For by the 5th century, slave owning was not confined to the aristocratic few but had been extended to the descendants of that very class Solon had liberated from another kind of slavery.
The Alcmaeonids were strong supporters of Solon, and Megacles' son Alcmaeon led an Athenian contingent that fought with Thessaly and the powerful tyrant of Sicyon (also named Cleisthenes), in a so-called Sacred War for the protection of Delphi.
Whatever the connection between Cylon and Draco and one must beware the trap of bringing all the meagre facts about the Archaic period into relation with each other firmer grounds for postulating economic and social unrest in late 7th-century Attica are to be found in the poetry of Solon.
Solon also prohibited the mortgaging of land or of personal freedom on account of debt.
Mr Solon finds that the correlation between the incomes of fathers and sons is higher in the United States than in Germany, Sweden, Finland or Canada.
But, as Mr Solon argued, the pledges made in the Copenhagen accord, and now annexed to the UN process, are nowhere near strong enough to limit climate change to an increase of two degrees, which is what the Cancún texts require.
Some have gone bust, including recently a clutch of once-pioneering German firms such as Solarhybrid, Solon, Solar Millennium and Q-Cells.The American tariffs, if confirmed, will annoy Chinese panelmakers and perhaps a wide array of American exporters, too, if China's "strongly dissatisfied" government launches retaliatory measures.
But at the final session of the 2010 conference, standing alone, Mr Solon was unable to repeat that feat.
However erroneous such an appeal to Solon was with regard to the facts it is a good example of "invented tradition"—it is undoubtedly true that members of that group behaved more moderately than some of the other oligarchs (Theramenes helped to overthrow the Four Hundred).
There is no getting round the clear implication of two poems of Solon (early 6th century) that, first, gold and silver were familiar metals and, second, wealth was now in the hands of arrivistes.
