mounted couriers to communicate with the provinces, are particularly specified. (126)

As Cyrus was the founder of the Persian monarchy, it is by no means unlikely that some of the institutions and customs described in the Cyropædia may have really originated with him. Many of them however (like the use of eunuchs about the court, and the provincial government by satraps), were probably Oriental usages, not peculiar to the Persian kingdom; and it is certain that the testimony of Xenophon does not authorize us in deriving any of them from Cyrus. These explanations, in order to be correctly understood, must all be read backwards. The subsisting custom is the starting-point, and the origin is an illustrative story, invented by Xenophon himself. The account given by Herodotus of the means by which Deioces made himself king of the Medes, and founded the city of Ecbatana, is likewise a political romance, framed, like the Cyropædia, without reference to historical truth.(127)

§ 13 We now mount a higher platform in the ascent of Greek history, and arrive at the period immediately preceding the age of Pisistratus and Cyrus. The distance from the contemporary historians now becomes greater; the traditions are accordingly less distinct and certain, and contain a larger admixture of fable. We have no such accounts as Thucydides was able to collect respecting the last years of Hippias; or as Herodotus obtained respecting the subjugation of Ionia by Croesus and Cyrus, or its revolt against Darius.

His legislation is placed at birth of Hellanicus, and he

Solon was born about 638 B.C. 594 B.C., just a century before the died a few years after the usurpation of Pisistratus, which commenced in 560 B.C.(128) The laws of Solon were originally in

(126) viii. 6, § 9, 14, 16, 17.

(127) Herod. i. 96-100. Compare the remarks of Mr. Grote, vol. iii.

p. 307-9.

(128) Niebuhr remarks, that before the time of Solon, a deep darkness hangs over the constitution of Athens; nay, over the time of Solon himself, although he is a real historical personage, and not by any means mythical; ib. p. 282.

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scribed on wooden rollers, some fragments of which were still extant in the time of Plutarch;(129) his laws were preserved to a late date, and are cited by Plutarch in his Life. Solon likewise composed many short poems, in elegiac and iambic verse, in which he described his own position and feelings, with respect to his public measures. They were all accessible to the ancient writers, and served, together with his laws, as a solid and authentic foundation for the accounts of his political acts. It is, however, difficult for us to judge how these supplementary accounts were obtained, for Herodotus only mentions the legislation of Solon as having been undertaken in obedience to the wish of the Athenians, who had bound themselves by solemn oaths not to alter his laws for ten years without his consent ;(130) and Thucydides never speaks of Solon or his legislation. No writers earlier than Heraclides Ponticus, Theophrastus, Hermippus, Androtion, and Demetrius Phalereus, are cited by Plutarch, in his Life; (131) and in their time, no trustworthy oral accounts of the early part of the sixth century B.C., could have been extant. The laws and poems doubtless served as points of attachment for certain authentic traditions, and helped to float them safely down the stream of time; but we know, from many examples, that Solon, like Romulus, sustained the part of a mythical founder, and that many institutions were called after his name, which in fact originated with other and later authors. Mr. Grote remarks, that the Attic orators sometimes confound Solonian and post-Solonian Athens. 'Demosthenes and Eschines (he says) employ the name of Solon in a very loose manner, and treat him as the author of institutions belonging evidently to a

(129) Sol. 25. Concerning the manner in which Solon's laws were preserved in writing, see Mure, Hist. of Gr. Lit. vol. iii. p. 416. (130) Herod. i. 29.

(131) See Heeren de Font. Vit. Plut. p. 26-30. Aristotle, in his Politics, ii. 12, couples Lycurgus and Solon as the authors of a constitution as well as of a code of civil laws. He proceeds to make some detailed remarks on the political changes introduced by Solon, with which he assumes his readers to be familiar. Heraclides Ponticus ascribes the Seisachtheia, or general remission of debts, to Solon, Pol. i. § 5, which Androtion denied; see above, p. 86, n. 266.

later age; for example, the striking and characteristic oath of the Heliastic jurors, which Demosthenes ascribes to Solon, proclaims itself in many ways as belonging to the age after Cleisthenes, especially by the mention of the Senate of five hundred, and not of four hundred. Among the citizens who served as jurors or dicasts, Solon was venerated generally as the author of the Athenian laws; and the orator therefore might well employ his name for the purpose of emphasis, without provoking any critical inquiry whether the particular institution which he happened to be then impressing upon his audience, belonged really to Solon himself, or to the subsequent periods.'(132)

Solon, not only as a lawgiver, was decorated with institutions which belonged to others, but, as a sage and a moralist, was made the subject of dramatic apologues, in which an ethical lesson was conveyed. The celebrated colloquy with Croesus, narrated by Herodotus, (133) beautiful as a fiction, cannot, for chronological reasons, hold its ground as history: Croesus belongs to the generation next after Solon. (134) Solon appears, from extant

(132) Vol. iii. p. 162-4.

(133) i. 30-3, cf. c. 86.

