A Commentary on Solon's Poems A Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Maria Noussia University College London February, 1999 BIET, LOIMOI1 ABSTRACT This dissertation is a Commentary on Solon's Poems (elegiacs and tetrameters; the iambic trimeters, though taken into consideration for the examination of the rest of the poems, are not given a detailed commentary). Solon's poetry is studied mainly from a literary point of view; it is compared with the language and vocabulary of his predecessors Homer, Hesiod, and the other lyric poets of his age. The study attests the influence of Solon's language, content, motives, and ethical / political ideas on his lyric successors, on Aristophanes and the tragedians (above all Euripides who specifically appears to share the ideology of the polls and the heightened consciousness about civic affairs which emerged in the Athenian community under Solon) as well as the coincidence between Solon's ethical statements and the topoi of the language of the inscriptions. This is not a historical Commentary; the connections of Solon's poetry with his Laws as well as with the historical situation of his time and the reforms he sponsored are taken into consideration only when they are useful and rewarding in the answers they provide for the interpretation of the Solonian poetry. The emphasis of this work is on Solon's poetry as a work of Literature and on Solon's poetic achievements. The close examination of his poems reveals his creativity, his artistry together with his view of the process of poetic composition as technical making and his focus on his craftsmanship as a tool for his profession as a politician and as a statesman. 2 Table of Contents Title Page I Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Preface 5 Introduction 7 Fragment 1 G. -P. 2(13 W. 2) 11 Fragment 2 G. -P. 2(1-3 W. 2) 61 Fragment 3 G. -P. 2(4 W. 2) 73 Fragment 4 G. -P. 2(4a W. 2) 105 Fragment 5 G. -P. 2(4b-c W. 2) 109 Fragment 6 G. 2(15 W. 2) 113 -P. Fragment 7 G. -P. 2(5 W. 2) 117 Fragment 8 G. -P. 2(6 W. 2) 121 Fragment 9 G. -P. 2(7 W. 2) 123 Fragment 10 G. -P. 2(28 W. 2) 124 Fragment 11 G. -P. 2(19 W. 2) 126 Fragment 12 G. -P. 2(9 W. 2) 132 Fragment 13 G. -P. 2(12 W. 2) 137 Fragment 14 G. -P. 2(10 W. 2) 141 Fragment 15 G. -P. 2(11 W. 2) 145 Fragment 16 G. -P. 2(25 W. 2) 152 Fragment 17 G. -P. 2(23 W. 2) 155 Fragment 18 G. -P. 2(24 W. 2) 158 Fragment 19 G. -P. 2(14 W. 2) 167 Fragment 20 G. -P. 2(16 W. 2) 169 Fragment 21 G. -P. 2(17 W. 2) 171 Fragment 22 G. -P. 2(22a W. 2) 172 Fragment 23 G. -P. 2(27 W. 2) 177 Fragment 24 G. -P. 2(26 W. 2) 190 Fragment 25 G. -P. 2(29 W. 2) 191 Fragment 26 G. -P. 2(20 W. 2) 193 Fragment 27 G. -P. 2(21 W. 2) 197 Fragment 28 G. -P. 2(18 W. 2) 200 Fragment 29 G. -P. 2(32 W. 2) 202 Fragment 29a G. -P. 2(33 W. 2) 208 Fragment 29b G. -P. 2(34 W. 2) 213 Fragment °40 G. -P. 2(31 W. 2) 217 Bibliography 220 BLANK IN ORIGINAL Preface This dissertation on Solon's poetry is heavily indebted to a range of people: I am particularly grateful to my supervisor Prof. H. G. T. Maehler for his wise counsel and constant encouragement, his unfailing patience in reading and improving successive drafts of this Commentary, and, above all, for the sense of perspective he has provided me during the course of research and writing. I would like to thank Prof. S. Hornblower for his kind help and advice as well as for the criticism he generously provided which saved me from many errors. I have also been exceptionally fortunate in receiving the constructive criticisms and perceptive analyses of Prof. M. Fantuzzi while I was at the University of Florence as an Erasmus-student, and also afterwards in the later stages of my research. My work has also greatly profited from the comments and suggestions of Dr. E. Magnelli. Finally, I wish to thank my family whose love and support have meant a great deal to me. The Commentary is based on the text of Solon in Teubner Poetae elegiaci by B. Gentili and C. Prato, with some deviations. The editions of the ancient authors which have been followed are the standard ones, in most cases, (unless otherwise stated), the ones listed in L. Berkowitz and K. A. Squitier, Canon of Greek Authors and Works3 (but for the ancient elegiac authors Gentili-Prato's edition is followed). Most of the abbreviations used for ancient authors and collections of fragments or for the reference bibliography are the conventional ones, which can be found, for example, in the Oxford Classical Dictionary'. The abbreviations of the titles of journals are as in L'Annee philologique. 