Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, paired Greek and Roman biographies of character, virtue, and vice. This chapter is Solon of Athens, set next to Publicola, another man who refused a crown and wrote a people's laws.

Solon found Athens eating its farmers. Debt had turned citizens into slaves on their own soil; the rich owned the markers on the fields. He cancelled the debts, tore up the boundary-stones, ranked citizens by the grain they produced, and would not take the tyranny the poor offered. He wrote verse and statute in the same hand, then left for ten years so they could not make him change a line. Croesus of Lydia, in western Turkey, later asked who was happiest; Solon named men already dead, because no life is safe until it is finished. This is the story of a lawgiver who would not stay to enjoy the city he had remade.