The view on adultery and rape

Although Draco's laws were long gone by classical times, his law on adultery and rape is relevant to explain the ancient mindset, which was somewhat weird by our modern standards. My female readers are warned to take some tranquilizers before going on...

A man seducing a married woman could legally be killed, as we saw in the previous post, but if he had raped the wife, then under Draco's laws he would have been subject only to a fine paid to the husband.

The reasoning is that by rape he has damaged the husband's property. (I did warn you about the tranqilizers.) But if she consented then something much worse has happened: the seducer has stolen the wife's affections. Hence rape was the lesser crime.

Notice in both adultery and rape the husband is considered the victim. Xenophon had this to say: When a wife has sexual intercourse by accident (! he means rape), husbands do not honor them the less on this account, if the wife's affection remains unaffected.

A real life Athenian criminal case

Picture the scene: a suspicious husband returns home early and questions his wife's slave. The slave admits, under pressure, that her mistress is having an affair and the adulterous couple are upstairs at that moment. The enraged husband grabs his sword and rushes upstairs. He discovers his wife and her lover naked in bed and kills the man on the spot.

The man's family charge the husband with murder. There are no police in Athens, all prosecutions are carried out by private citizens.

In the ensuing court case, the wife testifies she saw her husband kill her lover.

The house slave testifies as to what happened and says she saw the killing. The slave is tortured as she speaks, as the law requires. A slave required to testify against her owner might lie to avoid later punishment; the immediate pain of torture is intended to overcome the fear of a later beating.

The neighbors testify too, because the suspcious husband had rounded them up as he returned home to act as witnesses when he suspected adultery. They had run upstairs after the husband and they too testify to seeing the husband kill his wife's lover.

The jury, having heard the eye witness reports, instantly dismisses the charges and the husband goes home a free man.

This really happened, in the early 4th century. The husband's name was Euphiletus. The dead lover was Eratosthenes (not the man of the same name who was Librarian at Alexandria a hundred years later). We don't know the name of the wife.

Adultery was illegal. If a man seduced a married woman then the penalty for the man was death. Since, as I said, there was no police force, it was perfectly acceptable for citizens to deliver DIY justice, as long as they were later found to be in the right. If the husband had dragged the body of the man into the street they might have got him for littering, but there was no way this was anything but a legal killing.

However if Euphiletus had not found the lovers in bed, but had later passed Eratosthenes in the street and punched him in the nose, then Euphiletus would have been the one in trouble for assault, because the burden of proof lies with the aggressor. Greek courts gave great weight to independent eyewitness reports, which is why Euphiletus rounded up his neighbors as he went home.

An adulteress could expect to be divorced, but it would have been illegal to kill her since she is not considered responsible for the adultery. Euphiletus has acted within the letter of the law, and the real criminal is dead.

Janet on query letters

My agent Janet Reid was interviewed on the BBC on the subject of query letters. Here's the interview:



The part I enjoyed most was Janet doing a little expectation setting for my fellow author Dan Krokos. Not that Dan has a lot to live up to now or anything (evil laughter in background). I haven't read his book yet, but I will when it's out, which will be some time after he's beaten me in a threatened trivia contest at Bouchercon.

I've preset some posts

I've preset some posts to appear while I'm off lounging about a tropical island. Since my last attempt at doing this resulted in the post order getting jumbled, I'll be interested to see if it works this time.

I promise to read any and all comments when I'm back in a week and a bit!

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.