be, and to punish the idle.  A harsher measure was that of which we are told by Herakleides of Pontus, his making it unnecessary for illegitimate children to maintain their father.  Yet if a man abstains from an honourable marriage, and lives with a woman more for his own pleasure in her society than with a view to producing a family, he is rightly served, and cannot upbraid his children with neglecting him, because he has made their birth their reproach.

XXIII.  Altogether Solon’s laws concerning women are very strange.  He permitted a husband to kill an adulterer taken in the act; but if any one carried off a free woman and forced her, he assessed the penalty at one hundred drachmas.  If he obtained her favours by persuasion, he was to pay twenty drachmas, except in the case of those who openly ply for hire, alluding to harlots; for they come to those who offer them money without any concealment.  Moreover, he forbade men to sell their sisters and daughters, except in the case of unchastity.  Now to punish the same offence at one time with unrelenting severity, and at another in a light and trifling manner, by imposing so slight a fine, is unreasonable, unless the scarcity of specie in the city at that period made fines which were paid in money more valuable than they would now be; indeed, in the valuation of things for sacrifice, a sheep and a drachma were reckoned as each equal to a medimnus of corn.  To the victor at the Isthmian games he appointed a reward of a hundred drachmas, and to the victor in the Olympian, five hundred.  He gave five drachmas for every wolf that was killed, and one drachma for every wolf’s whelp; and we are told by Demetrius of Phalerum that the first of these sums was the price of an ox, and the second that of a sheep.  The prices of choice victims, which he settled in his sixteenth tablet of laws, would naturally be higher than those of ordinary beasts, but even thus they are cheap compared with prices at the present day.  It was an ancient practice among the Athenians to destroy the wolves, because their country was better fitted for pasture than for growing crops.  Some say that the Athenian tribes derive their names, not from the sons of Ion, but from the different professions in which men were then divided:  thus the fighting men were named Hoplites, and the tradesmen Ergadeis; the two remaining ones being the Geleontes, or farmers, and the Aigikoreis, or goat-herds and graziers.  With regard to water, as the country is not supplied with either rivers or lakes, but the people depend chiefly upon artificial wells, he made a law, that wherever there was a public well within four furlongs, people should use it, but if it were farther off, then they must dig a private well for themselves; but if a man dug a depth of sixty feet on his own estate without finding water, then he was to have the right of filling a six-gallon pitcher twice a day at his neighbour’s well; for Solon thought it right to help the distressed, and yet not to encourage