5 BLANK IN ORIGINAL Introduction It has been more than forty years since A. Masaracchia's book on Solon has appeared and eighty since I. M. Linforth's. Only one third of each book was devoted to a discussion of the Solonian poems: in spite of the wide range of material provided by Masaracchia and the generally good judgement shown by Linforth in relation to problems of interpretation arising out of Solon's poems, both books do not indeed focus enough on the literary features of Solon's text. Much more recently, the studies by O. Vox (1984) and by E. Katz Anhalt (1993) offered more careful literary interpretations of some of Solon's fragments. Vox and Anhalt approach Solon's poetry with great sensitivity: far from considering Solon's language? onventional, they well demonstrate how often Solon innovated within the archaic tradition to a remarkable degree, or resorted to refined forms of allusion to Homer or Hesiod. However, the good points of their contributions are overshadowed mainly by their limitations in structuring the material, as the selection and arrangement of it sometimes produces a sequential commentary on a single poem and sometimes a handling of a series of topics inside it. Neither are they interested in considering the specific context of each fragment or problems of their textual transmission. There is still a need, therefore, for a commentary on Solon's poems and for a fuller re-examination of their literary features. In fact, these often tended to be overshadowed by the other aspects of Solon's admittedly remarkable personality (Solon the wise man, Solon the traveller, Solon the legislator, Solon the statesman, Solon the political thinker). However, a close examination of the main body of his poetry (elegiacs and tetrameters) will reveal his creativity and artistry in as much as his own view of poetic composition as technical making and the strong interconnection between his 'profession' as a politician motivated by the concept of the community and his 'profession' as a poet, intending his poetry often, yet not only, as a more appealing form of advertisement and expression of his ethical or political thoughts. Indeed, Solon sought to create and use poetry for the needs of the polls as a whole, including all the members of it (rather than to exclude or to speak in favour of a faction, as in the poetry of Theognis or Alcaeus, for instance) and all the aspects of their life, considering as well the dimension of pleasures. It is precisely this non-exclusive function of his poetic ßoýiil and his consciousness about civic affairs which will be later appreciated by authors like Aristophanes or Euripides, imbued with the omnicomprehensive ideology of the polls. This Commentary does not specifically or systematically examine Solon's reception in late antiquity, but the fairly abounding fifth century parallels provide good instances of the reception and fortune of Solon's language and thought at an earlier age. 7 Solon's poems often appear vague or cryptic and this is certainly the case when one tries to find there detailed explanations or specific clarifications of his political career or reads them as an application of the historical situation and the crisis of his time as described by our principal, yet chronologically later, reconstructions of Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia and Plutarch's Solon. In this Commentary the connections of the poems with Solon's Laws and the historical background of Athens in his time are taken into consideration, especially when they are helpful to the intentionally) interpretation - and no-one ought to side-step (at least the thorny historic topics involved in them. However, this Commentary does not consider the poems as clues to political history, not only because this perspective has been prevailing in the only line-by-line modern commentary to Solon, namely that by Linforth, but even more because, on the present evidence, we have to admit that much has to remain disputable. For instance, the very words acladXOEla and EKT1 IopoL, which are a leitmotif of Aristotle's and Plutarch's explanations of Solon's political activity, are not found in the transmitted Solonian poems and, as a matter of fact, we do not have any reliable evidence for any reference to debt by Solon in connection with his reforms which is the hard-core of the most traditional (but still prevailing, though with exceptions) historical interpretations.