Draco was so draconian

It's not everyone who gets their name turned into a word which survives for more than 2,600 years. It takes a special sort of person.

The first person to codify the laws of Athens was Draco, who in the generation before Solon, some time around 620BC, was asked to bring together all the traditional laws of Athens to a consistent standard.

Judgements up to that time had been relatively arbitrary (which is why Draco was asked to standardise), so Draco had a wide range of precedents from which to prescribe penalties. He consistently chose the most...draconian.

Someone asked Draco why the penalty for even the slightest crime, even stealing a cabbage, was death. "Small crimes deserve death," he replied, "And I have no greater punishment for the larger crimes."

"Those laws were written not with ink, but in blood," the orator Demades said 300 years later. Demades would probably be forgotten today if he hadn't uttered those immortal words. What is less known about Demades is he was speaking in approval.

One of the first things Solon did when he was asked to write his constitution in 590 was to remove all of Draco's laws except for the homicide law. Which did not stop Athenians from quoting Draco in court when it suited them. There was one case in the 4th century BC in which a defendant for murder used Draco's view on adultery as part of his defense.

Draco was however revolutionary in one way: he introduced the concept of intent to commit a crime, in this instance murder. Draco said homicide could be by intent, or by accident or in self-defense, which today we would call manslaughter. The concept of intent lives today in the legal requirement to prove mens rea, the intent to commit the crime with which you are charged.

Aethiopians

Neither the Greeks nor, as far as I'm aware, any of the ancient people had anything like racism as we know it today, which didn't stop neighbours killing each other from time to time, but they never did it based on colour of skin. You had to be a Hellene to contest the Olympics, but that's only because you needed to be a member of the club. Romans didn't get to join either (unless you were an Emperor capable of executing the Judges of the Games, in which case they might see things your way). In fact of all the other peoples of the word, the Greeks had an especial respect for the Egyptians, in cause of their ancient culture.

To the Greeks, if you came from Africa, then you were either an Egyptian, or an Aethiopian. Aethiopian was their catch-all term for an African.

You might be surprised to hear there were Africans in the Greek lands. Here's an example:


I'm afraid it's not very clear from my poor photography, but this exhibit from the British Museum shows a boy, almost certainly a slave, holding a boot, and the features are African. (The funny shape at his back is a bird). The odds are very good this boy was passed along in the slave markets until he found himself working in Athens.

For some reason I don't understand, the Aethiopians had been an enemy of Hellas stretching back to the Trojan War. The bards sang in the great epic Aethiopis that Memnon, the hero-king of Aethiopia, brought a contingent to fight for the Trojans. Memnon slew Antilochus and was such a warrior that no one could touch him until he was brought down by Achilles himself. Memnon's skill and courage was so great that Zeus granted him immortality. The Greeks had no problem with someone of dark skin being beloved of the Gods and a hero.

Unfortunately Aethiopis has been lost, but it's part of the Trojan cycle and if we had it, it would almost certainly put some of the Iliad in a different light.

More recently, Herodotus recorded that a band of Aethiopians fought for the Great King of Persia when he invaded Hellas. Here's a good example of that:


This is an Aethiopian warrior in the army of Xerxes. You can tell because he's wearing trousers, very much Persian dress. The vase is dated 460-440BC, twenty or so years after the invasion.

Western Digital MyBook Sucks

I am not normally a negative person, so when I say that the Western Digital MyBook network storage system is a revolting piece of vile, slimy bat poo with no redeeming features, you should take it to mean this is a product you wish to avoid.

The cause of my strong emotion is that I bought one of these things a year ago to use for network backup storage and, while it is certainly true that they lied when they said the box has gigabit network connectivitity -- you could inscribe cuneiform on a clay tablet faster than this thing writes -- it did actually manage to accept backups.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when it stopped working, which I didn't notice until yesterday because I don't check backups every day.

I have just spent the last 24 hours struggling to work out what's wrong. With mere days before I go on hols, and then disappear for three weeks leaving my wife to look after the girls, there are better things I could have spent my time doing, but coming from my background I am most unwilling to leave any computer without a working backup system.

As near as I can tell, either the processor or the network circuitry, which has always been marginal, has degraded to the point it's physically incapable of keeping up with the data flow, at which point the controlling software spuriously reports the disk is full, which causes the backup software to bomb out.

So the odds are pretty good that some time tomorrow I'll be buying a new network storage system, and it won't be Western Digital.

3 sleeps until Gary et familia goes on holiday

We're going to be spending a week in the Whitsunday Islands of the Great Barrier Reef before I head off to the US. There's little or no internet where we'll be, so don't be surprised if I disappear for a while. Still a couple of days to go before I disappear, but I'll probably forget to post anything in the crisis of packing so this is the only notice.

A few days after I'm back, I get on a big plane and fly Sydney to Los Angeles to Chicago to Indianapolis without a break. I can't tell you how much I am not looking forward to spending 26+ hours traveling. The only compensation is that the joy of meeting the people at the other end exceeds the pain of the flights.

The world's longest family tree

I was fascinated to see the world's longest family tree has been updated. The tree is the descendants of Confucius. Since Confucius died about 10 years before Socrates was born, this is an incredibly long time ago, almost 2,500 years. There's nothing in the western world to match it. As far as I'm aware the oldest tree in the west is for the intimately connected European royal families, who can be traced back to the Dark Ages but no further. I'm pretty sure there's no Roman whose descendants can be traced, and certainly no Greek. The reason the Confucius tree is known is his descendants were honoured and ennobled by successive generations of Emperors for so long that there are good records.

Of course, after 83 generations the amount of Confucius DNA in each of those people is a tiny fraction: 1 part in 2⁸³ in fact. Since the number of base pairs in human DNA is "only" about 3 billion, which is a mere 2³², that means the amount of surviving Confucius DNA is effectively zero for all but those of direct male lineage. They of course will have the same Y chromosome.