Among the various laws of Solon, there are few which have attracted more notice than that which pronounces the man who in a sedition stood aloof, and took part with neither side, to be dishonored and disfranchised.  Strictly speaking, this seems more in the nature of an emphatic moral denunciation, or a religious curse, than a legal sanction capable of being formally applied in an individual case and after judicial trial,—­though the sentence of atimy, under the more elaborated Attic procedure, was both definite in its penal consequences and also judicially delivered.  We may, however, follow the course of ideas under which Solon was induced to write this sentence on his tables, and we may trace the influence of similar ideas in later Attic institutions.  It is obvious that his denunciation is confined to that special case in which a sedition has already broken out:  we must suppose that Cylon has seized the Acropolis, or that Pisistratus, Megacles, and Lycurgus are in arms at the head of their partisans.  Assuming these leaders to be wealthy and powerful men, which would in all probability be the fact, the constituted authority—­such as Solon saw before him in Attica, even after his own organic amendments—­was not strong enough to maintain the peace; it became, in fact, itself one of the contending parties.  Under such given circumstances, the sooner every citizen publicly declared his adherence to some of them, the earlier this suspension of legal authority was likely to terminate.  Nothing was so mischievous as the indifference of the mass, or their disposition to let the combatants fight out the matter among themselves, and then to submit to the victor.  Nothing was more likely to encourage aggression on the part of an ambitious malcontent, than the conviction that if he could once overpower the small amount of physical force which surrounded the archons, and exhibit himself in armed possession of the Prytaneum or the Acropolis, he might immediately count upon passive submission on the part of all the freemen without.  Under the state of feeling which Solon inculcates, the insurgent leader would have to calculate that every man who was not actively in his favor would be actively against him, and this would render his enterprise much more dangerous.  Indeed, he could then never hope to succeed, except on the double supposition of extraordinary popularity in his own person and widespread detestation of the existing government.  He would thus be placed under the influence of powerful deterring motives; so that ambition would be less likely to seduce him into a course which threatened nothing but ruin, unless under such encouragements from the preexisting public opinion as to make his success a result desirable for the community.  Among the small political societies of Greece—­especially in the age of Solon, when the number of despots in other parts of Greece seems to have been at its maximum—­every government, whatever might be its form, was sufficiently