Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens > Status Update

the crowd that elevates them, and they maintain their positions by force.

The polis is destroyed (ollutai) by overbearing men (andrôn d’ ek megalôn) who are associated with slavery and misfortune (doulosunê and lugra or deina); the crowd acts by ignorance (aidriê), ambitious men with arms (rhumata) are easier to restrain (kataschein) up front than to reverse later (husteron). In other words, tyrants rise through noetic failures – ignorance, hubris and excess – in both themselves and

Can wealth cause the noos to become empty, which allows atê to bloom? / Solon /: yes, at least, to the audience of poem 13, and possibly to the crowd in fragment 11. What is common to both contexts – the immoderate pursuit of wealth and / illegitimate pursuit of public honours – is a dependent standard of evaluation, the desire for social status gained through loot or power, and motivated by the presence of others.

become unmistakably clear that there is an unsolvable problem with applying dikê as a principle to bios; it simply does not work. Experience negates the generalization, so Solon changes the generalization – certainly the mark of a person concerned for what is true.

suffer the consequences, and their children and their relatives thereafter’, but we think things are well with ourselves only until we suffer, or experience, the opposite directly. Under the onslaught of experience, our expectations for the future become a ‘seeming’, an uncertain opinion of our actual situation and of the results to follow for us. By this point it has

Pathein, ‘the experiencing’, or ‘the suffering’ that marked the many sufferings caused by hubris in Athens, offers a profound challenge to noein, ‘the knowing’ that we have of our present and future conditions. Until we experience the end we cannot know if we were correct about our earlier understanding. We may recognize the general point that ‘the innocents

Moira brings good and evil to mortals,

and the gifts of the immortal gods may not be escaped.

There is risk in all actions, and no one knows

how something, having started, will end up.

Possibly he offers this ‘proof’ not by connecting abstract statements using syllogistic rules, but rather by showing that what he claims is undeniably true, given that it may be perceived directly, in the world around him.

is literally the ‘unhidden’, or the ‘unremembered’, that which we do not see or have not remembered seeing directly, but that we know to be so.30 For Solon, the problem is noetic: to bring the hidden aspects of the polis into the open. Possibly what we see as digressions – the use of vivid imagery and descriptive scenes – are Solon’s ways of proving his point.

Further, Solon surely does not build his arguments around deductive, syllogistic reasoning, and any attempt to find such methods could only succeed by creating what is not there. But this may not mean that he does not support his case in a logical fashion. A different approach to Solon is possible, one that recognizes a way of demonstrating the truth in a way that is not deductive. ‘Truth’ – alêtheia –