DRACO, a celebrated Athenian legislator who flourished in the 7th century B,c. By a strange irony of fate his name has passed into a proverb for an inexorable lawgiver, whose laws were written with blood and not with ink. Modern Greek historians, such as Thirlwall, Grote, and Curtius, have clearly shown that such a character is an utter perversion of fact. Of Draco’s famous code not a single line remains, and all we know of it is derived from a few scattered notices occurring mostly in late Greek authors. Of these the most important is a passage in Plutarch’s life of Solon. After stating that Solon abolished the whole of Draco’s legislation, except in cases of murder, on account of its harshness and severity, Plutarch adds by way of commentary—“Forfor nearly all crimes there was the same penalty of death. The man who was convicted of idleness, or who stole a cabbage or an apple, was liable to death no less than the robber of temples or the murderer.” To the same effect is a traditional saying of Draco by which he justified the rigour of his laws. The least offence, he said, seemed to him deserving of death, and he could devise no greater for the worst crime. It is obvious that the statement of Plutarch is not meant to be accepted as a literal statement of fact, and it is probable that to the most bloodthirsty of Draco’s laws parallels might be quoted from English statutes against vagrancy and theft. All that Draco did was to put in writing the customary laws of his time and nation. It was natural that these laws, the growth of a rude and primitive age, should strike writers of the Augustan age as in discriminative and inhuman. That he made no change in the constitution of Athens we have the express testimony of Aristotle. The judicial changes which he ...