Book 1
2.61
He is undoubtedly the author of the laws which bear his name; of speeches, and of poems in elegiac metre, namely, counsels addressed to himself, on Salamis and on the Athenian constitution, five thousand lines in all, not to mention poems in iambic metre and epodes.
2.62
His statue has the following inscriptionAnth. Pal. vii. 86.: At Salamis, which crushed the Persian might, Solon the legislator first saw light.
2.62
He flourished, according to Sosicrates, about the 46th Olympiad, in the third year of which he was archon at Athens594 b.c.; it was then that he enacted his laws. He died in Cyprus at the age of eighty. His last injunctions to his relations were on this wise: that they should convey his bones to Salamis and, when they had been reduced to ashes, scatter them over the soil. Hence Cratinus in his play, The Chirons, makes him sayFr. 5 Meineke, C.G.F. ii. 149.: This is my island home; my dust, men say, Is scattered far and wide o’er Ajax’ land.
2.63
An epigram of my own is also contained in the collection of Epigrams in Various Metres mentioned above, where I have discoursed of all the illustrious dead in all metres and rhythms, in epigrams and lyrics. Here it isAnth. Pal. vii. 87.: Far Cyprian fire his body burnt; his bones, Turned into dust, made grain at Salamis: Wheel-like, his pillars bore his soul on high; So light the burden of his laws on men.
2.63
It is said that he was the author of the apophthegm Nothing too much, Ne quid nimis. According to Dioscurides in his Memorabilia, when he was weeping for the loss of his son, of whom nothing more is known, and some one said to him, It is all of no avail, he replied, That is why I weep, because it is of no avail.
2.63
The following letters are attributed to Solon:
2.64
Solon to Periander
