In ancient Greece, the saying “don't do the crime, if you can't do the time” didn’t necessarily apply.
Greeks in the Classical Era didn’t use prison as a long-term solution for
dealing with convicted criminals. Let’s take a look at what punishments they had in store.
Turns out that imprisonment as we know it – as a form of punishment - was extremely
rare in ancient Greece. For the Athenians, the Greeks whom we know the most about,
it really didn't exist at all. They had other, more-preferred forms of punishment
that they considered less of hassle, which we're going to be discussing.
But people were sometimes jailed in ancient Greece. The main reasons for imprisonment
were pre-trial or pre-execution detention. For these detentions,
Athens had a dedicated building, referred to as the desmoterion. Still, a person awaiting
trial or execution might not be sent there and instead simply be put under strict surveillance.
Because ancient Greeks thought about punishment in a different way than we do,
their views on prison were different too. Whereas nowadays prison is usually served for reform,
retribution for a crime committed, or to deter more wrongdoing, for the Greeks,
punishment and prison were mainly about seeking redress for the victim.
In fact, the Athenians didn’t have a public district attorney to bring criminal cases
before the state. In the vast majority of Athenian criminal court cases from the
era we still have record of, the charges were brought before the court by the victim himself.
So for the Athenians, anger was the basis of law.
But what sort of punishments were actually used to appease that anger?
According to the Center for Hellenic Studies, that depended on the severity of the crime.
Some of the most common included fines, public humiliation in the stocks for a set
period of time, and temporary or total loss of civic freedoms such as voting.
The Greeks also had nastier punishments, including confiscation of property (even to the extent
of straight up burning down a person's house), banishment from the city, and, of course, death.
As for imprisonment, it wasn’t really a direct punishment for criminal offense – usually just
ordered when the sentenced people had to pay fines but couldn’t afford them.
In fact, exile was the most-prominent punishment for serious crimes in Greece.
Exile served roughly the same purpose that prison does for us: removing wrongdoers from society.
But not every person living within the confines of Athens was afforded the luxury of the state
penal system when a crime was committed. That was because of the strict class division
between land-holding adult males and everyone else. As the Center for Hellenic Studies says,
women had no political rights to lose, so their punishments for crimes were
commonly losing access to temples and religious festivals. They could serve
on juries but if called as defendants, men would have to speak on their behalf.
Male non-citizens residing in Athens could be subject to any of the male-citizen punishments
like fines and the stocks. But they couldn’t be disenfranchised since they had no voting rights.
Slaves, of course, incurred the harshest penalties of all.
If a slave was convicted of a crime, the master might be fined and the slave would be executed.
The less-severe punishments were whippings, beatings, and imprisonment in mill houses.
Like it is today, murder was a big deal in ancient Greece. In fact, the Greeks
thought it had to be atoned for thoroughly, or it would undermine the entire community.
As Mythology Unbound explains it, this blood guilt was known as miasma, a sort of god-sent contagion
resulting from murder. According to the newspaper Honi Soit at the University of Sydney, this guilt
infected the perpetrator and anyone who came in contact with him or her. The only way to remove
the stain of miasma was by exiling the wrongdoer and conducting a purge outside the community.
This curse of blood guilt is at the center of a number of prominent Greek myths and dramas,
most notably the Oedipus and Oresteia trilogies.
The ancient Athenians generally reserved the death penalty for the most serious of crimes,
including murder, blasphemy, and corrupting public morals – the last of which was used
in the conviction of the famous philosopher Socrates, whom we'll get to a bit more later.
“Socrates.”
“Hey, we know that name.”
“Ya. Hey, look him up.”
This restricted use of the death penalty wasn't always the case, however. As Ancient World
Magazine explains, the earliest known written laws of the Athenians, devised by the lawgiver Dracon,
proposed death as the punishment for just about any crime (hence our modern term
"draconian" referring to a particularly strict set of laws or rules). However,
by the Classical Era, even manslaughter was typically punished by exile rather than execution.
There were three typical methods of execution we're aware of. The first was throwing people
into a deep pit, though this was out of fashion by the fourth century BCE.
The next, and probably most common, was a little-understood device called a tympanon,
a board of some kind to which the criminal was fastened, and–depending
on various modern interpretations–was either beaten to death, exposed to the elements,
or strangled in a kind of bloodless crucifixion. The third method is probably the most famous,
because of its use on Socrates: drinking hemlock, a deadly poison. Yet despite its renown,
this method was rarely used, due in part to the great expense of procuring hemlock.
Just because the Athenians didn't typically use prison as a major form of criminal punishment
didn't mean it was out of their minds. In fact, one of Athens's most famous thinkers,
the philosopher Plato, a pupil of Socrates, theorized at some length about that very subject
in his last, longest philosophical work, the Laws. In this dialogue, three men–an Athenian,
a Spartan, and a Cretan–work together trying to create a set of laws for a new Cretan colony called Magnesia.
In typical Platonic fashion, the three men apply discussions on ethics,
theology, and metaphysics to practical concerns of legislation,
such as rules on drunkenness, hunting, and whether or not you can prosecute a suicide.
In Book 9, the discussion turns to the topics of justice and punishment. The Athenian proposes six
forms of punishment, including death, exile, and–an innovation for the time–imprisonment.
