The concept of lawbreakers being confined in prison as punishment is so ingrained in our way of thinking that it might not even occur to most people that there are other ways of doing things. But in ancient Greece, prison wasn't viewed as a valid form of punishment at all.
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00:00In ancient Greece, the saying, don't do the crime if you can't do the time, didn't necessarily
00:04apply. Greeks in the Classical Era didn't use prison as a long-term solution for dealing
00:08with convicted criminals. Let's take a look at what punishments they had in store.
00:13Turns out that imprisonment as we know it, as a form of punishment, was extremely rare in
00:17ancient Greece. For the Athenians, the Greeks whom we know the most about, it really didn't exist at
00:23all. They had other, more preferred forms of punishment that they considered less of a hassle,
00:27which we're going to be discussing. But people were sometimes jailed in ancient Greece.
00:31The main reasons for imprisonment were pretrial or pre-execution detention. For these detentions,
00:37Athens had a dedicated building referred to as the Desmoterion. Still, a person awaiting
00:41trial or execution might not be sent there and instead simply be put under strict surveillance.
00:47Because ancient Greeks thought about punishment in a different way than we do,
00:50their views on prison were different, too. Whereas nowadays, prison sentences are usually served for
00:56reform, retribution for a crime committed, or to deter more wrongdoing, for the Greeks,
01:00punishment in prison were mainly about seeking redress for the victim.
01:04In fact, the Athenians didn't have a public district attorney to bring criminal cases
01:08before the state. In the vast majority of Athenian criminal court cases from the era
01:12we still have record of, the charges were brought before the court by the victim himself.
01:16So for the Athenians, anger was the basis of law.
01:20But what sort of punishments were actually used to appease that anger?
01:23According to the Center for Hellenic Studies, that depended on the severity of the crime.
01:27Some of the most common included fines, public humiliation in the stocks for a set period of
01:32time, and temporary or total loss of civic freedoms, such as voting. The Greeks also
01:36had nastier punishments, including confiscation of property, even to the extent of straight-up
01:41burning down a person's house, banishment from the city, and, of course, death.
01:45As for imprisonment, it wasn't really a direct punishment for criminal offense,
01:49usually just ordered when sentenced people had to pay fines but couldn't afford them.
01:53In fact, exile was the most prominent punishment for serious crimes in Greece.
01:58Exile served roughly the same purpose that prison does for us, removing wrongdoers from society.
02:04But not every person living within the confines of Athens was afforded the luxury of the state
02:08penal system when a crime was committed. That was because of the strict class division between
02:13landholding adult males and everyone else. As the Center for Hellenic Studies says,
02:17women had no political rights to lose, so their punishments for crimes were commonly losing access
02:22to temples and religious festivals. They could serve on juries, but if called as defendants,
02:27men would have to speak on their behalf. Male non-citizens residing in Athens could be subject
02:32to any of the male citizen punishments like fines and the stocks, but they couldn't be
02:36disenfranchised since they had no voting rights. Slaves, of course, incurred the harshest penalties
02:42of all. If a slave was convicted of a crime, the master might be fined and the slave would
02:46be executed. The less severe punishments were whippings, beatings, and imprisonment in millhouses.
02:52Like it is today, murder was a big deal in ancient Greece. In fact, the Greeks thought
02:56it had to be atoned for thoroughly or it would undermine the entire community. As
03:00Mythology Unbound explains it, this blood guilt was known as miasma, a sort of God-sent contagion
03:06resulting from murder. According to the newspaper Ani Sua at the University of Sydney, this guilt
03:10infected the perpetrator and anyone who came in contact with him or her. The only way to remove
03:15the stain of miasma was by exiling the wrongdoer and conducting a purge outside the community.
03:20This curse of blood guilt is at the center of a number of prominent Greek myths and dramas,
03:25most notably the Oedipus and Oresteia trilogies.
