Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece

248 Pages·2008·1.38 MB·English

by  Zinon Papakonstantinou

Lawmaking and Adjudication
in Archaic Greece
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Lawmaking and Adjudication
in Archaic Greece

Zinon Papakonstantinou

Bristol Classical Press
Published by Bristol Classical Press 2012
Bristol Classical Press, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsburyacademic.com
Copyright © Zinon Papakonstantinou 2008
First published by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. 2008
The author has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identi ed as the author of this work.
ISBN: 978 0 715 63729 6
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croyden, CR0 4YY
Caution
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or
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retrieval systems – without the prior written permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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country of origin.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii

I. Greek Law and Greek Laws 1
Law and the everyday 4
The unity of Greek law 12

II. Law and Justice in Early Archaic Greece 19
Before the law 20
Divine justice 37
Beside the law 41
Conclusion 45

III. The Enactment of Law 47
Creating the law 51
The lawgivers 63
Conclusion 68

IV. Law in the Courts 71
Literacy, orality and law in archaic Greece 73
The judicial powers of civic officials 83
Dikasta< and other judicial authorities in archaic Greece 87
Popular courts in archaic Greece 93
The logistics of adjudication 99
Conclusion 101

V. Law in Everyday Life 105
Against the law 107
Perjury and negligence: the manipulation of archaic
legal systems 112
(a) The oath 112
v
Cont ents
(b) Judges and magistrates 121
(c) Judicial curses 123
Conclusion 125

Conclusion 127
Appendix: From qesmÒj to nÒmoj: the terminology
of archaic Athenian law 133
Notes 137
Bibliography 193
Index Locorum 225
General Index 229
vi
To Elif
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Preface and Acknowledgments
Every history book is a product of its age. The choice of subject-matter
and theoretical foundations of our books are as important as the evidence
we use to support our arguments, even if we think that we are not being
‘theoretical’ at all. This is plainly evident from the fact that over the past
half-century (and in many cases, long before that), widely divergent
interpretations of the history and literature of the Greco-Roman world
have been propagated that are based, in most cases, on an essentially
fixed corpus of primary evidence. I am a firm believer that, since all
scholarship is informed and largely defined by some form of theory and a
set of pre-conceptions, it will be far more conducive to the advancement
of scholarly discourse if we explicitly acknowledge and discuss our
epistemological foundations instead of sweeping them under the carpet in
silence. In this spirit, Chapter I adopts a format and tone that might
appear polemical to some. It is not meant to be; I wish only to make clear
to the reader where this study is coming from, why, in my opinion, it was
worth writing it, and how its interpretative framework differs from that of
other books on the laws and legal systems of archaic Greece. The
methodology that informs most of the book is then assumed for the rest of
the chapters, without however being expounded as openly as in Chapter I.
In other words, Chapter I is an author’s guide to how the book should be
read. On the other hand, I am very much aware of the fact that even if a
reader adopts this particular reading of the book, it will not necessarily
commit him/her to a similar reading of all the evidence on archaic law.
Yet if the book provokes readers to think about archaic law in a different
way (not necessarily in the way I suggest here), and stimulates some
scholarly debate, then this endeavour will have been successful.
For the sake of convenience, I have chosen to present and discuss most
of the evidence in roughly chronological order, as far as possible. There is
nothing teleological implied in this choice; it is predicated on the working
hypothesis that, as conditions of life change over time, so do perceptions
and practices of law. Wider historical developments are noted when
ix