As to this vexed question, see Boeckh, _Staatsaushaltung der Athener_, B. iv, c. 5 (Grote's ref. wrong), as expounded and checked by Grote (ii, 485-88). Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (pp. 22, 49, _notes_), reject the whole interpretation (which is reached by a combination of ancient data, Plutarch [c. 18] telling nothing as to taxation). But they adduce only the negative argument that "as we know that Peisistratos, the champion of the poorer classes, subsequently levied a uniform tax of five or ten per cent., it is absurd to suppose that the highly democratic principle of a sliding-scale had been previously adopted by Solon. Peisistratos would not have dared to attempt a reaction from a sliding-scale income-tax to a sort of poll-tax." To this it might be replied that the "flat rate" of Peisistratos--which ought to modify the conception of him as the "friend of the poor"--may have been an addition to previous taxes; and that the division of citizens into income-classes must have stood for _something_ in the way of burdens. The solution would seem to be that these were not regular money taxes. "Regular direct taxes were as little known in free Athens as in any other ancient State; they are the marks of absolute monarchy, of unfreedom" (Meyer, ii, 644). "Seemingly, it was not until later times that this distribution of classes served the purposes of taxation" (Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 40). But already the cost of certain public services, classed under the head of "liturgies," was laid upon the rich; and there may well have been a process of collective contribution towards these at a time when very rich citizens cannot have been numerous. Doubtless the graduated income-tax would have been unworkable in a systematic way, though in the "Servian" timocracy of early Rome a _tributum_ seems to have been imposed on the classes (Livy, ii, 9). At yet other points Solon prepared the ground for the democratic structure of the later Athenian polity. By overthrowing the sacrosanct power of the aristocratic priestly houses, who had aggrandised themselves by it like the nobles of early Rome, he prevented the growth of a hierocracy. By constituting out of all the citizens, including the Thetes or peasant cultivators, a kind of universal jury-court, out of which the panels of judges were to be taken by lot, he put the people on the way of becoming a court of appeal against the upper-class archons, who recruited the Areopagus. "The constitution of the judicial courts (_Heliaia_) out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which Solon discovered. It is his title to fame in the history of the growth of popular government in Europe."[106]