Single Mother of a Werewolf Baby novel Chapter 239

Chapter 239: Supreme Judge Solon

Solon, son of Execestides, was a man who stood between abyss and precipice... and chose, instead of falling, to build a bridge. To know the man, one must first grasp the burden of the lineage he bore, yet ultimately transcended.

His family, the Medontidae, traced their nobility to the dawn of Athenian kingship. His father, Execestides, was a man of fading fortune but impeccable pedigree. Through him, Solon’s ancestry reached back to the last semi-mythical king of Athens, Codrus.

The legend told that when the Dorians invaded, the oracle proclaimed Athens could only be spared if its king were slain by the enemy. Codrus disguised himself as a commoner, provoked a fight, and was killed... saving his city through his own blood. Codrus was Solon’s great-grandfather.

And the lineage reached deeper still. Codrus was the son of Melanthus, himself a descendant of Triton, the sea-king, and of a princess of Athens. Thus, Solon’s bloodline flowed with mythic sacrifice and supernatural royalty: a heritage of kings and legends.

This was the inheritance Solon might have claimed. He chose, instead, to forge his own.

Solon was an archaic Athenian statesman, lawmaker, poet, and political philosopher... counted among the Seven Sages of Greece, and remembered as the man who laid the first stones on the path toward Athenian democracy. His reforms, bold yet measured, overturned most of Draco’s brutal laws and sought to arrest Athens’ descent into political, economic, and moral collapse.

At the dawn of the sixth century BC, Athens teetered on the edge of civil war. The city was riven by staggering inequality. The poor were crushed beneath debts they could never repay; their very bodies and their land were collateral. Across the countryside stood horoi stones... grim markers that signalled bondage, monuments to the living enslaved. The aristocracy, clutching jealously to its privileges, offered no remedy, only the certainty of ruin.

Into this crisis, Solon was elected sole Archon in 594 BC, entrusted with extraordinary power to save the city from tearing itself apart. His genius lay not in siding with rich or poor, but in raising the idea of the polis itself above every faction.

His year as Archon was a storm of legislation. The Seisachtheia... the "shaking off of burdens", was his most dramatic act, cancelling debts and forbidding the enslavement of citizens for loans. Yet this was only the beginning. He reorganised the citizen body into four property classes... pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai, and thetes, each with distinct rights and military obligations, replacing birth with wealth as the measure of political standing. He established the Council of Four Hundred (the Boule) to prepare business for the general assembly (Ekklesia), thus curbing the dominance of the aristocratic Areopagus Council.

Most radical of all, he introduced the right of appeal to a popular court, the Heliaia, giving every citizen the power to challenge a magistrate’s verdict. He drafted laws on inheritance, land tenure, trade, funerary rites, and the export of agricultural goods... inscribing them on revolving wooden axles (axones) displayed openly in the Agora, so that law would no longer be the private knowledge of the few, but the common possession of the many.

The reaction was not acclaim, but restless anger. He had disappointed both sides. The aristocracy felt betrayed, their ancestral privileges cut down and weighed against money. The poor seethed, furious that he had not gone further... had not seized and redistributed the estates of the rich. Solon himself likened his position to that of a wolf at bay, encircled by snapping hounds.

And then, true to principle, he performed the most astonishing act of all. Having remade Athens’ laws, he stepped away from power. He bound the Athenians by oath to keep his constitution for ten years, and then he left the city... not in disgrace, but in deliberate withdrawal. For Solon believed that if his laws were to endure, they must rest not on the authority of the lawgiver, but on the will of the people themselves.

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