Solon

Aristotle, who looks into all things, wonders about Solon’s statementthat no one can be called happy while still alive — even though this one who had lived well and died well could be called happy — if their reputation is poor, their descendants miserable.

They know the story of King Croesus who, taken prisoner by Cyrus and condemned to die, cried “O Solon!

After someone told Cyrus of this, and after he sought to discover what it meant, Croesus told him that he was finding, at great personal cost, that the warning Solon had once given him was true:

We would be right, then, to listen to Solon’s warning.

Plato brings in Solon, telling a story that he had heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt, that of old, and before the Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly at the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar, which contained more countries than both Africa and Asia put together;

Plato adds, that these are immortal children that immortalize and deify their fathers, as Lycurgus, Solon, Minos.

and that the goddess who founded the city of Athens chose to situate it in a temperature of air fit to make men prudent, as the Egyptian priests told Solon, Athenis tenue cælum, ex quo etiam acutiores putantur Attici;

Solon, being lectured by his friends not to shed powerless and unprofitable tears for the death of his son, “It is for that reason that I the more justly shed them,” said he, “because they are powerless and unprofitable.

and Draco and Solon, legislators of the Athenians, under that of Minerva.

and Solon said “that eating was physic against the malady hunger.

for Solon, master of the law school, taxes us but at three a month, that men may not fail in point of conjugal frequentation:

and Solon was the first in Greece, ’tis said, who by his laws gave liberty to women, at the expense of their chastity, to provide for the necessities of life;

And the narrative of Solon, of what he had learned from the Egyptian priests, touching the long life of their state, and their manner of learning and preserving foreign histories, is not, methinks, a testimony to be refused in this consideration.

Solon being asked whether he had established the best laws he could for the Athenians;

and Solon was used to say, that “whoever would make a heap of all the ills together, there is no one who would not rather choose to bear away the ills he has than to come to an equal division with all other men from that heap, and take his share.

’tis that Solon represents himself, sometimes in his own person, and sometimes in that of a legislator;

and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the duration of life to threescore and ten years.