>>>>Dr. Kyle Harper: Athens - the birthplace of democracy. Democracy itself is a Greek
word which means rule by the people, and Athenian democracy would begin to take shape in the
6th century BC in the Archaic period. And above all, the Athenian democracy was shaped
at its beginnings by one towering figure: the great Athenian lawgiver Solon. Solon came
into power in Athens in the 590s, in the year 594, when he was elected Chief Archon. He
was elected the high magistrate of the Athenian people at a time of extreme crisis. The 590s
were a political moment of enormous consequence in the Greek world because of the crisis at
Athens. Now, the Athenians had already before the rise of Solon been ruled by an oligarchy.
That is, they'd been ruled by a political and social elite who controlled the affairs
of state. And in fact this is a fairly common pattern across the Greek world at this time.
And it's worth noting two structural features of this society. One is that it's not monarchy.
And in fact it's highly unique that this part of the world is ruled not by monarchs or even
chiefs, but by a shared kind of authority among oligarchs, a group of small elite rulers.
Two is that the divisions the units of political life in this world are small-scale, based
around the polis. This is not an age of empires or great kingdoms but in fact, small-scale
local city-based politics that would become the laboratories of political systems, of
constitutions as we think of them now to this day. And the crisis in the 590s in Athens
would give rise to a period of political experimentation unlike any that had ever occurred. And it's
worth thinking about what this means in terms of the grand sweep of history. We talked in
our previous lessons when we considered the law code of Hammurabi, the fact that the king
had executive and judicial powers but that there was no sense that the king himself was
a lawgiver or a creator of laws, of rules. He was just the enforcer of justice who gathered
the customs. We talked about the rise of casuistic law, the collection of case-based law that
accumulated, something like common law providing the standards of justice in that society.
But in Archaic Greece we see a new period, a new phase when we see what we might call
the birth of legislation, the idea that laws can be created by a society for itself, and
with that comes extraordinary possibility. And this period in the Greek world saw the
rise of a series of lawgivers that is in some cases semi-legendary figures who would give
shape to their own individual polis. Men like Lycurgus, who was credited with creating the
Spartan constitution, the characteristic way of life of the Spartans. Lycurgus is, we could
say, a largely legendary figure. Solon by contrast, the great lawgiver of the Athenians,
is a truly historical figure even if many legends did accrue around his name. There
is a kernel of historicity, an element of undeniable factual truth in the career of
Solon as we know it. Now, our primary source this day for the life of Solon is the biography,
"The Life of Solon" that was written by Plutarch, a Greek living some 700 years later in the
Roman Empire: in itself an enormous chasm of time. Plutarch's "Lives" are one of the
great classic works. They've survived across history been read generation after generation.
They have been an inspiration to statesmen and leaders across times. And "The Life of
Solon" is the story of the character of the great Athenian lawgiver. Solon inherited an
Athens that was in profound economic crisis. There was deep division even within the ruling
classes. The rich were opposed to the poor. Those who were traders, that is, those who
were engaged in commerce, were opposed to those who were farmers. Those who were landowners
were opposed to those who worked the land. And in fact we're told that the poor were
virtually enslaved to the rich in this society. Now remember that at this time coinage had
just been imported into the Greek world. Money is something that we take profoundly for granted,
but in fact it's a human invention, a convention that arises at particular moments in history.
And at this time it was new in the Greek world and it certainly, this new technology of commerce,
would have contributed to exacerbating the social divisions of Athens. And indeed, the
poor were effectively enslaved to the rich. Now to understand this we have to appreciate
that this is an agricultural economy. And when the crops failed, if you were a small
farmer, there were very few recourses. There we no public banks where you could go to.
There were no government welfare programs. You could only turn to the wealthy for help.
And imagine that you're a wealthy farmer, that you have resources and someone comes
knocking at your door asking for, for aid, for help. Should you give them a loan? Well
you could give them a loan, but a bank won't give you a loan to this day if you don't have
what's called collateral, if you can't securitize the loan. Lending money means taking a risk
and in our society we're accustomed to the idea that there are interest rates, there
are securitization and that the lender can charge a certain amount of interest and expect
something to securitize the loan in case the borrower's unable to pay it back. But this
was all highly novel in the Greek world, and in the Athens of Solon's day there are no
public banks, there are only wealthy individuals. And so what do you do if you're a wealthy
individual and a poor person knocks at your door and asks for money? You want some security.
Some guarantee that those poor peasants will pay you back. Nobody gives away their money
for free in this world. And so, what can the poor man provide as security? Well first maybe
his family farm, but then what happens if the crops fail and he can't pay back his load
and the farm is seized? The farm goes to the wealthy and the rich get richer. What happens
then if he needs to make another loan and he this time has no land to secure the, the
loan with? He can only use himself, his own person, his body, his wife, her body, his
children. And indeed this seems to be what had happened in Athens. There're no laws against
it, there are no laws regulating credit exchanges in this world and so the wealthy begin to
make loans securitizing them with the bodies, the individual persons of the debtors. Now
to us that may seem totally unacceptable, but in this world it was novel and it had
led to a grave social crisis in which the poor had become literally debt bondage. They'd
become debt slaves to the wealthy, and that was the kind of world that Solon inherited
and it was into this crisis that he would step with a series of reforms that would not
only pull Athens out of the crisis, but would set her on the path to become the most glorious
city in all of Greece.