n temple against the extortionate
proceedings of the inhabitants of Cirrha, and the favor of the oracle
was probably not without its effect in procuring for him that
encouraging prophecy with which his legislative career opened.

It is on the occasion of Solon's legislation that we obtain our first
glimpse--unfortunately but a glimpse--of the actual state of Attica and
its inhabitants. It is a sad and repulsive picture, presenting to us
political discord and private suffering combined.

Violent dissensions prevailed among the inhabitants of Attica, who were
separated into three factions--the Pedieis, or men of the plain,
comprising Athens, Eleusis, and the neighboring territory, among whom
the greatest number of rich families were included; the mountaineers in
the east and north of Attica, called Diacrii, who were, on the whole,
the poorest party; and the Paralii in the southern portion of Attica
from sea to sea, whose means and social position were intermediate
between the two. Upon what particular points these intestine disputes
turned we are not distinctly informed. They were not, however, peculiar
to the period immediately preceding the archonship of Solon. They had
prevailed before, and they reappear afterward prior to the despotism of
Pisistratus; the latter standing forward as the leader of the Diacrii,
and as champion, real or pretended, of the poorer population.

But in the time of Solon these intestine quarrels were aggravated by
something much more difficult to deal with--a general mutiny of the
poorer population against the rich, resulting from misery combined with
oppression. The Thetes, whose condition we have already contemplated in
the poems of Homer and Hesiod, are now presented to us as forming the
bulk of the population of Attica--the cultivating tenants, metayers, and
small proprietors of the country. They are exhibited as weighed down by
debts and dependence, and driven in large numbers out of a state of
freedom into slavery--the whole mass of them (we are told) being in debt
to the rich, who were proprietors of the greater part of the soil. They
had either borrowed money for their own necessities, or they tilled the
lands of the rich as dependent tenants, paying a stipulated portion of
the produce, and in this capacity they were largely in arrear.

All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor
and creditor--once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion
of