This paper offers a brief overview of detectable references to vertical social mobility in Homer, Hesiod, and Solon. It concludes that although the ideological contrast between the agathoi and the kakoi must have been a crucial socio-political factor in the archaic period, it was constantly undermined by upward and downward social mobility. More specifically it is argued that one endemic social problem of the archaic Greek cities seems to have been the existence of the ambitious and successful kakoi who could consider themselves agathoi but were not regarded as such by their communities and in particular by their local elites. In the last section of this paper, the implications of these conclusions for our interpretation of Solon’s census classes are preliminarily discussed.