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A P P E N D I X 3 Prices in Solon’s Day I N H I S R E V I E W OF S OL ON ’S L E G I S L A T I ON , Plutarch found the fines for rape and procuring to be inconsistent with the law of adultery. The matter led him into some interesting speculation on prices in Solon’s day. But in general, Solon’s laws about women seem to be extremely strange. On the one hand, he allows a person who apprehends an adulterer to do away with him; but if, on the other hand, a person abducts and rapes a free woman, he fixed a fine of a hundred drachmas , and if he should put her out for prostitution,1 twenty drachmas, except for those who are sold explicitly (by which expression he meant prostitutes, since they go openly to those who pay) . . . But to punish the same offense sharply and implacably in one case, gently and playfully in another, defining the payment of a trifling fine, is unreasonable , unless coins were rare in the city at that time, so that the difficulty of providing them made monetary fines great. In the valuations of the sacrifices, a sheep and a drachma are counted as equivalent to a 1. In the Loeb Plutarch, Bernadotte Perrin renders “and if he gained his end by persuasion,” as if this clause were describing the punishment of a seducer. But I can find no parallel for such a use of the verb προαγωγε  υω. It must be admitted, however, that Aeschines (1.14, 184) claims that the law on procuring included “the greatest penalties,” including death. Cf. Manfredini and Piccirilli, pp. 243–44. 236 Prices in Solon’s Day 237 medimnus;2 and he fixed a hundred drachmas for an Isthmian victor, five hundred for an Olympic victor. He gave five drachmas to anyone who brought in a wolf and one for a wolf’s cub. Demetrius of Phaleron says that the one was the price of an ox, and other the price of a sheep. Although the prices that he defines in the sixteenth axon3 for choice victims are many times more than that, as is reasonable, nevertheless even those are cheap compared to today’s prices.4 As others have noticed, Plutarch seems to have misunderstood the law on adultery. The law that “allows a person who apprehends an adulterer to do away with him” is not a law punishing the adulterer but a law exempting crimes of passion from punishment: the man who found someone else in bed with his wife and killed him on the spot was not to be punished as a murderer.5 In point of fact, the adulterer, if brought before a court of law, was punished not with death but with a public humiliation that stopped short of bloodshed: the terms of the law were that “in the presence of the court, without a dagger, he [the offended party] could treat him in any way he wanted.”6 This was the law that should have been compared to the fines placed on the rapist and the procurer.7 One might therefore argue that Solon was consistent, if repugnant to our own sensibilities, in treating sexual offenses against women lightly. There might, however, be a certain anachronism in that formulation, for scholars have often held that the laws as we have them seem to treat crimes of this sort as offenses not against the woman but against her husband or the male head of her household;8 more significantly, the penalty of twenty drachmas would have been so insignificant in the classical period as to have 2. A measure of grain holding about forty-one liters (Viedebantt in RE XV, cols. 86–87, s.v. Μ  εδιµνος), though it varied greatly with time and place. 3. The axones were revolving pillars on which Solon’s laws were inscribed. 4. Plut. Solon 23.1–3. 5. So, correctly, David Cohen (104–5) and Todd (276–77). Douglas MacDowell (124) still gave Lysias’s interpretation (below, n. 6), as did most of his predecessors. 6. [Dem.] 59.66. For a famous, if imaginary, example, see Aristophanes Clouds 1083. 7. The misunderstanding is not original with Plutarch; it seems to have begun with a sophistry of Lysias (Lysias 1.32–33, where the law is paraphrased), who used it to claim that the law considered seduction worse than rape. Lysias’s claim was...

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