The Solonian laws seem to have borne more or less upon all the great departments of human interest and duty.  We find regulations political and religious, public and private, civil and criminal, commercial, agricultural, sumptuary, and disciplinarian.  Solon provides punishment for crimes, restricts the profession and status of the citizen, prescribes detailed rules for marriage as well as for burial, for the common use of springs and wells, and for the mutual interest of conterminous farmers in planting or hedging their properties.  As far as we can judge from the imperfect manner in which his laws come before us, there does not seem to have been any attempt at a systematic order or classification.  Some of them are mere general and vague directions, while others again run into the extreme of specialty.

By far the most important of all was the amendment of the law of debtor and creditor which has already been adverted to, and the abolition of the power of fathers and brothers to sell their daughters and sisters into slavery.  The prohibition of all contracts on the security of the body was itself sufficient to produce a vast improvement in the character and condition of the poorer population,—­a result which seems to have been so sensibly obtained from the legislation of Solon, that Boeckh and some other eminent authors suppose him to have abolished villeinage and conferred upon the poor tenants a property in their lands, annulling the seigniorial rights of the landlord.  But this opinion rests upon no positive evidence, nor are we warranted in ascribing to him any stronger measure in reference to the land than the annulment of the previous mortgages.

The first pillar of his laws contained a regulation respecting exportable produce.  He forbade the exportation of all produce of the Attic soil, except olive oil alone.  And the sanction employed to enforce observance of this law deserves notice, as an illustration of the ideas of the time:  the archon was bound, on pain of forfeiting one hundred drachmas, to pronounce solemn curses against every offender.  We are probably to take this prohibition in conjunction with other objects said to have been contemplated by Solon, especially the encouragement of artisans and manufacturers at Athens.  Observing (we are told) that many new immigrants were just then flocking into Attica to seek an establishment, in consequence of its greater security, he was anxious to turn them rather to manufacturing industry than to the cultivation of a soil naturally poor.  He forbade the granting of citizenship to any immigrants, except to such as had quitted irrevocably their former abodes and come to Athens for the purpose of carrying on some industrial profession; and in order to prevent idleness, he directed the senate of Areopagus to keep watch over the lives of the citizens generally, and punish every one who had no course of regular labor to support him.  If a father had not taught his son some art or profession, Solon relieved the son