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.66 But he did not think that the kakoi should have equal shares in the land with the esthloi(nobles).67 While granting the demos, of which the nouveaux riches were a part, certain political privileges, he did not seek tochange their social position but to restore order.He only gave them as much as was sufficient,68 and seems to have thoughtthem incapable of being trusted with too much wealth and power:69 78 LYNETTE G.MITCHELLIn this way the demos would best go along with its leaders,neither being given too much rein, nor being forced too much.Excess breeds arrogance, whenever great wealth attends such men as do not have sound intent.70The term demos is used ambiguously in Solon s poetry, sometimes referring to the whole people, but sometimes referring tothe poor and sometimes simply to those who are not gnorimoi.71 Here he appears to be using it in this last sense, and makes itclear that his support is not for the demos but for those who have to handle them.72 Solon, like many aristocrats, had a poor opinionof the demos and their judgement, an opinion in which he claims he is vindicated by events:If you have suffered misery through your own baseness (kakotes),do not lay the blame for your share of these things upon the gods,for you raised them up, giving them protection,and because of this you have base slavery.Each one of you comes with the marks of a fox,but in all of you put together there is but empty wit;you look to the tongue and words of a wily man,but see nothing of the deed which is being done.73Diodorus74 and Plutarch75 believed that Solon was referring to Peisistratus tyranny,76 but he is at least probably referring tothe demos demands for land redistribution, lust for wealth, and lack of judgement.Playing on similar themes, many poems in the Theognidea also reflect an anxious aristocracy whose social position is beingundermined.One of the responses was to divorce arete from wealth and define it purely by birth.77 Arete is not what a manowns, but who he is.It is the moral force that drives him, and this is a quality lacking in the kakoi.Therefore, Theognis says,it is fitting for an agathos to have wealth,78 since he will not abuse the privilege.Wealth is dangerous for the kakoi; it is tooheady a wine, and will drive them to excess and injustice:Cyrnus, an agathos always has presence of mind,and is able to hold firm both in bad times and in good;but if god gives livelihood and wealth to a kakos,being silly, he is not able to restrain his inferiority.79Like Solon, Theognis believes that the true agathos has a moral fibre and stamina lacking in the kakos.A number of poems in the Theognidea make particularly vitriolic attacks on the integrity of the kakoi.Although all arete issummed up in justice, and every man is agathos who is dikaios ,60 elsewhere the kakoi, like the Homeric Cyclops, know neitherjustice nor established customs (nomoi), and this is the cause of all the problems of the polis:Cyrnus, this polis is still the polis, but there are other people,who previously knew neither justice nor established customs,but who used to wear goat skins on their sides,and lived like deer outside this city.And now they are agathoi, Polypades, and those who before were esthloiare now deiloi.Who could endure looking on these things?And they deceive each other and mock each other,not able to distinguish the principles of the kakoi or the agathoi.81Although they are to a large extent the bitter murmurings of a disillusioned man, these poems do present us with a picture ofthe agathoi under threat in their role as the exclusive guardians of society.For Theognis, the agathos was becomingincreasingly divorced from the traditional qualities that defined him.82 The instinct of self-preservation demanded that inorder to retain their position of supremacy in society, the aristocracy had to redefine arete and the agathos in a way that madearete exclusive to the agathos and so gave him a social and moral superiority.83Solon, like Theognis, is a member of an aristocracy under threat
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