XIII. They say also that when Mimnermus had written:—
Happy’s the man who ’scapes disease and care, And dies contented in his sixtieth year
Be guided now by me, erase this verse, Nor envy me if I’m more wise than you. If you write thus, your wish would not be worse, May I be eighty ere death lays me low.
The following are some lines out of his poems:—
Watch well each separate citizen, Lest having in his heart of hearts A secret spear, one still may come Saluting you with cheerful face, And utter with a double tongue The feigned good wishes of his wary mind.
As for his having made laws, that is notorious; he also composed speeches to the people, and a book of suggestions to himself, and some elegiac poems, and five thousand verses about Salamis and the constitution of the Athenians; and some iambics and epodes.
XV. And on his statue is the following inscription—
Salamis that checked the Persian insolence, Brought forth this holy lawgiver, wise Solon.
He flourished about the forty-sixth Olympiad, in the third year of which he was archon at Athens, as Sosicrates records; and it was in this year that he enacted his laws; and he died in Cyprus, after he had lived eighty years, having given charge to his relations to carry his bones to Salamis, and there to burn them to ashes, and to scatter the ashes on the ground. In reference to which Cratinus in his Chiron represents him as speaking thus:—
And as men say, I still this isle inhabit, Sown o’er the whole of Ajax’ famous city.
There is also an epigram in the before mentioned collection of poems, in various metres, in which I have made a collection of notices of all the illustrious men that have ever died, in every kind of metre and rhythm, in epigrams and odes. And it runs thus:—
The Cyprian flame devour’d great Solon’s corpse Far in a foreign land; but Salamis Retains his bones, whose dust is turned to corn. The tablets of his laws do bear aloft His mind to heaven. Such a burden light Are these immortal rules to th’ happy wood.
XVI. He also, as some say, was the author of the apophthegm—“Seek excess in nothing.” And Dioscorides, in his Commentaries, says, that, when he was lamenting his son, who was dead (with whose name I am not acquainted), and when some one said to him, “You do no good by weeping,” he replied, “But that is the very reason why I weep, because I do no good.”