ws was the public
dining-table in the prytaneum. Here he did not allow the same person to
dine often, while he punished the man who was invited and would not
come, because the one seemed gluttonous, and the other contemptuous.

XXV. He ordered that all his laws should remain in force for a hundred
years, and he wrote them upon triangular wooden tablets, which revolved
upon an axis in oblong recesses, some small remains of which have been
preserved in the prytaneum down to the present day. These, we are told
by Aristotle, were called _Kurbeis_. The comic poet Kratinus also says,

"By Solon and by Draco, mighty legislators once,
Whose tablets light the fire now to warm a dish of pulse."

Some say that the term _Kurbeis_ is only applied to those on which are
written the laws which regulate religious matters.

The senate swore by a collective oath that it would enforce Solon's
laws; and each of the Thesmothetae took an oath to the same effect at
the altar in the market-place, protesting that, if he transgressed any
of the laws, he would offer a golden statue as big as himself to the
temple at Delphi.

Observing the irregularity of the months, and that the motions of the
moon did not accord either with the rising or setting of the sun, but
that frequently she in the same day overtakes and passes by him, he
ordered that day to be called "the old and the new," and that the part
of it before their conjunction should belong to the old month, while the
rest of the day after it belonged to the new one, being, it seems, the
first to rightly interpret the verse of Homer--

"The old month ended and the new began."

He called the next day that of the new moon. After the twentieth, he no
longer reckoned forwards, but backwards, as the moon decreased, until
the thirtieth of the month.

When Solon had passed all his laws, as people came to him every day to
praise or blame, or advise him to add or take away from what he had
written, while innumerable people wanted to ask questions, and discuss
points, and kept bidding him explain what was the object of this or that
regulation, he, feeling that he could not do all this, and that, if he
did not, his motives would be misunderstood; wishing, moreover, to
escape from troubles and the criticism and fault-finding of his
countrymen [for, as he himself writes, it is "Hard in great measures
every one to please"], made his private commercial business an excuse
for leaving the co