The First Poets by Michael Schmidt

Author:Michael Schmidt [Schmidt, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2014-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Poor in his youth, Solon travelled to make his fortune, Plutarch says. In his age a person of good family could work for gain without a stigma attaching to him. Foreign trade was regarded as mind-extending, especially at a time when colonies were being planted far and wide. Both Thales and Hippocrates the mathematician engaged in trade, and Plato paid for the expenses of his stay in Egypt by selling oil. Solon the merchant succeeded in a sufficient, if not a spectacular, way and around 612 BC went home. Athens was in a singularly unhappy state when he arrived back. Among other things, citizens were not permitted so much as to mention the name of the island of Salamis, to which Athens laid claim, but which it had been unable to wrest from the control of the Megarians. This rankling defeat was a focus for wider discontents.

The twenty-eight-year-old could not abide such enforced silence on an issue of popular concern. He composed “a hundred gracefully turned verses,” of which only eight survive, committed them to memory, and then rushed into the public way, dressed for his madness “with a little cap upon his head,” reciting them with eloquence. Plutarch declares that “a great crowd swarming about him,” he climbed on to the Herald’s Stone and recited his elegy. It began with the words:

I come, a herald from delightful Salamis,

On my tongue not a speech but a carcanet of words …12

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