Probe Into Solon’s Political Thinking

Poetry played an extremely important role in almost every part of Ancient Greek world. In the beginning, poetry was just a teaching tool for memorization, by which people can get necessary knowledge of Greek life. But in the wake of Greeks’ having more questions and opinions over the world, poetry developed into means of self-expression. It surely reflected what poet and his contemporaries concerned. At that time, the actions of powerful individuals might even influence the entire community. Thus as educator of his men and his polis, poets would have to speculate upon public issues, most of which were political. And when their speculations turned into words, they would be poems. Since that, there could be no better way than facing up to poems to probe into poets’ political thoughts. It applies to Solon, too.Homer and Hesiod influenced the Greek thoughts so profoundly, both of them offer the human world to the hands of Zeus, and the will of gods became their polis’ motional source. However, Solon’s polis got rid of the will of gods, meanwhile it lost the shelter gods offered, human beings in the city had to be responsible for their polis by themselves then. Thus, the motional source became inherent in the polis. In early greek cosmology, one specific was always regarded as a part of a wider sphere, where internal order and principle worked without any enfored external force. So was Solon’s polis:it’s a self-support, self-sufficient and independent community, which ran with its own energy, and which embrace a language system to understand everything in the world. In fact, man had begun to bring the all these complex phenomena into the reach of human intellect and action by a complete system of orders. Once given proper order, polis became a little cosmos itself, neither gods nor foreigners could enslave it anymore, and its justice lay in "every internal factors in its proper position"Solonian polis-cosmos both stand for the city as a whole and each one in it. Just like what Hesiod had said, a wrong-doer’s misdeed may bring mischief to the whole city. Solon also concerned about the relationship between each one in the city and city as a whole, and he found what’s underlying the cosmos-the necessity of Justice. But Solon’s justice was not simply balance between different forces, rather than promised the necessity of retribution, which would force everyone to restrain his/her hybris. In Solon poem36, laws became the focus, a communal and enforced justice negotiated different choices of each one in the polis. As Aristotle told, man must see the moral virtue of justice in each individual at first, then the moral virtue of justice in the polis. Prudence required each one in the polis to distribute his/her staff in line with the wide order inherent in justice. Thus, eunomia, which could make everything in the polis proper and orderly, could maintain. Solon’s polis was a moral world reigned by justice in deed.