John Malcolm Mitchell

“ Up to his time the laws of Athens were unwritten, and were administered arbitrarily by the Eupatridae. As at Rome by the twelve Tables, so at Athens it was found necessary to allay the discontent of the people by publishing these unwritten laws in a codified form, and Draco, himself a Eupatrid, carried this out. According to Plutarch (Life of Solon) : “For 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.” ”

“ Again, it is unlikely that Solon, a democratic reformer, would have reverted from a democratic wealth’ qualification such as is attributed to Draco, to an aristocratic birth qualification. Thirdly, if Draco had instituted a hoplite census, Solon would not have substituted citizenship by birth. (4) The terminology of Draco’s constitution is that of the 5th, not the 7th, century, whereas the chief difficulty of Solon’s laws is the obsolete 6th-century phraseology. ”

“ It has been said that the qualification of the strategus was ten times that of the archon. This, reasonable in the 5th, is preposterous in the 7th century, when the archon was unquestionably the supreme executive official. ”