Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/150

126 of historic details, we shall be able to detect the fermentation which called for the entrusting of abnormal power to an individual arbiter, and to see something of the use he made of it, as well as of the excellent results he left behind him.

The period of fermentation begins at Athens towards the close of the seventh century. Three successive events illustrate its progress.

The first of these (though their order is indeed somewhat uncertain) is the appearance for the first time of a code of written law, attributed to the aristocrat Draco, in the year 621 B.C. The recent discovery of the Aristotelian treatise on the Athenian constitution has so far only added confusion to our ignorance of this man and his work; for the new account is so strange, and so much in contradiction with what little we knew before, that grave suspicions have been aroused as to the real origin and application of the chapter which contains it. But for us at present it will suffice to note the simple fact that law is now for the first time in Athenian history set down in writing, and the task entrusted to a leading individual with full powers. About the same time, or later, we find the same phenomenon in other parts of Hellas. The lawgivers of the age, such as Zaleucus of Locri in Italy, and Charondas of Catana in Sicily, do not indeed offer an exact analogy to Draco; they correspond rather with Draco's great successor. But the lesson for us is the same in all these cases, and also in the