heart, he speaks with friendly countenance, and his tongue rings with double speech from a dark soul. He is undoubtedly the author of the laws which bear his name ; of speeches, and of poems in elegiac metre, namely, counsels addressed to himself, on Salamis and on the Athenian constitution, five thousand lines in all, not to mention poems in iambic metre and epodes. His statue has the following inscription @ : At Salamis, which crushed the Persian might, Solon the legislator first saw light. He flourished, according to Sosicrates, about the 46th Olympiad, in the third year of which he was archon at Athens °; it was then that he enacted his laws. He died in Cyprus at the age of eighty. His last injunctions to his relations were on this wise: _ that they should convey his bones to Salamis and, when they had been reduced to ashes, scatter them over the soil. Hence Cratinus in his play, The Chirons, makes him say °: This is my island home ; my dust, men say, Is scattered far and wide o’er Ajax’ land. An epigram of my own is also contained in the collection of Epgrams in Various Metres mentioned above, where I have discoursed of all the illustrious dead in all metres and rhythms, in epigrams and Brice. ere itis: = Far Cyprian fire his body burnt ; his bones, Turned into dust, made grain at Salamis : Wheel-like, his pillars bore his soul on high ; So light the burden of his laws on men.
The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.
Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I (Books I-V), Diogenes Laertius — translated by R. D. Hicks, 1925
Apparatus shelf — Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. I (R. D. Hicks translation, Loeb L184) · R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann / New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, MCMXXV (1925)
license: public-domain (US: published 1925, pre-1930 — the MCMXXV title page verified by the 2026-07-08 acquisition lane, pin in ops/sources/MANIFEST.md; only the English rectos are served, Hicks's translation)