The permission granted to Athenians to kill with impunity those persons convicted of treason calls into question punishments for Greek crimes. We have already examined that punishment for crimes at Olympia and Delphi often resulted in fines, but outside of panhellenic sites the penalties were more severe, often involving death. In the Mycenaean Age, death by stoning was the common modus operandi (Bonner, 26). In later times, historical sources describe three modes of execution: the chasm, the board, and hemlock (MacDowell, 254-5). If ordered to die via the chasm, the offender was thrown into a pit, though by the fourth century B.C., this was a rare means of death. In the board method, the convicted man was secured by iron collars and nails to an upright wooden board, and was left to die from exposure and starvation. Socrates' death by drinking hemlock is perhaps the most famous enactment of the third execution method, though one must not infer, based on this noted example, that this method was at all common. Thomas Martin, in his overview of Greek history, notes that the Athenian public slaves were responsible for the actual punishment of criminals, and the official executioner for the city-state was also a public slave (Martin, 5.25). If the law did not specify a specific penalty for the slaves to enact, the trial jury decided the sentence's terms (MacDowell, 56).

Perhaps the need to establish solid social organization mandated harsh penalties like death. There were other penalties, though, that to Athenians may have seemed even more severe. For example, lessees failing to pay rent on property could be disenfranchised. Because citizenship was so important to a person's livelihood, outlawry and disenfranchisement were powerful and prevalent punishments. Furthermore, death, outlawry, and disenfranchisement could all be compounded by supplementary penalties like "confiscation of one's property, demolition of one's house, loss of the right to be buried in Attica on death, and disenfranchisement of one's descendants" (MacDowell, 255-6). In keeping with the importance placed on citizenship status, imprisonment was not a common punishment; instead, many culprits were sold into slavery (Vinogradoff, 190).

Ideological differences between ancient and modern punishments do not solely account for the virtual absence of disenfranchisement from modern verdicts; there were political and social forces shaping the Greek psyche that also factored into the equation. The Athenian city-state expanded in both size and capital, and concurrently developed democracy, making penalties like disenfranchisement meaningful in the polis. Thus, only by recognizing the temporal factors shaping poleis' emerging identities can we begin to understand the context of crime and punishment in Olympia and Delphi, and in Greece as a whole.

(Woman in a chamber)
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