But the forces for change in the world beyond Athens were not easily kept at bay, and by 600 BC even the Eupatrids were starting to embrace them. Cosmopolitanism, for those with sufficient fashion sense, had long promised ready entry to an international fast set. Its members felt their truest sense of identity not with compatriots from the grubbing lower classes but with fellow sophisticates from across the entire Greek world. “I simply adore the good things of life”:8 a statement unimaginable upon the lips of a stern and shaggy hero, but raising no eyebrows whatsoever among those who believed that luxury held up a mirror to the gods. Even a woman, if her tastes were sufficiently elegant, her jewelry golden, her robes soft and richly dyed, might hope to glimpse and converse with the divine: “Come, rainbow-throned and immortal goddess of love, if ever in the past you heard my far-off cries and heeded them, leaving your father’s halls, travelling in your chariot of gold, your pretty sparrows bearing you swiftly upon the fluttering of their wings, down from heaven through the sky to the dark earth.”9 A prayer well worth raising—for pleasures, properly enjoyed, might indeed lift scales from mortal eyes, and a dinner party provide a better-ordered realm than any state. The seductions of high society, delicate and perfumed as they were, exerted on those who could afford them an almost spiritual allure. Taste as well as breeding had become the mark of the elite.
Yet what defined it also served to threaten it. The passion for luxuries, most of which had to be shipped from glamorous locations overseas, inevitably boosted the fortunes of those with their fingers in the import-export trade. Capital, which had previously been tied up almost exclusively in the estates of the nobility, grew increasingly liquid. By 600 BC, a momentous innovation was being introduced to the cities of Ionia: coinage. Over the following decades, it would cross the Aegean and begin to circulate in Greece. The aristocracy, unsurprisingly, reacted with disgust and mounting alarm. They bristled at the prospect of a businessman having the same spending power as a Eupatrid, and responded with increasingly frantic insults. “Kakoi,” they called the nouveaux riches: the “low-born,” the “unpleasant,” the “cheats.” The Kakoi themselves, however, as they could afford to do, merely shrugged their shoulders and continued to rake in the cash. After all, as a Spartan had once pointed out, back in the days of his own city’s social upheavals, “A man is nothing but the sum of what he owns.” Fitting slogan for a new and perplexing age. “Gold is the only thing that makes for breeding now.” So, with a curling of the lip, might the déclassé nobleman complain. “There is no other basis of esteem.”10
The Spartans themselves, of course, once so convulsed by precisely such complaints, had long since evolved their own remedy. To many, in the Attica of the 590s BC, it must have seemed as though history were repeating itself. Once again, just as in Lacedaemon a century previously, a whole region of Greece was crippled by an agrarian crisis. Never before had the property market been so fluid. As impoverished noblemen, threatened with the loss of their patrimony, tightened the screws on their tenants, so misery was passed down the food chain to the very poorest, from the mansions of great families to the barest, rockiest plots. Creditors, mapping the limits of mortgaged olive groves and fields, filled the countryside with ominous lines of stones. They might just as well have been marking out the graves of ruined peasants.
As it worsened, the land famine drew an inevitable recourse. Just over the straits from southern Attica, temptingly, indeed irresistibly, close, lay the island of Salamis. Athenian scholars, adducing complex arguments from ancient epics, were able to demonstrate, at least to their own satisfaction, that Ajax’s old kingdom belonged to them. News, certainly, to the citizens of Megara, a small city midway between Athens and Corinth, which also laid claim to Salamis, and indeed had planted it with settlers. The two cities duly went to war. Athens was defeated and forced to sue for peace. All the more galling for the vanquished was the fact that Megara, tiny as she was, ranked only as a third-rate power. The Athenians plunged into a gloomy introspection. Racked by crisis at home, humiliated abroad, they could no longer deny that they were punching woefully below their weight. Something was rotten in the state of Athens.
Spectral figures began to be glimpsed on the streets of the city, seeming portents of imminent ruin. So desperate did the situation appear that the Athenians, with that Greek enthusiasm for one-man think tanks best exemplified by the tales told of Lycurgus, began to cast around for a sage. Fortunately for them, a ready candidate was at hand. In 594 BC,11 Solon, universally held to be the wisest man in Athens (not to mention one of the seven wisest Greeks who had ever lived), was given the archonship, the city’s supreme magistracy, and entrusted with the task of saving the state. His appointment, remarkably in a society as class-riven as Athens’, met with universal applause. The blue-blooded descendant of an ancient Attic king, Solon had also dabbled in trade, while simultaneously letting slip to the poor his sense of outrage at their plight. Here was a man who could appeal to all his constituencies.
Skilled though he was at tailoring his pitch to his audience, however, Solon was no mere idle trimmer. His brand of wisdom was of a peculiarly muscular variety. It was he, only a year before becoming archon, who had rallied Greek opinion to the defense of Delphi when the impious city of Crisa had sought to annex the oracle. His own city’s defeat by Megara had inspired him to even greater heights of outrage. “Let’s head for Salamis,” he had urged in impassioned verse, “fight for that beautiful island, wipe ourselves clean of the disgrace.”12 Now, as head of state, he was in a position to do more than sloganeer. It was evident to Solon that the two great crises facing Athens, agrarian and military, both sprang from the same root: rural impoverishment was enfeebling the reserves of Attic manpower; farmers were sinking ever deeper into serfdom. The poor, if truly desperate, might even stake their freedom against their debts, perhaps ending up chained and shackled as slaves in their own fields. Solon, had he displayed the calculating mercilessness of a Lycurgus, could easily have sponsored this trend, and condemned his city’s poor to a permanent helotage. Instead, he chose to redeem them. Even those who had been sold abroad, even those “who had forgotten how to speak the Attic dialect,” were liberated, while in Attica itself, wherever property had been mortgaged, Solon ordered a general pardoning of debts. Out in the fields, men were set to work “digging up the boundary-stones where they had been set in the dark earth.”13
Most landlords, naturally enough, were outraged; but Solon, playing the selfless sage to the hilt, argued sternly that his reforms were in their interests, too. After all, without the bedrock provided by a free peasantry, what hope was there of capturing Salamis, or of preserving Athens from social meltdown, or of winning for the city a rank commensurate with her size? Yes, Solon had sought to ease the sufferings of the poor—but he had also labored hard to keep the rich in power. The Eupatrids, holding their noses, had duly been persuaded into an alliance with the Kakoi; wealth rather than birth made the prerequisite for office; the poor, although granted membership of a citizens’ assembly, denied the privilege of speaking in it. It was a triumph not for revolution but for a hard-fought middle way. “Envied for their wealth though they were,” Solon pointed out, “I sought to preserve the powerful from the hatred of the oppressed. Taking my stand, I used my strong shield to protect both sides of the class divide, allowing neither to gain an advantage over the other that would be unjust.”14