Draconian

The story of the word

Draco wrote Athens's first written law code around 621 BC, and the penalty for almost everything in it, stealing a cabbage included, was death. Plutarch passes on the orator Demades saying the laws were written in blood rather than ink, and Draco's own defence that small offences deserved death and he had nothing worse to give the large ones. His name is the ordinary Greek word for serpent, from δέρκομαι, to look sharply, so a δράκων is the unblinking starer. Solon repealed the whole code within a generation apart from the homicide law, which Athens kept for centuries.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → English

First recorded

19th century