Who was the Draco whose laws were first called draconian?

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From time to time various legislation is criticized as being draconian. 

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that before draconian appeared in English in 1876 people had been using the word draconic since around 1700.

In the Harry Potter books and movies Draco Malfoy is one of the evil characters. I am not sure why J. K. Rowling gave him the name Draco, but let’s explore a little.

In Greek and then in Latin the root draco gave us the word dragon and there is a constellation of draco in the northern skies.

The Draco from whom we get draconian however, lived in Greece a little more than 600 years BC.  He has been blamed for having created extremely cruel laws which is why his name is sometimes invoked when criticizing laws.

Another Greek guy named Demades lived a couple of hundred years after Draco said that Draco’s laws were written in blood. It is true that in a long list of legal infractions the predominant punishment was death.

One wonders if that ancient Greek Draco was named Draco because he was a dragon of a man.

But in this I wonder if Draco is getting a bit more of the blame than he deserves.  The way things stood back in Draco’s day were that the legal statutes were enforced as they were understood, but since until Draco came along, no one had ever written them down, so it was easy to misunderstand them.

Just look at how lawyers these days can argue for months over the meaning of a law that was presumably written with the intention of being precise.

Now think how difficult it must have been to remain a law abiding citizen back in the days when the law was locked up in a judges head.

Draco didn’t invent the laws, he just wrote them down.

They were harsh but it’s likely that they had been harsh in the period before Draco.

This was just the first opportunity people had to get to know how harsh they really were—and that was enough to make Draco famous.