Solon the Thinker by Lewis John David;

Author:Lewis, John David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

‘We will not exchange our excellence’ Moira and wealth

Many evil men grow rich, and good men grow poor,

But we will not exchange our excellence

For their wealth …

Solon 15.1-3

Solon’s prayer to Memory in poem 13 has been answered, which is not to say that Solon (like Croesus) got the answer he wanted. Moira brings good and evil pantôs, but the when, where and how are beyond our capacity to know – a matter of grave practical consequence to a subsistence farmer who might not understand the issue abstractly, but would recognize his own vulnerability before a powerful enemy. The intellectual chasm between the moira of each man’s life and dikê of the polis is unbridged. But human beings do not earn their livings in a vacuum, and the non-political poems, especially those concerned with wealth, had importance to the polis.1 Solon does not mention the polis in poem 27, on the periods of life. Yet the issues in the poem applied to the polis, if for no other reason than that young men had to be of age prior to becoming citizens, and thus had to apply Solon’s stages of life to polis activities. As archaic Athens coalesced into the political capital of Attica, the unjust pursuit of honour, prestige and material wealth – acquired by what was in effect the Homeric standard of the agathos – could lead directly to the dangers that Hesiod had said the Good Strife of benevolent competition was supposed to prevent. The motivations to pursue wealth perforce could include complex psychological and social values that might warp a man’s disposition and fuel his desire for further outrage. The limits that Solon places to the pursuit of material wealth are surely related to his view that no limits to wealth are revealed to us – a matter of noos – but also to the fact that wealth itself has little value if its pursuit is not restrained by dikê.

Solon’s view of each man’s inability to recognize a limit, or terma, to wealth itself, is central to the pursuit of wealth, and how it relates to the polis. Continuing poem 13, Solon says:

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