Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece PDF
Preview Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece
Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece This page intentionally left blank 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 by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems – without the prior written permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. This book is produced using paper that is made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the 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 This page intentionally left blank 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
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