Solon

But those things wherein he hoped to find them open to persuasion or submissive to compulsion, these he did,

1. Combining both force and justice together,

Now later writers observe that the ancient Athenians used to cover up the ugliness of things with auspicious and kindly terms, giving them polite and endearing names.

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.

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.