15.3
Thus they called harlots companions, taxes contributions, the garrison of a city its guard, and the prison a chamber. But Solon was the first, it would seem, to use this device, when he called his cancelling of debts a disburdenment. For the first of his public measures was an enactment that existing debts should be remitted, and that in future no one should lend money on the person of a borrower.
15.4
Some writers, however, and Androtion is one of them, affirm that the poor were relieved not by a cancelling of debts, but by a reduction of the interest upon them, and showed their satisfaction by giving the name of disburdenment to this act of humanity, and to the augmentation of measures and the purchasing power of money which accompanied it.See Aristot. Const. Ath. 10.1, with Sandys’ note. For he made the mina to consist of a hundred drachmas, which before has contained only seventy-three, so that by paying the same amount of money, but money of a lesser value, those who had debts to discharge were greatly benefited, and those who accepted such payments were no losers.
15.5
But most writers agree that the disburdenment was a removal of all debt, and with such the poems of Solon are more in accord For in these he proudly boasts that from the mortgaged lands He took away the record-stones that everywhere were planted Before, Earth was in bondage, now she is free Fragment 36, verses 4 f., with adaptation from the first person; verses 6 f. in Aristotle’s citation. And of the citizens whose persons had been seized for debt, some he brought back from foreign lands, uttering no longer Attic speech, So long and far their wretched wanderings And some who here at home in shameful servitude Were held Fragment 36, verses 9-12 (Bergk); verses 11-14 in Aristotle. he says he set free