03:28The ancient Athenians generally reserved the death penalty for the most serious of crimes,
03:33including murder, blasphemy, and corrupting public morals, the last of which was used
03:38in the conviction of the famous philosopher Socrates, whom we'll get to a bit more later.
03:42"...Socrates. Hey, we know that name."
03:46"...Yeah! Hey, look him up!"
03:49This restricted use of the death penalty wasn't always the case, however.
03:53As Ancient World Magazine explains, the earliest known written laws of the Athenians,
03:57devised by the lawgiver Dracon, proposed death as a punishment for just about any crime,
04:02hence our modern term draconian referring to a particularly strict set of laws or rules.
04:06However, by the Classical era, even manslaughter was typically punished by
04:10exile rather than execution. There were three typical methods of execution we're aware of.
04:15The first was throwing people into a deep pit, though this was out of fashion by the
04:194th century BCE. The next, and probably most common, was a little-understood device called
04:24a tympanon, a board of some kind to which a criminal was fastened and, depending on various
04:29modern interpretations, was either beaten to death, exposed to the elements, or strangled
04:33in a kind of bloodless crucifixion. The third method is probably the most famous because of
04:38its use on Socrates, drinking hemlock, a deadly poison. Yet despite its renown,
04:42this method was rarely used, due in part to the great expense of procuring hemlock.
04:47Just because the Athenians didn't typically use prison as a major form of criminal punishment
04:51doesn't mean it was out of their minds. In fact, one of Athenian's most famous thinkers,
04:55the philosopher Plato, a pupil of Socrates, theorized at some length about the very subject
05:00in his last, longest philosophical work, the laws. In this dialogue, three men — an Athenian,
05:06a Spartan, and a Cretan — work together, trying to create a set of laws for a new Cretan colony
05:10called Magnesia. In typical Platonic fashion, the three men apply discussions on ethics,
05:15theology, and metaphysics to practical concerns of legislation, such as rules on drunkenness,
05:20hunting, and whether or not you can prosecute suicide. In Book 9, the discussion turns to the
05:25topics of justice and punishment. The Athenian proposes six forms of punishment, including death,
05:30exile, and — an innovation for the time — imprisonment. He proposes three types of prisons
05:36within the state, each suggesting a different level of penal severity. One, a common prison
05:40within the city center for general offenders. Next, the house of reformation for those whose
05:44crimes are judged to be the result of ignorance rather than malice. And finally, an isolated
05:49prison in the wilderness, where the offender is permanently exiled.
05:54Since we know from the records of various law cases in Athens, there was, in fact,
05:57a public building that served as a dedicated prison space. What was that building actually
06:02like? Well, thanks to archaeology, we might have a pretty good idea.
06:06As Harry's Greece Travel Guide explains, in the southwest corner of the Athenian Agora,
06:10there are the ruins of a building that might just have been the Athenian Desimatorium.
06:14The building is surrounded by workshops and homes. But the fact it wasn't simply
06:18another house or workshop is evidenced by its unusual floor plan. That's because most homes
06:23in ancient Greece and Rome feature rooms laid out around a central courtyard, whereas this building
06:27is made up of a long hallway with five rooms on one side and three on the other.
06:32It seems likely that these were the eight holding cells of the Athenian jailhouse.
06:36One room at the end of the corridor has a large earthenware jar for water,
06:39suggesting that it was a bathroom of some kind, while another room has a cistern into which 13
06:44small bottles had been thrown after use. These bottles are believed to have contained the hemlock
06:49used in the execution of some criminals. It is entirely likely that this was the very building
06:54where Socrates died.
06:56Because classical Athens didn't have a public prosecutor, any citizen could bring charges
07:00against someone they felt had wronged them. The complainant would deliver a summons orally in the
07:04presence of witnesses, who would then require the accused to appear before a judicial magistrate
07:09known as a king archon at a particular date and time. The archon would subsequently hear both
07:13sides of the issue and decide if the lawsuit was valid under the law. If so, a preliminary hearing
07:19would take place in front of a magistrate, where the charge and the defense were both read out,
07:23followed by a round of questions from the magistrate. If the magistrate found the
07:26accusation to be sound, formal charges and a public trial date would be set.
