(2) Glimpses into the economic and political life of the seventh and sixth centuries are occasionally to be got from the scanty remains of the poets of the period, supplemented by cautious references to later writers. It will be convenient to examine at once this more general evidence. [Sidenote: (_a_) statements from the extant writings of the sixth century (Solon and Theognis),] The only two writers of the age of the tyrants of whom more than the merest scraps have come down to us are Solon[24] and Theognis[25]. Both deal professedly with the social and political problems of their day. But both address audiences who are familiar with those problems. Even if their whole works had been preserved instead of a few hundred lines in either case, we should not expect to have the fundamental problems explicitly stated. It would be possible to read a large selection of articles and speeches by quite the best journalists and politicians on many recent political measures and at the end of it to be left in uncertainty as to the content and purport of the measure in question. We must expect the same difficulty in reading Solon and Theognis. And it must be confessed that we find it. But there is nothing in the extant fragments of either writer which discredits the theory. More than that there are passages in both of them that become of the utmost significance if the early tyrants owed their power to their previous wealth but are rather pointless on any other hypothesis. Solon’s position in relation to the tyranny is explained in the chapter dealing with Athens. But a few lines may be quoted here: But of themselves in their folly the men of the city are willing Our great city to wreck, being won over by wealth. False are the hearts of the people’s leaders[26]. By the wreck of the city the poet means the establishment of a tyranny, as is indicated by another couplet: Great men ruin a city: for lack of understanding Under a despot’s[27] yoke lieth the people enslaved[28]. These last two lines were presumably written after Peisistratus had made himself tyrant of Athens. Solon’s fears had been realized. The citizens had been “won over by wealth” to “wreck their great city.” Is not the best sense made out of these lines by assuming that what Solon feared and what actually happened was that the popular leader had made use of his wealth to establish himself as tyrant? Neither the “people’s leaders” of the first quotation nor the “great men” of the second are specifically stated to have been extremely rich, but to quote again the words of Solon, both may be plausibly identified with the foremost of Those who had power and made men to marvel because of their riches[29].