Episode Summary: In this episode, you will take a tour of Ancient Greece, where the Greeks didn’t invent justice, but did reshape it. Ancient Greece was responsible for transforming justice from a personal matter into a public institution and as a result began a process that laid foundations that still influence modern legal systems today. Learning about Ancient Greece from its beginnings in the Neolithic Age through to the conquering by Rome, Greece brought laws, policing, and corrections to another level not yet seen.

Links: Gallia, A. B. (2004). The Republication of Draco’s Law on Homicide. The Classical Quarterly, 54(2), 451–460. http://www.jstor.org.lcc.idm.oclc.org/stable/3556375

Solon: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Solon

Adler, Virginia (2019). Policing Athens https://hdl-handle-net.lcc.idm.oclc.org/2027/heb09405.0001.001

_________________________

Website: LCC Public Service Careers

From the watchmen of ancient cities, to the rise of modern police forces, and from medieval dungeons to today's correctional institutions, our systems of law enforcement and punishment have shaped societies for centuries. Welcome to Silver & Blue: Tracing the History of Policing and Corrections, the podcast where we will uncover the beginning to the present of policing and corrections. Each episode will explore how justice was enforced, how punishment evolved, and what these legacies mean for us today. Let's step back in time and see how order and disorder came to be.

Welcome to today's podcast. I'm your host, Tami McDiarmid.

And today we will move forward in the BC era and talk about the next in our civilizations that were influential in establishing law, policing and corrections. The next place in our tour is ancient Greece, where many of the ideas we take for granted today were just beginning to form.

The Greeks didn't invent justice, but they did reshape it, transforming it from a personal matter into a public institution and in the process, laying foundations that still influence modern legal systems. Last episode we were in Egypt in the second century BC.

Now let's travel to between 700 to 300 BC and begin learning about another evolution of law, policing and corrections through ancient Greece. To understand Greek law, imagine a society before written statutes, before courtrooms, before judges.

Early Greek justice was rooted in custom and tradition, passed down orally and enforced through family networks. If someone harmed you, it was your responsibility to respond. Justice was personal and retaliation, sometimes violent, was expected.

This one important thing to understand about ancient Greece, it wasn't one country. As Greece grew in its own group of people into sections or valleys, these eventually became city states.

As the centuries progressed, the Grecian Empire grew and and expanded beyond the islands to encompass great swaths of land that would start to grow.

As we get into the time period, we will focus on the way the Greeks settled were in these city states, places like Athens, Corinth, Argos and Sparta all operated as separate and independent of each other. Depending on which century, there was a variety of ways that each city state might be governed.

Monarchy was prominent in some with a king and council to rule. For places like Sparta, they relied on oligarchy.

Two men, both with limited authority to rule an oligarchy that existed in Athens is where we will head to first. That oligarchy at that time appointed one of the ruling members to codify the laws and add what he deemed necessary. Well, that doesn't sound good.

And it wasn't. That person was Draco. He was an Athenian lawgiver whose name still echoes in a word we've all heard before, Draconian.

What made this period important was that Draco's laws were written down and also publicly displayed. For the first time, the rules of society were visible to everyone. Law was no longer the private knowledge of aristocrats.

It became a shared reference point, a foundation for civic life. Now, many of you have heard the word Draconian.

As just mentioned, it refers to the laws that were put into effect by Draco during the seventh century. But it wasn't the laws that were harsh. The laws are the same as some we have already encountered in previous. Theft, adultery, corruption, etc.

It was the punishment that resulted from breaking the laws.

Unlike other civilizations covered so far, where the common punishment was fines, punishment here was death for almost everything from theft to murder.

While surprisingly, the only true proof of Draco's laws today is in the complete written law for homicide, many, many of the other presumed laws, while attributed to Draco, have no proof of existence. Check this week's show notes for more on Draco and the laws he is famous for.

A generation later, into the 6th century, Athens turned to another reformer, Solon. Where Draco had been strict, Solon was strategic.

He understood that Athens was on the brink of of social collapse, economic inequality, political tension, and widespread debt slavery that threatened the city's stability. Solon's reforms were sweeping. He abolished debt slavery, which was common practice. If you owed money, you could be enslaved.

If you could not pay it back. Solon did this by canceling existing debts. Next, he reorganized political classes, all based not on birth, which had been the custom, but on wealth.

This meant that lineage no longer determined political power. This meant allowing for the lower classes to have a voice, which meant helping to decide what happened in society.

And when it came to the legal system, Solon replaced the harshness of Draco's laws with balanced and humane laws. Citizens now had rights, including appealing decisions to a jury court.

He didn't create democracy, but he laid the groundwork for it by giving ordinary Athenians greater access to justice. Solon also encouraged public participation in legal matters. If you witnessed a crime, you were expected to speak up.

Justice became a shared responsibility, not just a government function. It was during this time, Solon was making the changes. Another thing came as a result of this.