(134) Plutarch states that some of the ancients had rejected Solon's visit to Crœsus on chronological grounds : τὴν δὲ πρὸς Κροῖσον ἔντευξιν αὐτοῦ δοκοῦσιν ἔνιοι τοῖς χρόνοις ὡς πεπλασμένην ἐλέγχειν, Sol. 27. See Grote, vol.iii. p. 51, 199; Niebuhr, Lect. on Anc. Hist. vol. i. p. 283. Col. Mure treats the story of the visit of Solon to Croesus as a fabulous legend;' vol. iv. p. 395. It is also rejected by Dr. W. Smith, Hist. of Gr. p. 100. The internal improbability of this story is equal to its chronological inconsistency. What could an Asiatic despot at Sardis have known of the wisdom and travels of Solon; or how could such a conversation as that described have been carried on between Croesus, who could not speak Greek, and Solon, who could not speak Lydian? The advice said to have been given by Pittacus to Croesus, in Herod. i. 27, must also be fabulous, as well as his refusal of the gifts of Croesus, his saying, and his letter to Croesus, in Diog. Laert. i. 75, 77, 81; Plut. de Frat. Am. 12, because Pittacus died in 569 B.C., and Croesus only began to reign in 560 B.C. Moreover, if Æsop died in 564 B.C. (see Clinton, ad ann.), he could not have been sent for to Sardis by Croesus, according to Plut. Sol. 28, nor could he have gone from Croesus to Periander, according to Plut. Sept. Sap. 4, if Periander died in 585 B.C. (Clinton, ad ann.), twenty-five years before the accession of Croesus. The statement of Herod. ii. 134, that Esop was the fellow-slave of Rhodopis, who was in her beauty in the reign of Amasis, can hardly be reconciled with the death of Esop in 564 B.C. Amasis reigned from 569 to 526 B.c. The emancipation of Rhodopis by the brother of the poetess Sappho, is likewise, as Mr. Clinton remarks, incon

fragments of his poems, (185) to have sailed to Cyprus and Egypt but his visit to Amasis, mentioned by Herodotus, (136) must, like his visit to Croesus, be a fiction; for the reign of Amasis did not begin till 569 B.C., twenty-five years after the legislation of Solon. He, like Croesus, belongs to the next generation.

The criminal laws of Draco, which are referred to 621 B.C., twenty-seven years before the legislation of Solon, were preserved in later times; but little appears to have been known respecting them or their author, beyond what could be inferred from their contents. Zaleucus, the legislator of the Epizephyrian Locrians, in the south of Italy, is said to have been the earliest author of written laws in a Greek state. His legislation is placed in 662 B.C. The laws attributed to him are spurious, and the accounts of him in ancient writers appear in general to be fabulous. If indeed Timæus, a Sicilian writer, could venture to deny his existence, (137) we cannot suppose that any clear or authentic memorials of him had been preserved.

The unsuccessful attempt of Cylon to make himself despot of Athens, which is dated at 620 B.C., is undoubtedly a historical fact. Its memory was preserved on account of the hereditary taint which it left in the powerful family of the Alcmaonida; and the practical effects which this taint continued to produce, nearly two centuries after the act in which it originated. Although the tradition of the main fact was faithfully continued, the details were differently related: for the brief notice of Herodotus differs in two material points from the full narrative

sistent with the reign of Amasis. Sappho is placed at 611 and 595 B.C. Other anachronisms of the ancients with respect to Sappho are pointed out by Mr. Grote, vol. iv. p. 104, note.

(135) Plut. Sol. 26. Plutarch, ib., says that Solon stayed some time with Psenophis of Heliopolis, and Sonchis of Sais, two learned priests; but he mentions no visit to Amasis. Compare Plat. Tim. § 5.

(136) i. 30. The anecdote of Pittacus and Amasis, in Procl. ad Hesiod. Op. 717, is also doubtless fabulous, as Pittacus died in the year in which Amasis began to reign.

(137) Fragm. 69, ed. Didot. The spuriousness of the extant laws of Zaleucus is proved by Bentley on Phalaris, p. 274–89, ed. 1816.

of Thucydides. The former states that Cylon failed in seizing the Acropolis; that he became a suppliant in a temple, from which he was removed; and that he was then put to death. (138) The latter, on the other hand, states that Cylon seized the Acropolis, and was besieged in it for some time by the Athenians; that Cylon and his brother escaped; but that his companions, reduced by hunger and thirst, became suppliants at the altars, and were afterwards slain by the besiegers.(139)

§ 14 A tolerably full account of the history of Corinth, during the despotic dynasty which governed that city for seventy-four years from the middle of the seventh century B.C., is introduced by Herodotus in a speech delivered by Sosicles, a Corinthian, at the congress assembled at Lacedæmon to decide on the restoration of Hippias. (140) After the Doric conquest of Peloponnesus, Corinth was governed by the Heraclide clan of the Bacchiadæ, who are reported to have been 200 in number, and to have retained their power for 200 years. (141) Cypselus, the son of Eetion and Labda, is described as overthrowing the dominion of the Bacchiadæ about 655 B.C., and acquiring the supreme power. The account in Herodotus of the ten Bacchiadæ who went to kill Cypselus when an infant, of his smiling on his murderers, and their taking pity on the innocent child-of their change of intention, and his concealment in a chest (kʊ↓íλn), is a legend, invented in explanation of his name; not more historical than the story of the marvellous preservation of Romulus and Remus. (142) Respecting the conduct and character

(138) Herod. v. 71.

(139) Thuc. i. 126. This account is followed by Schol. Aristoph. Eq. 415. Heraclid. Pont. Pol. i, states that the companions of Cylon, who had taken refuge at the altar of Minerva, were put to death by Megacles; not Cylon himself.

(140) v. 92. Further details respecting Periander are given in i. 20, 23-4; iii. 48-53.

(141) Diod. vii. 7; Strab. viii. 6, § 20. Compare Clinton, ad ann. 744. Mr. Grote remarks that the Bacchiad oligarchy is unquestionably historical;' vol. iv. p. 409.

(142) The story is repeated, with some variation, by Nicol. Damasc. 68, in Fragm. Hist. Gr. vol. iii. p. 391. The chest of Cypselus, covered with sculptures, was preserved at Olympia, and was seen by Pausanias,