in honour of the discharge of debt, and the authority of the lawgiver
was corroborated and enlarged. Solon was not one of those politicians
who vibrate alternately between the popular and the aristocratic
principles, imagining that the concession of to-day ought necessarily
to father the denial of to-morrow. He knew mankind too deeply not to
be aware that there is no statesman whom the populace suspect like the
one who commences authority with a bold reform, only to continue it
with hesitating expedients. His very next measure was more vigorous
and more unexceptionable than the first. The evil of the laws of
Draco was not that they were severe, but that they were inefficient.
In legislation, characters of blood are always traced upon tablets of
sand. With one stroke Solon annihilated the whole of these laws, with
the exception of that (an ancient and acknowledged ordinance) which
related to homicide; he affixed, in exchange, to various crimes--to
theft, to rape, to slander, to adultery--punishments proportioned to
the offence. It is remarkable that in the spirit of his laws he
appealed greatly to the sense of honour and the fear of shame, and
made it one of his severest penalties to be styled atimos or
unhonoured--a theory that, while it suited the existent, went far to
ennoble the future, character of the Athenians. In the same spirit
the children of those who perished in war were educated at the public
charge--arriving at maturity, they were presented with a suit of
armour, settled in their respective callings, and honoured with
principal seats in all public assemblies. That is a wise principle of
a state which makes us grateful to its pensioners, and bids us regard
in those supported at the public charge the reverent memorials of the
public service [203]. Solon had the magnanimity to preclude, by his
own hand, a dangerous temptation to his own ambition, and assigned
death to the man who aspired to the sole dominion of the commonwealth.
He put a check to the jobbing interests and importunate canvass of