CHAPTER 239: SUPREME JUDGE SOLON

Solon, son of Execestides, was a man who stood between abyss and precipice... and chose, instead of falling, to build a bridge. To know the man, one must first grasp the burden of the lineage he bore, yet ultimately transcended.

His family, the Medontidae, traced their nobility to the dawn of Athenian kingship. His father, Execestides, was a man of fading fortune but impeccable pedigree. Through him, Solon’s ancestry reached back to the last semi-mythical king of Athens, Codrus.

The legend told that when the Dorians invaded, the oracle proclaimed Athens could only be spared if its king were slain by the enemy. Codrus disguised himself as a commoner, provoked a fight, and was killed... saving his city through his own blood. Codrus was Solon’s great-grandfather.

And the lineage reached deeper still. Codrus was the son of Melanthus, himself a descendant of Triton, the sea-king, and of a princess of Athens. Thus, Solon’s bloodline flowed with mythic sacrifice and supernatural royalty: a heritage of kings and legends.

This was the inheritance Solon might have claimed. He chose, instead, to forge his own.

Solon was an archaic Athenian statesman, lawmaker, poet, and political philosopher... counted among the Seven Sages of Greece, and remembered as the man who laid the first stones on the path toward Athenian democracy. His reforms, bold yet measured, overturned most of Draco’s brutal laws and sought to arrest Athens’ descent into political, economic, and moral collapse.

At the dawn of the sixth century BC, Athens teetered on the edge of civil war. The city was riven by staggering inequality. The poor were crushed beneath debts they could never repay; their very bodies and their land were collateral. Across the countryside stood horoi stones... grim markers that signalled bondage, monuments to the living enslaved. The aristocracy, clutching jealously to its privileges, offered no remedy, only the certainty of ruin.

Into this crisis, Solon was elected sole Archon in 594 BC, entrusted with extraordinary power to save the city from tearing itself apart. His genius lay not in siding with rich or poor, but in raising the idea of the polis itself above every faction.

His year as Archon was a storm of legislation. The Seisachtheia... the "shaking off of burdens", was his most dramatic act, cancelling debts and forbidding the enslavement of citizens for loans. Yet this was only the beginning. He reorganised the citizen body into four property classes... pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai, and thetes, each with distinct rights and military obligations, replacing birth with wealth as the measure of political standing. He established the Council of Four Hundred (the Boule) to prepare business for the general assembly (Ekklesia), thus curbing the dominance of the aristocratic Areopagus Council.

Most radical of all, he introduced the right of appeal to a popular court, the Heliaia, giving every citizen the power to challenge a magistrate’s verdict. He drafted laws on inheritance, land tenure, trade, funerary rites, and the export of agricultural goods... inscribing them on revolving wooden axles (axones) displayed openly in the Agora, so that law would no longer be the private knowledge of the few, but the common possession of the many.

The reaction was not acclaim, but restless anger. He had disappointed both sides. The aristocracy felt betrayed, their ancestral privileges cut down and weighed against money. The poor seethed, furious that he had not gone further... had not seized and redistributed the estates of the rich. Solon himself likened his position to that of a wolf at bay, encircled by snapping hounds.

And then, true to principle, he performed the most astonishing act of all. Having remade Athens’ laws, he stepped away from power. He bound the Athenians by oath to keep his constitution for ten years, and then he left the city... not in disgrace, but in deliberate withdrawal. For Solon believed that if his laws were to endure, they must rest not on the authority of the lawgiver, but on the will of the people themselves.

It was in this season of departure that Solon first began to uncover fragments of his ancestry, whispers of a bloodline older than Athens itself. Having bound the Athenians by solemn oath to uphold his laws for ten years, he chose exile... not out of shame, but as an act of service. His absence was as necessary as his laws. He knew that if he remained, the people would look to Solon the man, not to the laws he had inscribed. Justice, he believed, must stand on its own legs, not on the authority of its maker.

