upon an axis in oblong recesses, some small remains of which have been
preserved in the prytaneum down to the present day. These, we are told
by Aristotle, were called _Kurbeis_. The comic poet Kratinus also says,
"By Solon and by Draco, mighty legislators once,
Whose tablets light the fire now to warm a dish of pulse."
Some say that the term _Kurbeis_ is only applied to those on which are
written the laws which regulate religious matters.
The senate swore by a collective oath that it would enforce Solon's
laws; and each of the Thesmothetae took an oath to the same effect at
the altar in the market-place, protesting that, if he transgressed any
of the laws, he would offer a golden statue as big as himself to the
temple at Delphi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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