Draco's Law Code (621 BC): The First Written Laws of Athens

Draco’s law code, issued in Athens around 621 BC, was the city’s first written collection of laws. Before it, justice was in the hands of aristocratic magistrates who applied unwritten custom. Draco’s laws became proverbial for their severity, giving English the word draconian, but their real importance was that the law was now fixed in writing and the state, rather than feuding families, took charge of punishing homicide.

Background: Athens in the seventh century BC

In the late seventh century BC Athens was ruled by a narrow aristocracy, the Eupatridae or “well-born”. Power lay with nine archons, chief magistrates chosen each year from noble families, and with the council that met on the Areopagus hill. Ordinary farmers had little protection when disputes went before these noble judges.

Law was oral. Judges decided cases by custom, which they alone claimed to know, and this made their rulings hard to challenge. Across the Greek world in this period, communities began to demand written laws; lawgivers such as Zaleucus of Locri in southern Italy and Charondas of Catana in Sicily are associated with similar codes.

Writing itself was still fairly new in Greece, where the alphabet had been adopted from the Phoenicians in the eighth century BC. Recording laws publicly was one of its most important early uses.

Causes: the Cylonian affair and blood feud

The immediate background was violence among the elite. Around 632 BC (dates of c. 636–632 BC are proposed) an Olympic victor named Cylon tried to make himself tyrant by seizing the Acropolis of Athens. The coup failed. Cylon escaped, but his followers, who had taken refuge as suppliants at an altar, were killed after being promised their lives.

Responsibility was laid on the archon Megacles and his family, the Alcmaeonidae, who were declared polluted and cursed. The killings set off cycles of revenge between noble families. Under traditional custom, the relatives of a murdered person were expected to take vengeance themselves.

Historians generally see Draco’s code, and especially its homicide law, as a response to this crisis: a way to end feuds by giving killings a fixed public procedure.

What the code contained

The Constitution of the Athenians, a work of Aristotle’s school written in the 330s–320s BC, dates Draco’s legislation to the archonship of Aristaechmus, which corresponds to 621/620 BC. The laws are said to have been displayed on wooden boards or pillars known as axones and kyrbeis.

Little of the text survives apart from the homicide law. Later writers state that the code covered theft, idleness and other offences, and that the penalty for most of them was death. Plutarch says that even someone convicted of stealing cabbages or fruit was punished like a temple robber or murderer.

The fourth-century orator Demades is reported by Plutarch to have said that Draco’s laws were written not in ink but in blood. Plutarch also records that Draco, asked why he fixed death for most crimes, replied that small offences deserved it and he had no heavier penalty for larger ones. Both remarks were recorded centuries later and should be treated as tradition rather than verified fact.

The homicide law

Draco’s law on homicide is the one part of his work we can still read. In 409/408 BC, during a review of Athenian law, the city had it copied onto a marble stele. The inscription, known to scholars as IG I³ 104, is damaged but legible in part.

Its most important feature is the distinction between deliberate and unintentional killing. A person who killed without intent was to go into exile. He could be pardoned and allowed to return if the victim’s close relatives, such as the father, brothers or sons, agreed unanimously.

Cases were judged by a panel of 51 judges called the ephetai, and the relatives of the victim were responsible for bringing the prosecution. The law also protected an exiled killer from being murdered outside Athenian territory. In practice, this replaced private revenge with a public legal process, the central achievement of the code.

Key people

• Draco: an Athenian about whom almost nothing personal is known; he may have held office as a thesmothetes, one of the junior archons responsible for law.
• Cylon: the would-be tyrant whose failed coup in the 630s BC helped create the crisis.
• Megacles: the Alcmaeonid archon blamed for the killing of Cylon’s followers.
• Solon: the lawgiver who replaced most of Draco’s laws around 594 BC.

Consequences

Writing the laws down did not end social conflict in Athens. Debt, land shortage and the enslavement of poor farmers for debt continued to divide rich and poor. Within a generation the crisis led to the appointment of Solon, whose reforms of 594 BC repealed all of Draco’s laws except those concerning homicide.

The homicide law, by contrast, lasted. Fourth-century orators still cited it as “the law of Draco”, and Athenian courts continued to apply its principles throughout the classical period.

Legacy

For the Athenians themselves, Draco stood at the start of their legal tradition. When the democracy reviewed and recodified its laws at the end of the fifth century BC, it went back to Draco’s homicide law as an authoritative text, a sign of how much respect it still commanded nearly two hundred years after it was written.

Modern historians value the code for different reasons. Although the inscription itself was carved in 409/408 BC, it preserves the wording of one of the oldest European laws that can still be read, and it shows early Greek ideas about intent, responsibility and pollution. The idea that unintentional killing deserves a lesser penalty than murder, and that a court rather than the family decides, became standard in later legal systems.

In English, “draconian” has been used since the nineteenth century for laws or measures seen as excessively severe. The word survives in everyday political and legal language, often by people who know little of the Athenian lawgiver behind it.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Draco wrote a democratic constitution. Chapter 4 of the Constitution of the Athenians describes a full “Draconian constitution” with property qualifications and a council of 401. Most historians regard this as a later invention, probably from political debates of the late fifth or fourth century BC; Aristotle’s Politics says Draco simply gave laws to an existing constitution.
• Myth: Draco was smothered by his admirers. A Byzantine tradition preserved in the tenth-century Suda says that he died on Aegina when grateful citizens threw so many cloaks over him in a theatre that he suffocated. There is no early evidence for this story.
• Fact: the code’s harshness is well attested by tradition. Ancient writers agree that his penalties were severe, even if particular anecdotes cannot be checked.

Timeline

• c. 632 BC: Cylon’s attempt to seize the Acropolis fails; his followers are killed.
• 621/620 BC: Draco issues his written laws in the archonship of Aristaechmus.
• c. 594/593 BC: Solon repeals Draco’s laws except the homicide law.
• 409/408 BC: The homicide law is republished on a marble stele.
• 330s–320s BC: The Constitution of the Athenians records the date of Draco’s code.
• c. AD 100: Plutarch’s Life of Solon preserves stories about the code’s severity.

Why it matters

Draco’s code marked a turning point in Western legal history: law in Athens became written, public and, at least in principle, the same for everyone. His homicide law shows the community taking over justice from private vengeance, a principle at the heart of later legal systems. Comparable steps were being taken elsewhere in Greece, as in the traditions of Lycurgus of Sparta, but Draco’s name alone passed into everyday language as a byword for harsh rules.