24.2
But the law concerning naturalized citizens is of doubtful character. He permitted only those to be made citizens who were permanently exiled from their own country, or who removed to Athens with their entire families to ply a trade. This he did, as we are told, not so much to drive away other foreigners, as to invite these particular ones to Athens with the full assurance of becoming citizens; he also thought that reliance could be placed both on those who had been forced to abandon their own country, and on those who had left it with a fixed purpose.
24.3
Characteristic of Solon also was his regulation of the practice of eating at the public table in the townhall, for which his word was parasitein. Hence, with scornful meaning, the word parasite. The same person was not allowed to eat there often, but if one whose duty it was to eat there refused, he was punished. Solon thought the conduct of the first grasping; that of the second, contemptuous of the public interests.
25.1
All his laws were to have force for a hundred years, and they were written on axones, or wooden tablets, which revolved with the oblong frames containing them. Slight remnants of these were still preserved in the Prytaneium when I was at Athens, and they were called, according to Aristotle,Cf. Aristot. Const. Ath. 7.1, with Sandys’ notes. kurbeis. Cratinus, also, the comic poet, somewhere says:— By Solon, and by Draco too I make mine oath, Whose kurbeis now are used to parch our barley-corns. Kock, Com. Att. Frag. i. p. 94.
25.2
But some say that only those tablets which relate to sacred rites and sacrifices are properly called kurbeis, and the rest are called axones. However that may be, the council took a joint oath to ratify the laws of Solon, and each of the thesmothetai, or guardians of the statutes, swore separately at the herald’s stone in the market-place, vowing that if he transgressed the statutes in any way, he would dedicate at Delphi a golden statue of commensurate worth.
