The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 03

by Unknown

These successive encroachments on the royal prerogatives, and the final triumph of the nobles, are almost the only events that fill the meagre annals of Attica for several centuries. Here, as elsewhere, a wonderful stillness suddenly follows the varied stir of enterprise and adventure, and the throng of interesting characters, that present themselves to our view in the heroic age. Life seems no longer to offer anything for poetry to celebrate, or for history to record. Are we to consider this long period of apparent tranquillity, as one of public happiness, of pure and simple manners, of general harmony and content, which has only been rendered obscure by the absence of the crimes and the calamities which usually leave the deepest traces in the page of history? We should willingly believe this, if it were not that, so far as the veil is withdrawn which conceals the occurrences of this period from our sight, it affords us glimpses of a very different state of things. In the list of the magistrates who held the undivided sovereignty of the state, the only name with which any events are connected is that of Hippomenes, the last archon of the line of Codrus. It was made memorable by the shame of his daughter, and by the extraordinary punishment which he inflicted on her and her paramour. Tradition long continued to point out as accursed ground the place where she was shut up to perish from hunger, or from the fury of a wild horse, the companion of her confinement. The nobles, glad perhaps to seize an opportunity so favourable to their views, deposed Hippomenes, and razed his house to the ground.

This story would seem indeed to indicate the austerity, as well as the hardness, of the ancient manners: but on the other hand we are informed, that the father had been urged to this excess of rigour by the reproach that had fallen upon his family from the effeminacy and dissoluteness of its members. Without however drawing any inference from this isolated story, we may proceed to observe, that the accounts transmitted to us of the legislation of Draco, the next epoch when a gleam of light breaks through the obscurity of the Attic history, do not lead us to suppose that the people had enjoyed any extraordinary measure of happiness under the aristocratical government, or that their manners were peculiarly innocent and mild.

DRACO, THE LAWGIVER

[ca. 650-600 B.C.]

The immediate occasion which led to Draco’s legislation is not recorded, and even the motives which induced him to impress it with that character of severity to which it owes its chief celebrity, are not clearly ascertained. We know however that he was the author of the first written laws of Athens: and as this measure tended to limit the authority of the nobles, to which a customary law, of which they were the sole expounders, opposed a much feebler check, we may reasonably conclude that the innovation did not proceed from their wish, but was extorted from them by the growing discontent of the people. On the other hand, Draco undoubtedly framed his code as much as possible in conformity to the spirit and the interests of the ruling class, to which he himself belonged; and hence we may fairly infer that the extreme rigour of its penal enactments was designed to overawe and repress the popular movement which had produced it.

Aristotle observes that Draco made no change in the constitution; and that there was nothing remarkable in his laws, except the severity of the penalties by which they were enforced. It must however be remembered that the substitution of law for custom, of a written code for a fluctuating and flexible tradition, was itself a step of great importance; and we also learn that he introduced some changes in the administration of criminal justice, by transferring causes of murder, or of accidental homicide, from the cognisance of the archons to the magistrates called ephetes; though it was not clear whether he instituted, or only modified or enlarged, their jurisdiction. Demades was thought to have described the character of his laws very happily, when he said that they were written not in ink, but in blood. He himself is reported to have justified their severity, by observing that the least offences deserved death, and that he could devise no greater punishment for the worst. This sounds like the language of a man who proceeded on higher grounds than those of expediency, and who felt himself bound by his own convictions to disregard the opinions of his contemporaries. Yet it is difficult to believe, that Draco can have been led by any principles of abstract justice, to confound all gradations of guilt, or, as has been conjectured with somewhat greater probability, that, viewing them under a religious rather than a political aspect, he conceived that in every case alike they drew down the anger of the gods, which could only be appeased by the blood of the criminal.

It seems much easier to understand how the ruling class, which adopted his enactments, might imagine that such a code was likely to be a convenient instrument in their hands, for striking terror into their subjects, and stifling the rising spirit of discontent, which their cupidity and oppression had provoked. We are however unable to form a well-grounded judgment on the degree in which equity may have been violated by his indiscriminate vigour; for though we read that he enacted the same capital punishment for petty thefts as for sacrilege and murder, still as there were some offences for which he provided a milder sentence, he must have framed a kind of scale, the wisdom and justice of which we have no means of estimating.

[ca. 630 B.C.]

The danger which threatened the nobles at length showed itself from a side on which they probably deemed themselves most secure. Twelve years after Draco’s legislation, a conspiracy was formed by one of their own number for overthrowing the government. Cylon, the author of this plot, was eminent both in birth and riches. His reputation, and still more his confidence in his own fortune, had been greatly raised by a victory at the Olympic games; and he had further increased the lustre and influence of his family by an alliance with Theagenes, the tyrant of Megara, whose daughter he married. This extraordinary prosperity elated his presumption, and inflamed his ambition with hopes of a greatness, which could only be attained by a dangerous enterprise. He conceived the design of becoming master of Athens. He could reckon on the cordial assistance of his father-in-law, who, independently of their affinity, was deeply interested in establishing at Athens a form of government similar to that which he himself had founded at Megara; and he had also, by his personal influence, insured the support of numerous friends and adherents. Yet it is probable that he would not have relied on these resources, and that his scheme would never have suggested itself to his mind, if the general disaffection of the people toward their rulers, the impatience produced by the evils for which Draco had provided so inadequate a remedy, and by the irritating nature of the remedy itself, and the ordinary signs of an approaching change, the need of which began to be universally felt, had not appeared to favour his aims.