07:30The trial would take place in front of an enormous jury between 500 and 1,500 male
07:35citizens over the age of 30, chosen at random from a pool of volunteers. Pretty democratic.
07:41Silence! Silence for the hero of Marathon! This is a democracy, not a street fight.
07:47The charges would be read again, at which point the defendant would have a chance to answer them.
07:51The jury would then vote, first on the defendant's guilt and then, in the case of a conviction,
07:55on the sentencing, deciding between punishment suggested by both the accuser and the defendant.
08:01Though the Athenians had the death penalty, they were pretty lenient in carrying out punishments,
08:05including the death penalty, according to the Center for Hellenic Studies.
08:08In most cases, even murder, exile was often considered a harsh enough punishment,
08:13so convicts scheduled for execution were often given an opportunity to escape to another country.
08:18It was, in fact, expected that convicted felons would break out of prison.
08:21It was such an expected part of the process that there was even the option given to a defendant
08:26on trial for murder simply to leave the country rather than to risk the death penalty.
08:30Part of the reason Athens was so willing and even eager to let a prisoner on death row escape
08:34had to do with the concept of miasma, or blood guilt. The thinking was,
08:38better to avoid having someone's blood on your hands if you can manage it.
08:41It was reflected in their relatively bloodless methods of execution — pit,
08:45poison, strangulation on a weird device. But the safest way not to bring a blood
08:49curse on your city is not to kill someone at all.
08:52The most famous trial in Greek history is that of philosopher Socrates,
08:56who was put on trial in Athens in 399 BCE. As Famous Trials points out, the trial was notable
09:02because it was a capital trial not over murder, but rather over corrupting the morals of Athenian
09:07youth through the teaching of philosophy. While most of what we know about Socrates
09:10comes through the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, the comedic play The Clouds,
09:14by Socrates' friends Aristophanes, gives us a pretty good idea of the public's perception of
09:19Socrates — eccentric, dreamy, and condescending. Opinions turned darker when some of his former
09:24students became terrifying tyrants, which suddenly made Socrates' teaching seem more
09:28dangerous than charmingly eccentric. It was the poet Miletus who drew up the official
09:32charges against Socrates, claiming that his teachings had a corrupting and undemocratic
09:37influence on the youth of the day. The trial took place over the course of about 10 hours
09:41in the People's Court in front of a jury of 500 men. His accusers spent their three allotted hours
09:46pointing out Socrates' alleged political sins and religious blasphemies, such as saying the
09:51sun and moon weren't gods, but rather celestial bodies.
09:54"'All we are is dust in the wind, dude.'"
10:02Socrates' response to his accusers is one of the most famous legal speeches in history,
10:07with versions recorded by both Plato and Xenophon, though Plato's is the better known.
10:11The speech is known as the Apology, but it's important to understand that in Greek,
10:15this word means defense, because Socrates was anything but meek in addressing his accusers,
10:20whom he mocks and corrects over the course of his speech.
10:23According to famous trials, Socrates didn't even ask for mercy, as most defendants would have done.
10:28He said that begging for one's life was a disgrace both to oneself and to the justice system.
10:33In the end, Socrates was found guilty, 280 votes to 220.
10:37When the penalty phase of the trial began, it was time for each side to propose a punishment.
10:42Miletus and the others skipped exile entirely and proposed death. Socrates,
10:46spiteful of the entire process, suggested that his punishment be the state buying him
10:50dinner every day for the rest of his life. When forced to pick a real punishment,
10:54he proposed a nominal fee. This mockery of the system upset the jurors more than his crime,
10:59so he was sentenced to death by a vote of 360 to 140.
11:03Unwilling to flee his fate, Socrates drank hemlock in his prison cell and died in 399 BCE.