idle. A harsher measure was that of which we
are told by Herakleides of Pontus, his making it unnecessary for
illegitimate children to maintain their father. Yet if a man abstains
from an honourable marriage, and lives with a woman more for his own
pleasure in her society than with a view to producing a family, he is
rightly served, and cannot upbraid his children with neglecting him,
because he has made their birth their reproach.

XXIII. Altogether Solon's laws concerning women are very strange. He
permitted a husband to kill an adulterer taken in the act; but if any
one carried off a free woman and forced her, he assessed the penalty at
one hundred drachmas. If he obtained her favours by persuasion, he was
to pay twenty drachmas, except in the case of those who openly ply for
hire, alluding to harlots; for they come to those who offer them money
without any concealment. Moreover, he forbade men to sell their sisters
and daughters, except in the case of unchastity. Now to punish the same
offence at one time with unrelenting severity, and at another in a light
and trifling manner, by imposing so slight a fine, is unreasonable,
unless the scarcity of specie in the city at that period made fines
which were paid in money more valuable than they would now be; indeed,
in the valuation of things for sacrifice, a sheep and a drachma were
reckoned as each equal to a medimnus of corn. To the victor at the
Isthmian games he appointed a reward of a hundred drachmas, and to the
victor in the Olympian, five hundred. He gave five drachmas for every
wolf that was killed, and one drachma for every wolf's whelp; and we are
told by Demetrius of Phalerum that the first of these sums was the price
of an ox, and the second that of a sheep. The prices of choice victims,
which he settled in his sixteenth tablet of laws, would naturally be
higher than those of ordinary beasts, but even thus they are cheap
compared with prices at the present day. It was an ancient practice
among the Athenians to destroy the wolves, because their country was
better fitted for pasture than for growing crops. Some say that the
Athenian tribes derive their names, not from the sons of Ion, but from
the different professions in which men were then divided: thus the
fighting men were named Hoplites, and the tradesmen Ergadeis; the two
remaining ones being the Geleontes, or farmers, and the Aigikoreis, or
goat-herds and graziers. With regard to water, as the country i