laziness.  He also made very judicious regulations about planting trees, ordering that they should not be planted within five feet of a neighbour’s property, except in the case of olives and fig-trees, which were not to be planted within nine feet; for these trees spread out their roots farther than others, and spoil the growth of any others by taking away their nourishment and by giving off hurtful juices.  Trenches and pits he ordered to be dug as far away from another man’s property as they were deep; and no hive of bees was to be placed within three hundred feet of those already established by another man.

XXIV.  Oil was the only product of the country which he allowed to be exported, everything else being forbidden; and he ordered that if any one broke this law the archon was to solemnly curse him, unless he paid a hundred drachmas into the public treasury.  This law is written on the first of his tablets.  From this we see that the old story is not altogether incredible, that the export of figs was forbidden, and that the men who informed against those who had done so were therefore called sycophants.  He also made laws about damage received from animals, one of which was that a dog who had bitten a man should be delivered up to him tied to a stick three cubits long, an ingenious device for safety.

One is astounded at his law of adopting foreigners into the state, which permits no one to become a full citizen in Athens unless he be either exiled for life from his native city, or transfers himself with his whole family to Athens to practise his trade there.  It is said that his object in this was not so much to exclude other classes of people from the city, as to assure these of a safe refuge there; and these he thought would be good and faithful citizens, because the former had been banished from their own country, and the latter had abandoned it of their own freewill.  Another peculiarity of Solon’s laws was the public dining-table in the prytaneum.  Here he did not allow the same person to dine often, while he punished the man who was invited and would not come, because the one seemed gluttonous, and the other contemptuous.

XXV.  He ordered that all his laws should remain in force for a hundred years, and he wrote them upon triangular wooden tablets, which revolved upon an axis in oblong recesses, some small remains of which have been preserved in the prytaneum down to the present day.  These, we are told by Aristotle, were called Kurbeis.  The comic poet Kratinus also says,

    “By Solon and by Draco, mighty legislators once,
    Whose tablets light the fire now to warm a dish of pulse.”

Some say that the term Kurbeis is only applied to those on which are written the laws which regulate religious matters.

The senate swore by a collective oath that it would enforce Solon’s laws; and each of the Thesmothetae took an oath to the same effect at the altar in the market-place, protesting that, if he transgressed any of the laws, he would offer a golden statue as big as himself to the temple at Delphi.