7. The Ancient Greek Who Gave Us the Word Draconian
Ancient Athenian legislator Draco (flourished 7th century BC), nicknamed The Lawgiver, reformed the city’s legal system with law codes and courts to enforce them, which replaced traditional tribal oral laws and blood feuds. The Athenians, who had asked him to come up with a new set of laws, were shocked when he came up with an extremely harsh legal code that punished both serious offenses and trivial ones with death. The severity of his legal system gave birth to the term “draconian”, to refer to exceptionally harsh penalties.
Little is known of Draco’s background, but he was most likely a nobleman. In the 620s BC, he was asked by fellow Athenians to come up with a legal system to replace the private justice one in use at the time, in which rights were enforced by citizens and their relatives. That lent itself to bloody vendettas and chaos, and a law of the jungle in which only the strong and those with connections were protected, while the weak were preyed upon by the powerful. Draco put Athens’ laws in writing and had them published. That reduced the pitfalls of traditional oral laws only known to a select few, and arbitrarily interpreted and applied.
