Closing thoughts on Solon

Some closing thoughts on Solon:

  • Generally Solon feels pretty distinctive compared to the other elegy and iamb so far. If you gave me an unseen and asked me to identify if it's Solon, I think I'd do pretty well. In particular, I think of:
  • There's just so much Athens. Athens is frequently named, and generally there's a lot of discussion of contemporary Athenian politics (rich vs. poor, debts, etc.)
  • Linked with this discussion of Athenian politics is moralizing; moralizing is a common feature with other elegy, but Solon is particularly focused on a set of related ideas (hybris, kore, ate) and tying political discussion (especially leaders' success and failure) to those ideas.
  • Some of his moralizing is more general and not so strongly linked to Athens (perhaps selection bias; stuff that's preserved in Stobaeus and Clement of Alexandria). Bits the most like other elegy include the descriptions of various person's lives in Solon 13 (~Semonides 1) and the 7 ages of men (~Mimnermus 1 and 2 in considering youth vs. old age).
  • A difference from other elegy though is that there's no myth. Nothing like Mimnermus 12's Helius cup or Archilochus 17a's Telephus elegy. Even the hortatory frame of Solon 1-3 doesn't appear to have elicited a heroic parallel. (incidentally there's a ton of surviving hortatory elegy)
  • That's not to say there aren't links with epic: he likes homeric-style similes:
    • Weather similes: (Solon 9 snow and hail from cloud like great men destroying city, Solon 13.17-24 wind scattering clouds producing clear day)
    • animals (Solon 36.27 like a wolf among dogs)
    • fond of bold metaphors, especially of tying anthropomorphizations to physical place: court of time, the foundations of justice (4.14, σεμνὰ Δίκης θέμεθλα, 36.3 ἐν δίκηι Χρόνου); a bit like something like the Homeric Litai of Il. 9.
Overall a pretty unusual figure in archaic elegy and iamb in so sharply shaping his poetry for a particular place and time.

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