could no longer be enforced. According to the profound
remark of Aristotle--that seditions are generated by great causes but
out of small incidents--we may conceive that some recent events had
occurred as immediate stimulants to the outbreak of the debtors, like
those which lent so striking an interest to the early Roman annals, as
the inflaming sparks of violent popular movements for which the train
had long before been laid. Condemnations by the archons of insolvent
debtors may have been unusually numerous; or the maltreatment of some
particular debtor, once a respected freeman, in his condition of
slavery, may have been brought to act vividly upon the public
sympathies; like the case of the old plebeian centurion at Rome--first
impoverished by the plunder of the enemy, then reduced to borrow, and
lastly adjudged to his creditor as an insolvent--who claimed the
protection of the people in the forum, rousing their feelings to the
highest pitch by the marks of the slave-whip visible on his person. Some
such incidents had probably happened, though we have no historians to
recount them. Moreover, it is not unreasonable to imagine that that
public mental affliction which the purifier Epimenides had been invoked
to appease, as it sprung in part from pestilence, so it had its cause
partly in years of sterility, which must of course have aggravated the
distress of the small cultivators. However this may be, such was the
condition of things in B.C. 594 through mutiny of the poor freemen and
_Thetes_, and uneasiness of the middling citizens, that the governing
oligarchy, unable either to enforce their private debts or to maintain
their political power, were obliged to invoke the well-known wisdom and
integrity of Solon. Though his vigorous protest--which doubtless
rendered him acceptable to the mass of the people--against the iniquity
of the existing system had already been proclaimed in his poems, they
still hoped that he would serve as an auxiliary to help them over their
difficulties. They therefore chose him, nominally as archon along with
Philombrotus, but with power in substance dictatorial.

It had happened in several Grecian states that the governing
oligarchies, either by quarrels among their own members or by the
general bad condition of the people under their government, were
deprived of that hold upon the public mind which was essential to their
power. Sometimes--as in the case of Pittacus of Mitylene anterior to th