Note 819 — Chapter XVIII

The chronological difficulties which are brought against this meeting, and to which Plutarch refers, "Sol." c. 27, rest on the fact that Plutarch, like Herodotus, represents Solon as going to Sardis after the establishment of the Athenian constitution. According to this the meeting occurred in 593, or rather in 583 B.C. Either date is impossible: in 593 B.C. Crœsus was five years old, in 583 B.C. he was fifteen, and he did not ascend the throne till 563 B.C. The meeting with Crœsus therefore cannot be placed earlier than 560 B.C. when Solon left Athens after Pisistratus became tyrant. After 558 B.C. Crœsus could no longer count as the happiest of mortals, with whom everything went well, for in 558 B.C. Cyrus had already deposed Astyages, the connection of Crœsus. Herodotus says (1, 34, 46), that Crœsus had bewailed the loss of his son Attys for two years before the account of the fall of Astyages was brought to him; Attys must have died in 560 B.C. With this the exact account of Phanias of Eresus, a scholar of Aristotle (Suidas, Φανιάς), entirely agrees. He tells us that Solon did not live two complete years after Pisistratus had seized the tyranny, for Pisistratus became tyrant under the archonship of Comias; Solon died under the archonship of Hegestratus (Plut. "Sol." 32); the archonship of Comias falls in the year 559 B.C. Cf. Ælian, "Var. Hist." 8, 16. Diogenes Laertius, 1, 50, 62, remarks that Solon, after Pisistratus had become tyrant, went to Crœsus, to Cilicia and Cyprus; that he died in Cyprus in his eightieth year. If Suidas tells us that Solon went to Soli in Cilicia after Pisistratus became tyrant, this, like the founding of the city in Diogenes, is a confusion with Soli in Cyprus. Solon went to Cyprus, where he had been so well received between 583 and 573 B.C., where Soli, his own foundation, offered him a worthy refuge. As there can hardly have been direct communication between Athens and Soli, he went by way of the Ionian harbours. The general statement of Heracleides of Pontus, that Solon lived for a long time after the tyranny of Pisistratus (Plut. "Sol." c. 32), proves nothing against the precise statement of Phanias, and that Solon, as Plutarch says without giving his authority, died in Athens as the adviser of Pisistratus, is as much opposed to the character of Solon as to the statement that he died in Cyprus.