Draco (lawgiver)

Dracon redirects here. In fiction, it may refer also to the home world of the Dracs.

Draco
Born	circa 650 BC
Died	unknown
Residence	Athens, Ancient Greece
Occupation	Legislator
Known for	Draconian constitution

Draco ( /ˈdreɪkoʊ/; Greek: Δράκων, Drakōn) (circa 7th century BC) was the first legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece. He replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud by a written code to be enforced only by a court. Because of its harshness, this code also gave rise to the term draconian.

Life

During the 39th Olympiad, in 621 or 620 BC, Draco established the legal code with which he is identified.

Little is known about his life. He probably belonged to the Greek nobility of the Attica deme called the Eupatridae,^{[citation needed]} with which the 10th-century Suda text records him as contemporaneous, prior to the period of the Seven Sages of Greece. It also relates a folkloric story of his death in the Aeginetan theatre. In a traditional ancient Greek show of approval, his supporters "threw so many hats and shirts and cloaks on his head that he suffocated, and was buried in that same theatre".

Aristotle specifies that Draco laid down his legal code in the archonship of Aristaechmus (Ἀρισταίχμος) in 620 or 621 BC.

The Draconian constitution

The laws (θεσμοί - thesmi) he laid down were the first written constitution of Athens. So that no one would be unaware of them, they were posted on wooden tablets (άξονες - axones), where they were preserved for almost two centuries, on steles of the shape of three-sided pyramids (κύρβεις - kyrbis).^{[citation needed]} The tablets were called axones, perhaps because they could be pivoted along the pyramid's axis, to read any side.

The constitution featured several major innovations:

• Instead of oral laws known to a special class, arbitrarily applied and interpreted, all laws were written, thus made known to all literate citizens (who could make appeal to the Areopagus for injustices):

[...] the constitution formed under Draco, when the first code of laws was drawn up. (Aristotle: Athenian Constitution, Part 5, Section 41)

• The laws distinguish between murder and involuntary homicide.

The laws, however, were particularly harsh. For example, any debtor whose status was lower than that of his creditor was forced into slavery.^{[citation needed]} The punishment was more lenient for those owing debt to a member of a lower class. The death penalty was the punishment for even minor offences. Concerning the liberal use of the death penalty in the Draconic code, Plutarch states:

It is said that Drakon himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offences, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones.

All his laws were repealed by Solon apart from the one dealing with homicide.

Draco's Law of Homicide

After much debate from the Athenians, it was decided to revise the laws, including the homicide law, in 409. The homicide law is a highly fragmented inscription, but it does state that it is up to the victim’s relatives to prosecute a killer. According to the preserved part of the inscription, unintentional homicides receive a sentence of exile, while intentional murders are punishable by death. Apart from the inscriptions very little is known about Draco’s background or the nature of most of his laws. However, the significance of his work was prevalent when most of his laws were successfully abolished by Solon.

See also

• Ancient Greek law
• Hammurabi, a Babylonian who wrote some of the earliest codes of law
• List of Ancient Greeks
• List of eponymous laws (those named after their inventor)

References

• Roisman, Joseph, and translated by J.C Yardley, Ancient Greece from Homer to Alexander (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011) ISBN 1405127767

Further reading

• Carawan, Edwin (1998). Rhetoric and the Law of Draco. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York City: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-198-15086-2. 
• Gagarin, Michael (1981). Drakon and Early Athenian Homicide Law. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02627-6. 
• Gagarin, Michael; Cohen, David (editors) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81840-7. 
• Maine, Sir Henry Sumner (1963). Ancient Law – Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. Boston: Beacon Press. OCLC 1310967. 
• Phillips, David (2008). Avengers of Blood: Homicide in Athenian Law and Custom from Draco to Demosthenes. Stuttgart: Steiner. ISBN 978-3-515-09123-7. 
• Stroud, Ronald S. (1968). Drakon's Law on Homicide. Berkeley: University of California Press. OCLC 463502977.