Book of the Magistrates of the Athenians

was before Solon, and he instituted such severe laws against the wicked that for any small theft, any person was punished by death, whence it was accustomed to be said commonly that Draco had written the laws not with ink but with human blood. And who will believe that under such severity of law, being in the Republic for so long, so many wicked and malign persons (for in every century the saying of the poet is true, that the worst things win) had no one paying the penalty for their wickedness? Certainly, it cannot be. But if someone will say that Pliny wants to mean in the Areopagus, that is in Athens, it will hardly be able to be true, inasmuch as before the Empire of the Greeks, the affairs of the Persians, of the Assyrians, of the Indians, of the Egyptians, and of the Syrians had already fallen, which, without imposing penalty on the wicked, would not have been able to endure for so long. Whence it seems that Pliny in this place does not speak the truth, which is not to be marveled at, inasmuch as he being a Senator and occupied in the charges of the Republic, he could hardly write what he had collected. Everything is full of the authority of this Senate among the authors; an oration of Demosthenes against Aristocrates speaks of it openly, to which I refer the reader.

Of the Nomothetes. Cap. V.

THE name of nomothetos lawgiver comprises many generations of dignity, which I will declare before I come to say anything else. I find according to Suidas that there were three Nomothetes among the Athenians: Draco, Solon,