Introduction

Earl Fontanelle: For ancient Greeks, the particular customs and laws of different city-states were often explained with reference to a particularly Greek figure. He says that for the Athenians, the nomothet was Solon, who lived from sometime in the middle of the 7th century BCE until the mid-6th Century BC. The stories told about him by authors like Herodotus and Plutarch much later are certainly not what we would call historical, but they do tell us a lot about how the Greeks wanted to see themselves, he writes.