Draco was, as wwh's first post indicates, a codifier of Athenian customary law, not a writer of a new code (the confusion may be related to the insertion of a forged "Constitution of Draco" into the Athenian Constitution attributed to Aristotle). Interestingly, what little knowledge of archaic Greek customary law we have suggests that the punishment was not death, but outlawry (atimia), a formal abandonment of the criminal to the vengeance of the victim or the victim's kin.

Draco was probably not hated; we should note that politically, this was an age of rebellion against the established aristocratic order in Greece. The poets of the age praise turannoi (those who seized power, the origin of our word "tyrant") for bringing eunomia (etymologically "good order", but used to merely "order") and dike ("justice"). Interestingly, the words that were used in opposite to "justice" meant "caprice"; the middle class (such as it was) apparently preferred a defined role, how limited and harsh, to being the playthings of the nobility.