The divine protection afforded by the sanctuary obviously offers but a temporary refuge from the avenger. The fugitive again encounters the dangers of blood-revenge as soon as he leaves the sacred precincts. Nevertheless, the time that is thus made to elapse between the act and its reprisal tempers the passion of the avenger, and affords an opportunity for negotiations in which the hostile families or clans may arrange that a ransom be paid in satisfaction of the crime that was committed. Moreover, the chief or the temple priest under whose protection the fugitive places himself, is given a direct opportunity for mediating in the capacity of an arbitrating judge, and later, as the political power gradually acquires greater strength, for taking the measures of retribution into his own hands. Revenge, thus, is changed into punishment, and custom is displaced by the norm of law, which grows up out of repeated decisions in the adjudication of similar cases.
Sojourn in a place of refuge resembles imprisonment in that it limits personal freedom. One might, therefore, be inclined to suppose that, through a further development other than that described above, the sanctuary led to a gradual moderation of punishment by introducing the practice of _imprisonment_. Such a supposition, however, is not borne out by the facts. At the time when the transition from the place of refuge into the prison might have taken place, the idea of reducing the death penalty to the deprivation of freedom was still remote. The value which the heroic age placed on the life of the individual was not sufficiently high to induce such a change, and the enforcement of prison penalties would, under the existing conditions, have appeared difficult and uncertain. Hence imprisonment was as yet entirely unknown as a form of punishment. Though the State had suppressed blood-revenge, it showed no less an inclination than did ancient custom to requite not only murder but even milder crimes with death. Indeed, inasmuch as the peaceful mode of settlement by ransom gradually disappeared, it might be truer to say that the relentlessness of the State was even greater than that of blood-revenge. The oldest penal codes were very strongly inclined to impose death penalties. That the famous Draconian laws of Athens became proverbial in this respect was due merely to the fact that other ancient legal codes, though not infrequently more severe, were still unknown. The law of King Hammurabi punished by death any one who stole property belonging to the court or the temple, or even to one of the king's captains; the innkeeper who charged her guests extortionate prices was thrown into the water, and the temple maiden who opened a wine-shop was burned to death. Whoever acquired possession of stolen goods, or sheltered a runaway slave, was put to death, etc. For every crime that was judged to be in any way serious, and for whose expiation a money ransom was not adequate, the law knew only the one penalty, death. The earliest law made no use of custody except in connection with civil justice. The debtor was confined in the house of the creditor. This simply enforced the pledge involved in the shaking of hands at the time when the debt was contracted--an act by which the debtor vowed to be responsible for his debt with his own person.