Greeks re-invented King Solomon as an Athenian Statesman, Solon

 

by

Damien F. Mackey

  

The chronology and parentage of Solon were disputed even in ancient times.

 

 

SOLOMON IN GREEK FOLKLORE

 

There is a case in Greek ‘history’ of a wise lawgiver who nonetheless over-organised his country, to the point of his being unable to satisfy either rich or poor, and who then went off travelling for a decade (notably in Egypt).

 

This was Solon, who has come down to us as the first great Athenian statesman.

 

Plutarch [115] tells that, with people coming to visit Solon every day, either to praise him or to ask him probing questions about the meaning of his laws, he left Athens for a time, realising that ‘In great affairs you cannot please all parties’.

According to Plutarch:

 

‘[Solon] made his commercial interests as a ship-owner an excuse to travel and sailed away ... for ten years from the Athenians, in the hope that during this period they would become accustomed to his laws. He went first of all to Egypt and stayed for a while, as he mentions himself

 

^‘where the Nile pours forth

its waters by the shore of Canopus’.’

 

We recall Solon's intellectual encounters with the Egyp­tian priests at Heliopolis and Saïs (in the Nile Delta), as described in Plutarch's ‘Life of Solon’ and Plato's ‘Timaeus’ [116].

 

The chronology and parentage of Solon were disputed even in ancient times [117].

 

Since he was a wise statesman, an intellectual (poet, writer) whose administrative reforms, though brilliant, eventually led to hardship for the poor and disenchantment for the wealthy; and since Solon's name is virtually identical to that of ‘Solomon’; and since he went to Egypt (also to Cyprus, Sidon and Lydia) for about a decade at the time when he was involved in the shipping business, then I suggest that ‘Solon’ of the Greeks was their version of Solomon, in the mid-to-late period of his reign.

 

I Kings 10:23-29:

 

King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart. Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift—articles of silver and gold, robes, weapons and spices, and horses and mules.

Solomon accumulated chariots and horses; he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem. The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees in the foothills. Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt and from Kue—the royal merchants purchased them from Kue at the current price. They imported a chariot from Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for a hundred and fifty. They also exported them to all the kings of the Hittites and of the Arameans.

 

The Greeks simply picked up the story and transferred it from Jerusalem to Athens, just as they (or, at least Herodotus) later confused Sennacherib's advance towards Jerusalem (C8th BC), by relocating it to Pelusium in Egypt [118].

 

Much has been attributed to the Greeks that did not belong to them - e.g. professor Henry Breasted [119] made the point that Hatshep­sut's marvellous temple structure was a witness to the fact that the Egyptians had developed architectural styles for which the later Greeks would be credited as originators.

 

Given the Greeks' tendency to distort history, or to appropriate inven­tions, one would not expect to find in Solon a perfect, mirror-image of King Solomon.

 

Thanks to historical revisions [120], we now know that the ‘Dark Age’ between the Mycenaean (or Heroic) period of Greek history (concurrent with the time of Hatshepsut) and the Archaic period (that commences with Solon), is an artificial construct.

 

This makes it even more plausible that Hatshepsut and Solomon were contemporaries of ‘Solon’.

 

The tales of Solon's travels to Egypt, Sidon and Lydia (land of the Hittites) may well reflect to some degree Solomon's desire to appease his foreign women - Egyptian, Sidonian and Hittite - by building shrines for them (I Kings 11: 1, 7-8).

 

Both Solomon and Solon are portrayed as being the wisest amongst the wise.

In the pragmatic Greek version Solon prayed for wealth rather than wisdom - but ‘justly acquired wealth’, since Zeus punishes evil [121].

In the Hebrew version, God gave ‘riches and honour’ to Solomon because he had not asked for them, but had prayed instead for ‘a wise and discerning mind’, to enable him properly to govern his people (I Kings 3:12-13).

 

Notes and References

….

115. Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens (Life of Solon), Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1964, pp. 68-69, emphasis added.

116. According to these authors, Solon had to be instructed by the Egyptians, the Egyptian priesthood claiming to have historical knowledge going back far beyond that of the Greeks.

117. See Plutarch, ibid., p. 43 (parentage) and pp. 69-70 (chronol­ogy).

118. Herodotus, Histories, Penguin Books, London, 1972, Bk.II.

119. History, p. 274.

120. E.g. footnote [25].

121. Boardman, J, et al. (eds.), The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, Oxford UP, 1991, p. 112.

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