It is on the occasion of Solon’s legislation that we obtain our first glimpse—­unfortunately but a glimpse—­of the actual state of Attica and its inhabitants.  It is a sad and repulsive picture, presenting to us political discord and private suffering combined.

Violent dissensions prevailed among the inhabitants of Attica, who were separated into three factions—­the Pedieis, or men of the plain, comprising Athens, Eleusis, and the neighboring territory, among whom the greatest number of rich families were included; the mountaineers in the east and north of Attica, called Diacrii, who were, on the whole, the poorest party; and the Paralii in the southern portion of Attica from sea to sea, whose means and social position were intermediate between the two.  Upon what particular points these intestine disputes turned we are not distinctly informed.  They were not, however, peculiar to the period immediately preceding the archonship of Solon.  They had prevailed before, and they reappear afterward prior to the despotism of Pisistratus; the latter standing forward as the leader of the Diacrii, and as champion, real or pretended, of the poorer population.

But in the time of Solon these intestine quarrels were aggravated by something much more difficult to deal with—­a general mutiny of the poorer population against the rich, resulting from misery combined with oppression.  The Thetes, whose condition we have already contemplated in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, are now presented to us as forming the bulk of the population of Attica—­the cultivating tenants, metayers, and small proprietors of the country.  They are exhibited as weighed down by debts and dependence, and driven in large numbers out of a state of freedom into slavery—­the whole mass of them (we are told) being in debt to the rich, who were proprietors of the greater part of the soil.  They had either borrowed money for their own necessities, or they tilled the lands of the rich as dependent tenants, paying a stipulated portion of the produce, and in this capacity they were largely in arrear.

All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor—­once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world—­combined with the recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself as well as that of another man to buy him.  Every debtor unable to fulfil his contract was liable to be adjudged as the slave of his creditor, until he could find means either of paying it or working it out; and not only he himself, but his minor sons and unmarried daughters and sisters also, whom the law gave him the power of selling.  The poor man thus borrowed upon the security of his body (to translate literally the Greek phrase) and upon that of the persons in his family.  So severely had these oppressive contracts been enforced, that many debtors had been reduced from freedom to slavery in Attica itself,