Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

were sinking ever deeper into serfdom. The poor, if truly desperate, might even stake their freedom against their debts, perhaps ending up chained and shackled as slaves in their own fields. Solon, had he displayed the calculating mercilessness of a Lycurgus, could easily have sponsored this trend, and condemned his city’s poor to a permanent helotage. Instead, he chose to redeem them. Even those who had been sold abroad, even those “who had forgotten how to speak the Attic dialect,” were liberated, while in Attica itself, wherever property had been mortgaged, Solon ordered a general pardoning of debts. Out in the fields, men were set to work “digging up the boundary-stones where they had been set in the dark earth.”