Solon 10, 11, 13.1-24

Solon 10: A short time will show the citizens my "madness," when the truth comes into the middle.

Solon 11: If you've suffered, don't blame the gods; you yourselves got slavery because you increased their power and gave them protection. Individually each of you walks in a fox's footsteps but together your mind is empty. You look at the tongue, not at all to a deed.

Solon 13 (1-24): 

1-6: Muses, hear my prayer. Give me prosperity from the gods and a good reputation among people; that I be pleasant to my friends, and bitter to my enemies. 

7-10: I want to have wealth, but not unjustly. When the gods give wealth, it endures.

10-17: But the wealth men honor out of hybris, it goes unnaturally and relies on unjust deeds; like a fire it grows from a small beginning, trivial at first, in the end painful. For mortals' works don't last; Zeus oversees the end of all things, and suddenly,

17-24: like a wind scatters clouds all at once in the spring. Stirring the sea's bottom and destroying fields on land it reaches the gods' seat in heaven. It makes a clear day to see. The sun's might shines on land, and no longer is there a cloud in sight. 

  • Lots of Solonic themes in 10-11: citizens, the gods are not to blame (cf. 4.1-8), the city slavery (4.18, 9.4)
  • The comparison to a fox -- no animals before in Solon, but like Archilochus & Semonides
  • In 11 Solon talks to a "you" -- even in 4, where he claims to teach the Athenians, his discussion of them is in the 3rd person. Whatever poem this is has a different relationship between persona & learners
  • 13 is quite nice. More Solonic themes: unjust wealth, a moral constellation centering around hybris, a deep love of anthropomorphizations (here the fire)
  • Solon 13 is preserved in Stobaeus, who seems to really like these general moralizing poems; in contrast to other Solon, this one lacks an Athenian context and is mostly moral generalizations in the 3rd person, focusing on unjust wealth & the transitoriness of human effort. Themes a Christian could get behind
For the simile Allan compares Il. 16.384-92, but I think the move from storm to clear sky is closer to Il. 16.297-302 (Lattimore):

And as when from the towering height of a great mountain Zeus
who gathers the thunderflash stirs the cloud dense upon it,
and all the high places of the hills are clear and the shoulders out-jutting
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the heavens,
so when the Danaans had beaten from the ships the ravening
fire, they got breath for a little, but there was no check in the fighting; 

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