The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon

The great poet, historian and dramatist Friedrich Schiller recognized that the study of universal history were impossible if the mind of the researcher missed the fundamental tension between two opposing paradigms which strike at the heart of the nature of man, god, and reality itself.

While this fundamental tension has expressed itself in diverse manners across the ages and cultural matrices of humanity, certain constant invariants remain the same. While one outlook recognizes humanity to be born good and made in the image of a creative God, the other posits humanity to be born evil and governed principally by our bestial lusts for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Where one is driven by love and the goal of sovereignty within each self-aware member of the species within the body politic, the other is driven by hate and the goal of total enslavement of the masses on behalf of an incrusted oligarchy.

This clash of these two Ideas was reflected loudly in the divergent constitutions of two Ancient Greek legislators named Lycurgus (lawgiver of Sparta) and Solon (lawgiver of Athens) which is the topic of this second of Schiller’s Universal History lectures.

In his lecture which was read as part of the Rising Tide Foundation study group, Schiller lays out the conditions of Natural Law which any true sovereign nation state worthy of the name must adhere to in order to have the moral fitness to survive and self-perfect:

“The state itself is never the purpose, it is important only as the condition under which the purpose of mankind may be fulfilled, and this purpose of mankind is none other than the development of all the powers of people, i.e., progress. If the constitution of a state hinders the progress of the mind, it is contemptible and harmful, however well thought-out it may otherwise be… In general, we can establish a rule for judging political institutions, that they are only good and laudable, to the extent that they bring all forces inherent in persons to flourish, to the extent that they promote the progress of culture, or at least not hinder it. This rule applies to religious laws as well as to political ones: both are contemptible if they constrain a power of the human mind, if they impose upon the mind any sort of stagnation. A law, for example, by which at a particular time appeared to it most fitting , such a law were an assault against mankind and laudable intents of whatever kind were then incapable of justifying it. It were immediately directed against the highest Good, against the highest purpose of society.”