Due to the shift of justice from the few elites to the wider citizenry, Athenian law had evolved into a system unlike anything else in the ancient world. Trials were held before large juries, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Can you imagine a jury in the hundreds? We can hardly seat 12.

There were no professional lawyers at this time. Citizens got to argue their own cases, often with speeches crafted by professional writers. Can you imagine citizens arguing their own cases?

What a circus. These trials were dramatic, emotional, and deeply public. They weren't just determining guilt or innocence.

They were about reinforcing the values of the community. The courtroom became kind of a civic theater where Athenians performed their identity as citizens. Law in this sense, wasn't just a set of rules.

It was a cultural expression of what it meant to belong to the polis or society. Well, now that we have the foundations of law in ancient Greece, let's shift from law to policing.

To do that, we have to set aside our modern assumptions. Ancient Greece did not have a centralized police force.

There were no uniformed officers patrolling the streets, no investigative units, and no detectives. Because ancient Greece was made up of different city states, each handled order and crimes the same, but different.

The main concept for Greece was that maintaining order was a shared civic duty. As you recall, Greek city states were small, tightly knit communities. Citizens were expected to regulate themselves and each other.

Think neighborhood watch on steroids. A large armed force controlled by the state would have been seen as a threat to freedom. So let's think about that concept.

What about how things are done now? So policing emerged in a very different form, one that blended civic responsibility, public officials, and, in some cases, enslaved labor.

Remember, enslaved labor during ancient times was not unheard of. The closest thing to a formal police force in ancient Greece appeared in athens during the 5th century BCE.

The city employed a group of 300 Scythian slaves, often called archers or rod bearers. Those were clubs, by the way. Their role was practical, not investigative.

They maintained order during public gatherings, like parades or kings gatherings. They guarded government buildings, managed prisoners. They carried out arrests, assisted magistrates in enforcing the regulations of the city state.

These individuals were chosen precisely because they were not citizens, because they were enslaved. They were not part of the Grecian society. They had no political loyalties, no family ties, and no reason to favor one Athenian over another.

Their neutrality made them effective enforcers of public order. Even with the Scythian archers, policing in Athens relied heavily on citizens.

Remember, Scythian archers handled practical tasks for Example, if your home was robbed, you didn't call the police. You investigated the crime yourself. You gathered evidence, found witnesses and brought the case to court.

If an arrest was to be made, then the Scythian archers would be called to make an arrest. It was this system that reinforced a core Greek freedom comes with responsibility. To be a citizen was to be an active guardian of the community.

Now, this is an example of only what Athens did. Other city states had their own approaches.

Sparta, for example, developed the Krypteia, a secret organization of young Spartan men who acted as internal enforcers. Their primary role was to control the population, sometimes through violence. This was policing as social control, not public service.

As I mentioned earlier, because Greece was broken into city states, policing reflected the values and priorities of each polis society and city state. So now we know. Corrections in ancient Greece looked nothing like modern systems. The Greeks did not use prisons as punishment.

Instead, they saw imprisonment as a temporary measure, a way to hold someone until a trial, ensure payment of a fine, or enforce compliance with a court order. There was a main reason prisons were not used as punishment. The Greeks believed punishment should be visible, immediate and public.

A prison sentence didn't achieve that. It hid the offender away and consumed resources without benefiting the community. So to Greeks, punishment happened outside the prison walls.

So let's see what this punishment actually looked like. First up, fines were the most common form of punishment.

They were flexible and could be scaled to the offense, so what the offender did could be taken into consideration when the fine was being levied. That's a novel thought. However, failure to pay a fine could lead to temporary imprisonment or loss of your rights.

However, on the other end of the spectrum, exile was one of the harshest penalties in Athens. To be exiled was to lose your home, your community, and your identity as a citizen.

In a society where citizenship was central to personal identity, exile was devastating. Athens also practiced ostracism, a unique form of temporary exile.

Once a year, citizens could vote to banish someone for 10 years, not for a crime, but for being a potential threat to the state. It was a political safety valve designed to prevent tyranny. We will find this in common as we work our way through the ages.

Moving forward, exile becomes less harsh depending on the time in society. But it still took you away from family and community, which was still a central part of who people were in this time.

Some punishments were designed to humiliate rather than harm. A person might be forced to stand in a public place, wear certain symbols, or pay fines publicly. These penalties reinforced community norms.

And discouraged repeat offenses. Think do we do those kinds of things now? Last execution was rare, but used for serious crimes like treason or sacrilege.

Physical punishment was more common in militaristic states like Sparta, where discipline and obedience were central to the society. Ultimately, Greek corrections wasn't about rehabilitation. They were about protecting the community, preserving order, and reinforcing civic identity.

Punishment was a tool for maintaining the balance of the polis, or society.

That wraps up today's episode of Silver & Blue: Tracing the History of Policing and Corrections. This podcast is produced by LCC Connect. You can listen to other podcasts in the LCC Connect family by going to LCCconnect.com. If you want to listen to this podcast on Demand, go to LCCConnect.com and visit the Silver & Blue webpage. Until next time, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep the dialogue alive.