Debt and Its Aftermath: The Near Eastern Background to Solon's Seisachtheia

by Josine Blok and Julia Krul

Hesperia, Volume 86, Issue 4
Page(s): 607-643
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2972/hesperia.86.4.0607
Year: 2017
VIEW ONLINE

ABSTRACT:

Debts were a structural factor in the lives of peasants throughout the ancient world. In Archaic Greece, Solon of Athens took the unique measure to cancel all debts, abolish debt slavery, and bring back those individuals who had been sold abroad. For this innovation, he drew on the tradition of periodic debt remission and liberation of debt slaves by royal decree in the empires of ancient Mesopotamia, about which he may have heard during his travels in the East. His poems about his legal reforms also display striking similarities with Near Eastern, and specifically Neo-Assyrian, official memorials. In contrast to debt slavery in the Near East, the practice at Athens was terminated forever, even though the custom of debt remission failed to become entrenched.