During this Achæan period the Athenians seem to have largely deserted the sea for agriculture and olive-culture. It will be remembered that Athena’s gift to the city by which she outbid the sea-god was the olive-tree. Of course there were still fishermen on the coast, but when history begins dimly in the seventh century Athens is mainly agricultural and by no means yet a city-state. She was not yet a fully developed city-state when Sparta had long been settled in government and had already extended her hegemony over the whole Peloponnesus. By this time the Athenian kingship had dissolved into aristocracy, and the aristocrats, or Eupatridæ, were a clique of oppressive landowners whose farms were largely worked for them, as at Sparta, on the _métayer_ system, by which the tenant pays a certain proportion of the produce to the proprietor. The troubles which Solon had to face were agrarian troubles connected with boundary-stones. He reckons property in bushels of corn and oil. His enactments, or the ancient laws which pass under his name, are largely concerned with dogs and wolves and olive-culture. The only export permitted is that of olive oil. Even after Solon the local parties that divide the state are not divisions of city-dwellers, but of country folk--the shepherds of the hills, the farmers of the plain, and the fishermen of the coast. These facts emerge in despite of subsequent Athenian historians, who, to please the _amour propre_ of a democratic city, tried to make out that democracy had existed long before the tyranny of Peisistratus--in fact, as far back as Theseus, and certainly Solon. But it is fairly clear to any one discounting this tendency and reading their early traditions impartially that until the time of the tyrants Attica was by no means a true city-state, much less a democracy. Until city life was developed democracy was impossible.