Single Mother of a Werewolf Baby

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Athens’ name into the courts of kings. His journeys became a catalogue of the ancient

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

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

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

when he was bound upon a pyre by the Persian conqueror Cyrus, he remembered Solon’s words. It is said he cried out,