Plutarch's life of the Athenian lawgiver Solon, tracing his poetry, his debt-cancelling Seisachtheia, his constitutional reforms, his travels, and his old-age standoff with the rising tyrant Pisistratus.
This Life of Plutarch's Parallel Lives follows Solon of Athens from his family background and youthful reputation as a poet and trader through his emergence as lawgiver and archon. Plutarch opens with disputed details of Solon's ancestry, his fondness for handsome young men, his modest fortune, and his early verses, which he says Solon first wrote as pastime before weaving in 'philosophical maxims into it, and included much political matter.' He recounts Solon's ruse to win the island of Salamis from Megara, his praised handling of the sanctuary at Delphi, and his role, alongside Epimenides of Crete, in purifying Athens after the pollution left by the Cylon affair.
The narrative's center is the constitutional crisis of Solon's archonship: a city split between a wealthy creditor class and an indebted poor 'forced to sell even their own children,' with 'the gulf between rich and poor having grown, so to speak, as wide as it would ever get.' Elected archon, Solon refuses the tyranny his supporters urge on him, and instead legislates the Seisachtheia (the 'shaking-off of burdens,' debt cancellation), reforms Draco's blood-penalty code, restructures citizenship by property class, establishes the Council of the Areopagus's oversight and a second council, and issues a long, idiosyncratic run of laws covering inheritance, dowries, women's public conduct, naturalized citizens, public dining, and the calendar. Plutarch weaves in Solon's own poems throughout as evidence for his motives and self-justification, quoting lines such as 'To the people I gave as much power as suffices, neither taking away their honor nor reaching out for more.' The Life closes with Solon's travels to Egypt and Cyprus, his famous (and chronologically disputed) exchange with Croesus of Lydia about human happiness, his return to an Athens sliding toward tyranny under Pisistratus, his lone public opposition to the bodyguard vote that let Pisistratus seize power, and his death, with Plutarch noting and setting aside the legend that his ashes were scattered on Salamis.
The Life matters historically because it is one of the fullest ancient accounts of the transition from archaic aristocratic Athens toward the constitutional order later associated with democracy, and because it treats a lawgiver's own poetry as primary evidence for his politics -- a method Plutarch flags explicitly when he says the poems 'agree with this view rather more' than rival prose accounts. It also preserves the Solon-Croesus meeting, one of antiquity's most quoted parables about fortune and the definition of a happy life, alongside Plutarch's aside comparing Solon's unfinished Atlantis project to Plato's Timaeus and Critias.
“In his poetry, at first he seems to have used it for nothing serious, but rather as play and pastime for his leisure hours.”
— Solon
“Many were forced to sell even their own children (for no law forbade it) and to flee the city because of the harshness of their creditors.”
— Solon
“he said to his friends, as the story goes, that tyranny was a fine piece of ground but had no way down from it”
— Solon
“To the people I gave as much power as suffices, neither taking away their honor nor reaching out for more; and for those who had power and were admired for their wealth, I took care that they should suffer nothing unseemly.”
— Solon
“To the Greeks, O king of the Lydians, the god has given a moderate share in other things, and a certain wisdom that is cautious and of the common sort, not royal or splendid”
— Solon
It was Solon's signature reform, whose name means the 'shaking-off of burdens.' Plutarch reports that most writers describe it as a wholesale abolition of debts, though some, including Androtion, argued the relief came only from a moderation of interest rather than full cancellation. Plutarch notes that Solon's own poems support the stronger reading.
Plutarch acknowledges that some readers reject the meeting on chronological grounds but defends it as too well-attested and too fitting to Solon's character to dismiss outright. In the episode, Solon refuses to call Croesus fortunate while he still lives, a judgment Croesus recalls with regret only after his own downfall before Cyrus.
Both the rich and the poor pressed him toward absolute power during the debt crisis, expecting him to favor their side outright. Solon instead told his friends that tyranny was 'a fine piece of ground but had no way down from it,' choosing instead to legislate a compromise that left him unpopular with both factions.
Pisistratus was a kinsman of Solon through their mothers and, according to the Life, once his lover in youth. When Pisistratus later staged a self-inflicted wound to win a bodyguard and used it to seize power, the aged Solon alone spoke against the bodyguard vote in the assembly, then continued to publicly oppose the tyranny in verse even after it succeeded.
The Life catalogs a wide range: abolition of most of Draco's death-penalty code (keeping only the laws on murder), a property-based citizenship structure, rules on dowries and heiresses, a ban on speaking ill of the dead, restrictions on women's public mourning and dress, and a provision for public maintenance at state expense that Solon called 'dining alongside.'
After completing his legislation, Solon left Athens rather than field constant requests to amend it, studying with priests near the Nile and helping resettle a city for King Philocyprus in Cyprus, an episode he commemorates in his own surviving elegiac verse quoted by Plutarch.
He calls it 'altogether implausible and fabulous because of its strangeness,' even though it was recorded by notable men including the philosopher Aristotle, showing Plutarch's willingness to flag a tradition as unreliable while still preserving it for the reader.
Plutarch reports that Solon began but abandoned a work on Atlantis learned from priests at Sais, and that Plato later took up the same unfinished project for the Timaeus and Critias, a connection Plutarch uses to compare the two unfinished undertakings.
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