The growing crisis in Athens has forced most Athenians into debt; many have been sold into slavery to foreign lands.

The Athenian oligarchs, facing a serious economic crisis and the possibility of a revolt by the common people against their unpopular rule, give Solon, a well-intentioned liberal aristocrat who had had already held office as archon about 594 BCE, unique powers as “diallaktes,” or mediator, granting him absolute authority to remedy the grave ills afflicting Athens.

His first concern is to relieve the immediate distress caused by debt.

He redeems all the forfeited land and frees all the enslaved citizens, probably by fiat.

Solon in one of his poems describes this measure, known popularly as the “shaking off of burdens”: “These things the black earth … could best witness for the judgment of posterity; from whose surface I plucked up the marking-stones [probably signs of the farmers' indebtedness] planted all about, so that she who was enslaved is now free.

And I brought back to Athens … many who had been sold, justly or unjustly, or who had fled under the constraint of debt, wandering far afield and no longer speaking the Attic tongue; and I freed those who suffered shameful slavery here and trembled at their masters' whims.”

Solon also prohibits for the future all loans secured on the borrower's person, but refuses to go to the length demanded by the poor, which is to redistribute the land.

Instead, he passes measures designed to increase the general prosperity and to provide alternative occupations for those unable to live by farming: e.g., trades and professions are encouraged; the export of produce other than olive oil is forbidden (so much grain has been exported that not enough remains to feed the population of Attica); the circulation of coined money (invented in Solon's lifetime) is stimulated by the minting of a native Athenian coinage on a more suitable standard than that of the coins of neighbors, which had been used hitherto; and new weights and measures are introduced.