Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 19, 2025
In the eye of divine purity the offender, by this crime, may be the vilest of the vile, but if the Redeemer of the world refused to denounce the punishment of death against one taken in the act, it devolved not on this Scottish Draco to render it a capital crime.
"Sire," he cried, with tears in his eyes, "you will live to remember the day on which you have been restored from exile, given back to your people, reestablished on the throne of your ancestors by the hands of your monks, and crowned by them with the august crest of the Dragon. King Crucho, may you equal the glory of your ancestor Draco the Great!"
Athens had her days of severity and cruelty, too, under Draco, who established her first laws. But the people rebelled, and in 594 B.C. Solon, a man of great sagacity, prepared a constitution, which was a model of wisdom, justice, and even of gentleness. The government established by Solon was an aristocratic Republic, in which the common people had no part.
History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same time, simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the Lawgiver, Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is clear, direct, and limpid, and offers no obscurity. But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account.
The laws of Draco were too severe, but they had no others to govern the city. While they were hesitating, not knowing what to do, Cy´lon, an Athenian citizen, tried to make himself king. His first move was to gather together a few of his friends, and go secretly to the Acropolis, or fortress of Athens, which he took by surprise.
The acts of some of these how they warred with their husbands and were worsted; how they provoked the presiding Draco, and stultified the attesting policeman by obstinately ignoring their injuries, written legibly in red, and black, and blue; how they interceded with many sobs for the aggressor are they not written in the book of the chronicles of Bow-street and Clerkenwell?
Hence they were said to have been written not in ink but in blood; and we are told that he justified this extreme harshness by saying that small offences deserved death, and that he knew no severer punishment for great ones. The legislation of Draco failed to calm the prevailing discontent.
Where persons and things agreed with these, being sympathetic to their rules and regulations, they naturally belonged to "the house beautiful" of her creed, for they must be good: where they ran counter to such standards of merit, which were upheld by laws as unvarying and unchangeable as those of the Medes and Persians, and administered by a judge as stern as Draco they were, they must be evil; and were, therefore, cast out into the outer darkness that existed beyond her sacred Lares and Penates.
The great law-givers, Lycurgus, Draco, Solon, Beamish, sorrowfully acknowledge that they have had recourse to infernal agents, after they have thus purified their circle of an offender. Doctors confess to the same of their physic. The expelling agency has next to be expelled, and it is a subtle poison, affecting our spirits.
One feature seemed familiar; a winged serpent Draco encircled it about the place which, on a terrestrial globe, is occupied by the equator: but on the other hand, a good part of the upper hemisphere was covered by the outspread wings of a large figure whose head was concealed by a ring at the pole or summit of the whole.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking