Plutarch
Solon — the man who cancelled the debts
Σόλων · Plutarch wrote around 100 CE about events of the 590s BCE, nearly seven centuries earlier.
Athens in about 594 BCE was close to civil war: the poor were mortgaged to the rich, and those who defaulted were being sold abroad as slaves. Solon was given power to write the laws and used it to void every debt at a stroke, free the enslaved, and forbid lending on the security of a person ever again. Then he left the country for ten years so nobody could ask him to change anything.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Bernadotte Perrin (1847-1920) of Yale, in the Loeb Lives. His English is careful, even, and deliberately unobtrusive — he is trying to get Plutarch's sense across without adding a manner, and he mostly succeeds. Two things to watch. Plutarch's quotations of Solon's verse are poetry, and Perrin renders them in a raised prose register that signals the shift without reproducing it, so the reader should know that a more formal-sounding sentence may be a fragment of a poem. And the technical constitutional vocabulary — the property classes, the council, the offices — arrives in English terms that carry their own baggage; 'senate' for boule is doing real interpretive work.