Draco and Solon: the first laws of Athens

Imagine a town where only a few rich families know the rules, and those same families have the right to explain them. That, roughly, was Athens in the 7th century BC. The nobles, the εὐπατρίδαι, knew the law and said what it meant. Ordinary people could not check it.

Around 621 BC, when Aristaechmus was the year's chief magistrate (ἄρχων), the Athenians gave a man called Draco, Δράκων, the job of making laws. For the first time the rules were written down, and anyone could turn to them. This was a big change: the law now existed outside the memory of the powerful.

We know very little about these laws. Later Greeks remembered them for one thing, their severity. Aristotle says in the Politics (1274b) that there was nothing in them worth mentioning except their heavy punishments.

The famous stories come from Plutarch, writing centuries later. In his Life of Solon (17), almost every offence carries the death penalty: idlers die, and so do people who steal salad or fruit. The orator Demades joked that Draco's laws were written not with ink but with blood. Asked why, Draco is said to have replied that small crimes deserved death, and he could find nothing heavier for great ones.

Historians treat this with caution. The Foundation of the Hellenic World calls death for all crimes rather exaggerated, and thinks that loss of citizen rights or exile was probably more common. The one law we can actually read concerns killing, φόνος, and it is more careful than the legend: ‘even if anybody kills anybody not from forethought, he shall be exiled’.

The Constitution of the Athenians (7.1) says that this law stayed in use when the rest were dropped; it calls Draco's rules θεσμοί and Solon's νόμοι. In 409/8 BC the Athenians copied the law onto a stone stele in front of the Royal Stoa. The damaged stone (EM 6602) is in the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, but editors warn that we cannot tell how far it keeps Draco's own wording.

Draco's laws did not calm Athens. According to the Constitution of the Athenians, attributed to Aristotle (ch. 2), the land was in few hands. Poor farmers, the ἑκτήμοροι or ‘sixth-parters’, worked rich men's land for a share of the crop, and loans were secured on the borrower's own body. A man who could not pay could be seized with his children.

Around 594/3 BC the two sides chose Solon, a noble of middling wealth and a poet, as mediator and ἄρχων. His first measure was the σεισάχθεια, from σείω ‘shake’ and ἄχθος ‘burden’. Debts were cancelled and lending on the person was forbidden (6.1). In a poem quoted in the treatise (12.4), Solon says that he pulled up the boundary stones, ὅροι, planted across the Black Earth, once a slave and now free, and that he brought home people sold abroad, some of whom no longer spoke Attic.

The details are uncertain. Plutarch (15) reports that Androtion thought only the interest was reduced, while most writers spoke of full cancellation. Modern historians still argue about who the ἑκτήμοροι were, what share they paid and what the ὅροι marked, and N. G. L. Hammond argued for a second commission, in 592/1 BC, for the wider laws.

The treatise says Solon kept four property classes, measured by the yearly produce of a man's land: πεντακοσιομέδιμνοι, ἱππεῖς, ζευγῖται and θῆτες. Offices went to the top three, in proportion to wealth. The θῆτες, the labourers, could only sit in the assembly and the courts. It also credits him with a council, a βουλή, of 400 (8.4). The treatise names three features as his most democratic: no loans on the person, the right of anyone to seek justice for a wronged person, and appeal to the jury-court, ἡ εἰς τὸ δικαστήριον ἔφεσις (9.1).

His laws were written on the κύρβεις and set up in the Royal Stoa. The treatise says they were fixed for a hundred years (7.2), Herodotus says ten (1.29). Solon then left Athens for ten years, so as not to be pressed to change them. Neither side was satisfied: the poor had hoped for a share-out of land, and the nobles for the old order (11.2).

The quarrels went on. In the thirty-second year after his laws, Peisistratus seized the Acropolis (14.1). Athens became a democracy only after Cleisthenes, in 508 BC. Yet the words remain: Greeks still do their θητεία, a word related to θῆτες, and their parliament is the Βουλή.