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Did Solon abolish debt-bondage?

The Constitution of the Athenians attributed to Aristotle informs us in several places that Solon abolished the practice of ‘lending on the (security of the) body’ (δαξε ειξ π υο Κ τ νατι).1 Several scholars have recently interpreted this to mean that Solon abolished the practice of debt-bondage. Finley believed that as a result of Solon’s reforms ‘debt-bondage was abolished tout court’.2 Elsewhere Finley asserted ‘The Solonic revolution in Athens brought an end to debt-bondage’, and also interpreted a major fragment of Solon’s poetry (fr. 36 [West]) as a description of this reform. De Ste. Croix often disagreed with Finley, but on this point he did not differ: in his opinion, Solon ‘forbade for the future not merely enslavement for debt but also any kind of debt-bondage by the simple expedient of prohibiting the giving of the body as security’.3 This view has been accepted without question by several scholars such as Ober4 and by Patterson.5 In this article I will argue that Solon did not abolish debt-bondage, but only enslavement for debt. Section I will analyse the difference between enslavement for debt and debt-bondage. Section II will examine the terminology used by Aristotle to describe Solon’s reform, and show that the law concerns enslavement for debt, not debt-bondage. Section III will provide evidence to show that debt-bondage continued to exist in classical Athens long after Solon. Section IV will show that Solon’s poetry reveals that the lawgiver was concerned about enslavement resulting from violence and raids for booty, not about debt-bondage that had come about because of a certain system of land tenure. Section V will place Solon’s law in the context of class relations in archaic and classical Athens.