cause partly in years of sterility, which must of course have aggravated the distress of the small cultivators.  However this may be, such was the condition of things in B.C. 594 through mutiny of the poor freemen and Thetes, and uneasiness of the middling citizens, that the governing oligarchy, unable either to enforce their private debts or to maintain their political power, were obliged to invoke the well-known wisdom and integrity of Solon.  Though his vigorous protest—­which doubtless rendered him acceptable to the mass of the people—­against the iniquity of the existing system had already been proclaimed in his poems, they still hoped that he would serve as an auxiliary to help them over their difficulties.  They therefore chose him, nominally as archon along with Philombrotus, but with power in substance dictatorial.

It had happened in several Grecian states that the governing oligarchies, either by quarrels among their own members or by the general bad condition of the people under their government, were deprived of that hold upon the public mind which was essential to their power.  Sometimes—­as in the case of Pittacus of Mitylene anterior to the archonship of Solon, and often in the factions of the Italian republics in the middle ages—­the collision of opposing forces had rendered society intolerable, and driven all parties to acquiesce in the choice of some reforming dictator.  Usually, however, in the early Greek oligarchies, this ultimate crisis was anticipated by some ambitious individual, who availed himself of the public discontent to overthrow the oligarchy and usurp the powers of a despot.  And so probably it might have happened in Athens, had not the recent failure of Cylon, with all its miserable consequences, operated as a deterring motive.  It is curious to read, in the words of Solon himself, the temper in which his appointment was construed by a large portion of the community, but more especially by his own friends:  bearing in mind that at this early day, so far as our knowledge goes, democratical government was a thing unknown in Greece—­all Grecian governments were either oligarchical or despotic—­the mass of the freemen having not yet tasted of constitutional privilege.  His own friends and supporters were the first to urge him, while redressing the prevalent discontents, to multiply partisans for himself personally, and seize the supreme power.  They even “chid him as a mad-man, for declining to haul up the net when the fish were already enmeshed.”  The mass of the people, in despair with their lot, would gladly have seconded him in such an attempt; while many even among the oligarchy might have acquiesced in his personal government, from the mere apprehension of something worse if they resisted it.  That Solon might easily have made himself despot admits of little doubt.  And though the position of a Greek despot was always perilous, he would have had greater facility for maintaining himself in it than