Drakonian

English Etymology From en Drakon ian; or, with en Drako, a Hellenized spelling of en Draconian. Adjective en Draconian. en 1847 w:George Grote Ionic Portion of Hellas.—Athens before Solon. History of Greece III (part II (Continuation of Historical Greece)) London John Murray,Albemarle Street. 100 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.45364/page/n114/mode/1up 889250025 Probably neither Drako, nor the Lokrian Zaleukus, who somewhat preceded him in date, were more rigorous than the sentiment of the age: indeed the few fragments of the Drakonian tables which have reached us, far from exhibiting indiscriminate cruelty, introduce, for the first time, into the Athenian law, mitigating distinctions in respect to homicide; founded on the variety of concomitant circumstances. en 1990 Philip Brook Manville Laws, Boundaries, and Centralization The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens Princeton, N.J. w:Princeton University Press 1992 (2nd printing) 81 https://archive.org/details/originsofcitizen0000manv/page/81/mode/1up 0-691-09442-X The text of the Drakonian homicide law adumbrates another kind of boundary beginning to form: a public distinction between Athenians and non-Athenians. en 1996 Joseph Michael Bryant Toward Democracy in Athens Moral Codes and Social Structure in Ancient Greece: A Sociology of Greek Ethics from Homer to the Epicureans and Stoics Albany, N.Y. State University of New York Press section 3 (Archaic Greece), subsection I (Social Structure: The Emergence of Polis Society) 68 https://archive.org/details/moralcodessocial0000brya/page/68/mode/1up 0-7914-3042-1 Within a decade of the Kylon affair, the first Athenian lawcode was written down by Drako, no doubt largely in response to the growing political unrest. Little is known of these Drakonian laws apart from their alleged harshness (“written in blood,” tradition records), but codification did provide something of a check against the arbitrariness of themis-giving nobles. en 2015 w:Josiah Ober Citizens and Specialization before 550 bce The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece Princeton, N.J. w:Princeton University Press 2016 (3rd printing) 148 https://archive.org/details/risefallofclassi0000ober/page/148/mode/1up 978-0-691-17314-6 It remains unclear what (if any) other matters were addressed in the laws of Drakon, although in later Athenian legend, he was believed to have prescribed death for a wide range of offenses. Whatever their scope and intent, the Drakonian laws did not lead to a stable social order.