ment does not consist in revenging what is past, but in preventing the culprit from repeating and the community from suffering the like or any other offence from the same person, it may well be doubted if death need be inflicted in any case; the terror of example, not the spirit of revenge, must constitute the necessity of such a mode of punishment, if any necessity exists; but if punishments may be devised, by which guilty persons shall be made to atone to society without cutting them from it, and if these punishments may be such as shall deter and terrify the evil-minded equally with death itself, policy, independent of religion, will be interested to adopt

them.

It was not to be expected that the Athenians would be remedied by such sanguinary laws as those of Draco, and they had been in operation nearly half a century, when Solon, in the third year of the forty-sixth Olympiad, found the people in as much need of reformation, as Draco did in the beginning of the thirty-fifth Olympiad.

Solon was of noble birth and of an elevated soul; he was a friend to liberty, but a lover of order; descended from Codrus, he was a patriot by inheritance; though he was a great adept in the philosophy of the times, it neither soured his manners nor left him without attention to the public. When he withdrew himself from the world for the purposes of study and contemplation, it was to render himself a more useful citizen on his return to society: with a fortune rather below mediocrity he had such a spirit of beneficence and generosity, that he was obliged in his youth to apply himself to commerce to support his independence: Solon's philosophy did not boast any unnatural contempt of pain or pleasure; he affected no apathy: on the contrary, when he was reproached for weeping at the death of his son, as if it was unbe

coming of a wise man to bewail an evil he could not remedy, he answered, with a modest sensibility of his weakness, that it was on that very account he did bewail it.

The anecdote Plutarch gives us of Solon's interview with his contemporary Thales, and the silly method that philosopher took for convincing Solon of the advantages of celibacy, by employing a fellow to make a false report to him of his son's death, heightens our affection for the man, without lowering our respect for the sage: Thales in the true spirit of sophism triumphed in the superiority of his wisdom by avoiding those connexions, which soften the human heart, and vainly supposed he sunk the dignity of Solon's character by exposing to ridicule the tender feelings of the father.

The Athenians were exhausted by a tedious and unprosperous war with the people of Megara: the important island of Salamis was lost, and such was their despair of ever recovering it, that they passed a law for making it a capital offence in any citizen to propose the retaking it: Solon, who regarded this degrading edict with honest indignation, feigned himself insane, and rushing into the forum harangued the populace, abrogated the edict, and declared war against the Megarensians: on this occasion he addressed the people in elegiac verses of his own composing, one hundred in number; the power of his muse prevailed, for it was great; the people gave him the command of an expedition against Salamis, in which he had the good fortune to reduce that island and re-annex it to his country, which had made such public avowal of its despair.

Solon is so highly celebrated as a poet, that some ancient authorities have equalled him to Hesiod and even to Homer; we have few and small remains, but many testimonies of his writings; in particular we

are informed, that he composed five thousand verses on the commonwealth of Athens, recording the transactions of his own time, not as a history in praise, but in defence of himself, and with a view to encourage his countrymen to persist in a course of public virtue and private morality. He wrote iambics also and odes, and composed even his laws in verse, of which Plutarch has quoted the exordium.

He employed stratagem in the reduction of the island of Salamis, but as the celebrated Pisistratus was joined with him in this enterprise, it must not be disguised that some authorities give the success of the expedition to Pisistratus; both were men of consummate address and resource, and each no doubt had his share of merit in the service; the reputation Solon gained by this event was still increased by his conduct in the defence of the famous temple of Delphi against the sacrilegious Cirrhæans; though he was only assessor to the general Clisthenes the Sicyonian in this campaign, the successful termination of the war by the capture of Cirrha was universally attributed to Solon.

Athens was now rent by popular feuds and dissentions; the commonwealth was in imminent peril, every thing tending to civil tumult and confusion, and the people in a state little short of absolute anarchy: in this extremity every eye was turned towards Solon, and he was elected archon by the general voice of his fellow-citizens. It was now not only in his power to make himself absolute master of the state, and to establish that tyranny in his own person, which he lived to see Pisistratus aspire to and obtain, but that step was also pressed upon him by the unanimous solicitation of his friends and the public at large; religion had its share in the temptation, for the temple of Delphi uttered its oracular decree for his assuming the supreme power in Athens,

and when he withstood the dazzling offer, he had to combat the reproaches and invectives of all parties for refusing it. A magnanimity that was proof against temptation was not to be shaken by calumny; supported by conscious integrity he opposed the torrent, and contenting himself with the limited authority of an annual magistracy, framed and published those mild and salutary ordinances, which have endeared his name to all posterity. Amongst the pacifying measures of his government he found it expedient to relieve the people by an ordinance for the remission of debts of a certain description; this act raised a storm of opposition and abuse from all the rich and usurious against his administration, and some who had been his intimates took part in the faction, and began to persecute him in the bitterest manner, charging him with the meanness of exempting himself as a creditor from the conditions of the act; he soon turned the odium of the charge upon the contrivers of it, by giving public proof to the city that he himself had been the first who obeyed his own law, and remitted a considerable sum to his debtors; this proof of his disinterestedness as a creditor convinced his countrymen of his uprightness as a legislator, and he rose the higher in their esteem for the malevolent attack he had so fully repulsed: reason and public gratitude at length prevailed, and the voice of faction being put to silence, the whole care of the commonwealth was surrendered into his hands, to be regu lated and reformed according to his wisdom and discretion.

Solon, though too magnanimous to accept the title of king, was too good a citizen to decline the trust, and now it was that he abrogated all Draco's sanguinary laws, except those that affected murderers: this, as I before observed, occurred in the course of the forty-sixth Olympiad ; he arranged the

people into four classes, according to the different proportions of their property; he erected the principal council of the Areopagites, with inferior courts for the administration of law and justice, and published his famous manifesto for rendering infamous all persons, who in civil seditions should remain spectators of their country's danger by a criminal neutrality; he enacted many wholesome regulations respecting marriages, tending to the increase of population; he suppressed libels, and made idleness punishable by law; he put under certain disabilities, parents who were convicted of having grossly neglected the education of their families, and restrained by sumptuary laws every species of public excess. Many more of his laws might be enumerated, if it were necessary to enlarge upon facts so generally known, but it will suffice to mention, that when he had completed his code, he bound the senators to the observance of what it contained by the solemnest oath he could devise, and causing his laws to be engraven on tables of wood, hung them up in the public courts that no man might plead ignorance.

The nature of this oath is curious; the senator was led up to a ponderous stone preserved in the forum; there the oath was publicly administered, and the obligation of it was, that he should dedicate a piece of gold to the temple of Delphi of equal weight with the stone if he was proved guilty of having violated his oath: not content with thus swearing the judges and senators to the faithful administration of his laws, he also bound the people by oath to their due observance; and having done all this with a temper and prudence, particularly expressive of his character, Solon took his leave of Athens, and set out upon his travels into Egypt.