Solon 4, 5, 6, 9
Solon 4
1-4: The gods will not destroy our city; Athena protects it
5-10: But the senseless greed of its leaders wishes to ruin it
...
11: they grow wealthy through unjust deeds
...
12-16: they steal from holy and public things and do not respect the foundations of Justice, who silently knows the past and present and will punish in the future.
17-23: it comes to the city as an inescapable wound, bringing it to slavery; leading to youth-killing civil war. From its enemies the lovely city is consumed by those doing ill to their friends. These evils swirl in the demos
23-5: many of the poor arrive enslaved to a foreign land
...
26-29: thus a public evil comes to every house; the doors cannot hold it back, it jumps over the threshold, and it finds everyone, even if they hide in a corner.
30-1: my soul bids me to teach the Athenians of the evils of Disorder.
32-39: But Order (Eunomia) reveals all well-ordered (εὔκοσμα) things: she levels the rough, stops insolence, dims out insolence, withers the blooming flowers of blindness, and makes everything fitting and rational.
1-4: The gods will not destroy our city; Athena protects it
5-10: But the senseless greed of its leaders wishes to ruin it
...
11: they grow wealthy through unjust deeds
...
12-16: they steal from holy and public things and do not respect the foundations of Justice, who silently knows the past and present and will punish in the future.
17-23: it comes to the city as an inescapable wound, bringing it to slavery; leading to youth-killing civil war. From its enemies the lovely city is consumed by those doing ill to their friends. These evils swirl in the demos
23-5: many of the poor arrive enslaved to a foreign land
...
26-29: thus a public evil comes to every house; the doors cannot hold it back, it jumps over the threshold, and it finds everyone, even if they hide in a corner.
30-1: my soul bids me to teach the Athenians of the evils of Disorder.
32-39: But Order (Eunomia) reveals all well-ordered (εὔκοσμα) things: she levels the rough, stops insolence, dims out insolence, withers the blooming flowers of blindness, and makes everything fitting and rational.
Solon 5: I gave the people as big a prize as they could handle, and I showed the powerful that there was nothing unseemly in it. I stood a shield to both, and I did not let either win unjustly.
Solon 6: May the people follow leaders as well as possible, neither released nor restrained. Surfeity breeds insolence, when the people follow unsound men.
Solon 9: From a cloud comes the might of snow and hail, and thunder from lightning. A city is destroyed by great men, falling to the slavery of monarchy from its ignorance. It's not easier to restrain an elevated man later.
some initial thoughts on the first half of Solon 4:
- lots of anthropomorphization: Δίκη, the 'public evil' δημόσιον κακόν, even the wound ἕλκος and evils κακά are out there doing things.
- θέμεθλα in a metaphorical sense ('foundations of Justice') -- maybe emerging out of something like the θεμείλια in the hAp (254, 294), where Apollo is very concerned with where and how to lay his foundations for his temple.
- seems like a different moral order to me than Homer or Hesiod (which Allen compares to) -- Solon's concern for how the leaders want to 'ruin' (φθείρειν) the city through their greed seems to point to a concern for moral virtue throughout the whole city. Really seems to point forward to e.g. Athenians' concern for how Socrates ruins (διαφθειρειν) the youth.
On 4, 5, 6, 9 together: Solon seems pretty different from the other elegy & iamb so far. Some bits stand out:
- Explicitly for an Athenian audience: he identifies as an Athenian (Sol. 2) and addresses Athenians (4.30).
- His Athens is recognizably Athens of a later period: Athena protects the city, compound epithets with a placename a bit like the Marathonomachoi (here the Σαλαμιναφέτης), concern for the poor, strongly anti-monarchical.
- Lots of 1st person verbs describing the past. We had some of this in Archilochus, I suppose, but Solon talks so much about what he did (esp. in Solon 5)
- A certain repertoire of moral terms and a concern with the relationship between them: kosmos, hybris, koros, teaching (didasko). His interest here is especially clear in the description of Eunomia (παύει κόρον, ὕβριν ἀμαυροῖ) alongside his generalization τίκτει γὰρ κόρος ὕβριν
Might be survival effect: most of the other poets survive in Stobaeus, but Solon comes down in Attic oratory (Demosthenes), Plutarch's Life of Solon, and the Ath. Pol. Quite different sources that have in common an interest in Athens and Athenian history and politics.
Also: Athena holds her hands above the city, presumably in protection: Παλλὰς ᾿Αθηναίη χεῖρας ὕπερθεν ἔχει. I think this gesture occurs elsewhere (even is fairly common?), e.g. in the Iliad, but what does it mean exactly? How does holding your hands above something protect it? Makes me think of like giants standing above the city blocking it with enormous hands, but I doubt that's the image intended.
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