Thus, he left Athens as both pilgrim and envoy, seeking the truth of his inheritance while carrying Athens’ name into the courts of kings. His journeys became a catalogue of the ancient world’s empires, its wisdoms, and its failings.

In Egypt, he stood beneath temples older than Greek memory, speaking with the priests of Sais. There he heard the tale of the sunken kingdom of Atlantica, a story that stirred his blood, for it was the first echo of his ancestors beyond Attica’s soil. He sought out hidden clans... keepers of lore and bloodlines half divine, probing for the truth of his own heritage. In Egypt he grasped both the immensity of time and the fragility of civilization, how mighty kingdoms crumble into sand while their stones endure.

From Egypt he sailed to Cyprus, to Aepea, where he advised King Philocyprus on the founding of a new city. The king, honouring his wisdom, renamed it Soloi. Though the dialect of its people would later be mocked as corrupt... giving rise to the word "solecism", the city itself stood as a monument to Solon’s repute as counsellor and lawgiver, even far from home.

Yet his most famous encounter came in Lydia, with Croesus, the golden king whose wealth dazzled the world. Herodotus preserved their meeting: Croesus, robed in splendor, asked Solon whether he had ever seen a man so happy as he. Solon, unmoved by treasure, replied, "Count no man happy until he is dead." For happiness could not be measured by wealth, but only by the sum of a life well-lived, judged in its ending.

Croesus, affronted, dismissed the old lawgiver. But years later, when he was bound upon a pyre by the Persian conqueror Cyrus, he remembered Solon’s words. It is said he cried out, "O Solon, Solon, Solon!"—a testament to the enduring sting of that lesson: that fortune is fickle, and the gods do not reckon happiness as men do.

He journeyed across the lands of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, walking the boundary where myth brushed against history. He met kings and commoners, priests and warriors, and in secret places, the children of sea and shadow. Though he never found the fabled underwater kingdom of Atlantica, he discovered the truth of his Merfolk bloodline. The clans of the deep recognized him, and some entreated him to undergo the ancient rites that would awaken his dormant power. Yet Solon, ever measured, chose to wait. He longed first to live as a man among his people, to walk Athens’ streets as son, friend, and citizen, before returning to the depths to claim the inheritance of his blood.

For ten years he wandered, and when at last he returned, he saw the true test of his labour. His old comrade Peisistratus had seized power as tyrant, and many whispered that this was proof of the failure of Solon’s reforms. But Solon, with the patience of one who understood the long arc of time, saw differently. His laws had taken root. They could be bent, twisted, even smothered beneath a tyrant’s rule... but they could not be erased. The idea of equality under law, once spoken, could not be unsaid.

In his later years, weary of the noise of politics and the ceaseless quarrel of men, Solon chose seclusion. He left Athens once more, vanishing into the horizon, seeking silence, perhaps seeking the sea. Some say he died far from the city he had saved; others whispered that he returned at last to the waters of his ancestry, claimed by the tide.

What remained was not his crown, for he never sought one, but the living framework he left behind. He gave Athens not commands carved in stone, but a constitution supple enough to grow with the city itself. It was Solon who taught Athens to govern not by the will of kings, but by the reason of its people.

And in that gift, his truest inheritance was revealed: not merely the blood of kings and sea-gods, but the wisdom to give away power, so that others might learn to wield it.

In reality, Solon left Athens and journeyed to Kvernheim. There, he awakened his merfolk bloodline and took his place as the Supreme Judge of the Supernatural Council. He authored the very first Supernatural Act, which became the foundation of the current peace within the supernatural community.

There are seven Judges entrusted with upholding law and justice among the supernatural races. Judges serve as both arbiters and executioners, working directly under the Council. They are: Supreme Judge Solon, Judge Hatshepsut, Judge Theodora, Judge Ashoka, Judge Yu, Judge Hammurabi, and Judge Lycurgus.