He also created a new council, or boulē, of four hundred members drawn from the four tribes, which met regularly and prepared business for the assembly. A preexisting all-purpose body, the council of the Areopagus (a hill near the Acropolis named after Ares, god of war, where it met), had been dominated by the nobility and its powers were now limited to guardianship of the constitution and to criminal trials.
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Solon was still not convinced that he had prized the fingers of the aristocracy from the levers of power. So he introduced a remarkable innovation into the election of the nine Archons. This was the principle of randomness. Each of Athens’s four tribes (or subdivisions of the citizen body) elected ten men for the Archonship, forty in total. The successful nine were then chosen from the forty by lot.
The use of lot (the technical term is sortition) was a typically imaginative Greek device. It had two purposes—one religious and the other political. First, it was a respectful invitation to the gods to play their part in an election and, so to speak, leave them with the last word. Then, it ensured equality of opportunity and prevented the corruption that can mar elections. So far as Solon was concerned, it was a mechanism for weakening the influence of over-mighty factions. The nobility would find it harder to monopolize the Archonship.
To the modern mind, random selection is absurd. But sortition took the sting out of electoral contests. Perhaps most significantly, it encouraged citizens (at least, the better-off ones) to keep up-to-date with the issues of the day, for there was a reasonable chance that at some point they might have to play an active part in public life. Vetting and the preliminary long list went some way to preventing totally unsuitable or incapable appointees.
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One of Solon’s most curious measures underlines the seriousness with which he meant Athenians to take politics. He ruled that in times of faction and great policy debates a citizen who held back and did not involve himself or take sides should lose his civic rights and have no share in the city’s governance.
Solon had not finished. As a successful businessman, he understood the value of economic growth to social harmony and the alleviation of poverty. Too much was being exported for higher prices than in the domestic market. So the Archon forbade the export of agricultural products, except for olive oil, of which there was probably a surplus. To encourage manufacturing, citizenship was granted to craftsmen (for example, in metalwork and ceramics) who settled in Athens with their families. Fathers were obliged to teach their sons a trade, if they were to enjoy support in their old age. The rapid rise in the production and dissemination of decorated Attic pottery at about this time is probably no coincidence.
Domestic ceramics were popular throughout Hellas. Corinthian ware was widely exported and featured black figures in silhouette on a red ground. The style was copied in Athens where it achieved very high levels of artistry from about 570. By about 530 Athenian potters developed a new, more realistic technique, with black backgrounds and human figures drawn by brush in red. Modern scholars have identified, on stylistic principles, more than one thousand ceramic artists.
Vases, cups, and plates depict a wide range of social activity—athletes training in the gymnasium, wining and dining at drinking parties or symposia, battle scenes, ships at sea, religious ceremonies, attractive young men (often accompanied by a fond toast—“Here’s to the lovely Alexias” or whomever), mythological scenes (sometimes ghoulish, as when Medea is shown killing her children), people having sex, a reveler with a prostitute, women making music at home, and many, many more. Small vases (called lecythoi) show figures on a white ground; they held olive oil used for anointing the corpses of young unmarried men. Athenian pottery is not only aesthetically pleasing, but it also goes a long way to making up for the lack of literary accounts of everyday life.
For the first time Athens began minting its own coinage. Until then it had used the money of its nearby commercial rival, the island of Aegina. The object of the exercise was to assert the city’s arrival as a serious economic force.
As well as his social and economic policies and his constitutional changes, Solon tackled the legal system of Athens and repealed Dracon’s legal code except for his homicide laws.
He brought in two radical legal measures. In Athens there was no police or prosecution service. When a crime was committed it was for the victim in person to prosecute the alleged offender; but few poor men had the education or the audacity to take a nobleman to court. Solon ruled that any citizen, not simply the person affected, could bring a prosecution. An experienced orator was now able to speak for the injured party, thus improving the odds on a conviction.
The most far-reaching of all Solon’s measures was the creation of a jury court of appeal against decisions taken by elected officials, particularly the Archons. This was the heliaea. Anyone could qualify to be a juror, even the impoverished thetes. This supreme court may indeed have been the ecclesia itself, in legal session.
In later times the annual jury list consisted of six thousand citizens over thirty years of age, chosen by lot. These sometimes met in full session and, as required, could be subdivided (also by lot) into panels some hundreds strong and served in various different courts. Cases were heard in the open air in a marked-off area of the agora. The large number of jurors not only encouraged citizens’ participation in public affairs, but made bribery less likely. As we shall see, the judicial powers of the Archons were eventually taken over by the heliaea, and they merely prepared cases to be heard by it.
Whether or not Solon understood the full consequences of what he was doing, the establishment of his jury courts was the foundation of Athenian democracy, because they gave the citizens control over the executive arm of government.
Solon’s settlement was inscribed on four sides of wooden tablets that were set in rotating frames, so they could be consulted easily. These tablets were still in existence in the third century and fragments survived to the lifetime of Plutarch in the first century A.D. They were in an antiquated and more or less incomprehensible script and were written “as the ox plows”—that is, in alternating lines from left to right and then right to left. But they were a treasure from Athens’s time-honored past.
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Once Solon had finished his work, what was he to do? And, despite all the assurances, how could he be certain that his reforms were properly carried out? The city appears to have been in turmoil; there is little detail but, in the light of the fact that the lawgiver lost an eye, we may suppose a forceful reaction, even riots. Also he faced endless advice on improvements to what he had written and inquiries about the exact meaning of one law or another.
Solon could have established himself as a tyrant and governed by decree. But this would have gone against everything he stood for—the rule of law, constitutional government, and social reconciliation. He would never be a Cylon. He wrote:
And if I spared my homeland,
And refused to set my hand to tyranny
And brute force, staining and disgracing my good name,