He proposes three types of prisons within the state, each suggesting a different level of penal
severity: one, a common prison within the city center for general offenders; next, the "House
of Reformation," for those whose crimes are judged to be the result of ignorance rather than malice;
and finally, an isolated prison in the wilderness, where the offender is permanently exiled.
Since we know from the records of various law cases in Athens that there was, in fact,
a public building that served as a dedicated prison space,
what was that building actually like? Well, thanks to archaeology, we might have a pretty good idea.
As Harry's Greece Travel Guide explains, in the southwest corner of the Athenian agora,
there are the ruins of a building that might just have been the Athenian desmoterion.
The building is surrounded by workshops and homes. But the fact it wasn't simply
another house or workshop is evidenced by its unusual floor plan. That's because most
homes in ancient Greece and Rome featured rooms laid out around a central courtyard,
whereas this building is made up of a long hallway with five rooms on one side and three on the other.
It seems likely that these were the eight holding cells of the Athenian jailhouse.
One room at the end of the corridor has a large earthenware jar for water, suggesting that it was
a bathroom of some kind, while another room has a cistern into which 13 small bottles had been
thrown after use. These bottles are believed to have contained the hemlock used in the execution
of some criminals. It is entirely likely that this was the very building where Socrates died.
Because classical Athens didn’t have a public prosecutor, any citizen could bring charges
against someone they felt had wronged them. The complainant would deliver a summons orally in
the presence of witnesses, who would then require the accused to appear before a
judicial magistrate known as a King Archon at a particular date and time. The Archon would
subsequently hear both sides of the issue and decide if the lawsuit was valid under the law.
If so, a preliminary hearing would take place in front of a magistrate, where the charge and
the defense were both read out, followed by a round of questions from the magistrate.
If the magistrate found the accusation to be sound, formal charges and a public trial date
would be set. The trial would take place in front of an enormous jury–between 500 and 1,500 male
citizens over the age of 30, chosen at random from a pool of volunteers. Pretty democratic.
"Silence!" "Silence for the hero of Marathon!"
"This is a democracy, not a street fight."
The charges would be read again, at which point the defendant would have the chance
to answer them. The jury would then vote: first on the defendant's guilt, and then,
in the case of a conviction, on the sentencing,
deciding between punishments suggested by both the accuser and the defendant.
Though the Athenians had the death penalty, they were pretty lenient in carrying out punishments,
including the death penalty, according to the Center for Hellenic Studies.
In most cases, even murder, exile was often considered a harsh-enough punishment,
so convicts scheduled for execution were often given an opportunity to escape to
another country. It was, in fact, expected that convicted felons would break out of prison.
It was such an expected part of the process, that there was even the option given to a defendant on
trial for murder simply to leave the country rather than risk the death penalty.
Part of the reason Athens was so willing–and even eager–to let a prisoner on death row
escape had to do with that concept of miasma, or blood guilt. The thinking was,
better to avoid having someone's blood on your hands if you can manage it. It was
reflected in their relatively bloodless methods of execution–pit, poison, strangulation on a weird
device–but the safest way not to bring a blood curse on your city is not to kill someone at all.
The most famous trial in Greek history is that of the philosopher Socrates, who was put on trial in
Athens in 399 BCE. As Famous Trials points out, the trial was notable because it was a
capital trial not over murder, but rather over corrupting the morals of Athenian youth through
the teaching of philosophy. While most of what we know about Socrates comes through the writings of
his students Plato and Xenophon, the comedic play The Clouds by Socrates’s friend Aristophanes gives
us a pretty good idea of the public’s perception of Socrates: eccentric, dreamy, and condescending.
Opinions turned darker when some of his former students became terrifying tyrants,
which suddenly made Socrates's teachings seem more dangerous than charmingly eccentric.
It was the poet Meletus who drew up the official charges against Socrates, claiming that his
teachings had a corrupting and undemocratic influence on the youth of the day. The trial
took place over the course of about 10 hours in the People's Court in front of a jury of 500 men.
His accusers spent their three allotted hours pointing out Socrates's alleged political sins and
religious blasphemies, such as saying the sun and moon weren't gods, but rather celestial bodies.
“All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”
Socrates's response to his accusers is one of the most famous legal speeches in history,
with versions recorded by both Plato and Xenophon, though Plato's is the better known. This speech
is known as the Apology, but it's important to understand that in Greek, this word means defense,
because Socrates was anything but meek in addressing his accusers, whom he mocks and
corrects over the course of his speech. According to Famous Trials, Socrates didn't even ask for
mercy, as most defendants would have done. He said that begging for one's life was a disgrace
both to oneself and to the justice system. In the end, Socrates was found guilty, 280 votes to 220.
When the penalty phase of the trial began, it was time for each side to propose a punishment.
Meletus and the others skipped exile entirely and proposed death. Socrates, spiteful of the entire
process, suggested that his punishment be the state buying him dinner every day for the rest of his life.
When forced to pick a real punishment, he proposed a nominal fine. This mockery of the
system upset the jurors more than his crime, so he was sentenced to death by a vote of 360 to 140.
Unwilling to flee his fate, Socrates drank hemlock in his prison cell and died in 399 BCE.
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