with and subsidiary to the popular assembly, he manifested no jealousy
of the preexisting Areopagitic senate. On the contrary, he enlarged its
powers, gave to it an ample supervision over the execution of the laws
generally, and imposed upon it the censorial duty of inspecting the
lives and occupation of the citizens, as well as of punishing men of
idle and dissolute habits. He was himself, as past archon, a member of
this ancient senate, and he is said to have contemplated that by means
of the two senates the state would be held fast, as it were with a
double anchor, against all shocks and storms.

Such are the only new political institutions (apart from the laws to be
noticed presently) which there are grounds for ascribing to Solon, when
we take proper care to discriminate what really belongs to Solon and his
age from the Athenian constitution as afterward remodelled. It has been
a practice common with many able expositors of Grecian affairs, and
followed partly even by Dr. Thirlwall, to connect the name of Solon with
the whole political and judicial state of Athens as it stood between the
age of Pericles and that of Demosthenes--the regulations of the senate
of five hundred, the numerous public dicasts or jurors taken by lot from
the people--as well as the body annually selected for law-revision, and
called _nomothets_--and the open prosecution (called the _graphe
paranomon_) to be instituted against the proposer of any measure
illegal, unconstitutional, or dangerous. There is indeed some
countenance for this confusion between Solonian and post-Solonian
Athens, in the usage of the orators themselves. For Demosthenes and
AEschines employ the name of Solon in a very loose manner, and treat him
as the author of institutions belonging evidently to a 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 Clisthenes, 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. An 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. Many of thos