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In this work, one of Latin America's most renowned legal philosophers conducts a comprehensive survey of the ancient Greek understanding of the law, drawing on texts by poets (Hesiod), philosophers (Anaximander), playwrights (Aeschylus and Sophocles), and historians (Herodotus and Thucydides). The book ends with a finely detailed analysis of the relationship between language and reality in Aristotle, and the emergence of the notion of the system and its subsequent introduction into Roman law. The author's in-depth study of all these aspects makes this volume an essential reference for philosophers, jurists, and historians.

Derecho e Historia indisolublemente unidas en esta obra El Derecho Natural y el Reinado de Edipo Rey; dos Ciencias que tienen en común mucho más de lo que parece, son dinámicas, para nada estáticas, en continuo cambio con continuas aportaciones que nos hacen pensar que ambas son, un continuo volver a empezar; cuyos objetivos principales son el conocimiento y la mejora del ser humano en sociedad. A través de este libro nos acercamos a conceptos como el Derecho Griego (Arcaico y Clásico), el Derecho Natural, a la mitología, a las leyendas, a la tragedia, incluso al psicoanálisis. Un verdadero compendio de conceptos que al final forman un macropuzle en el cual todo finaliza encajando. Un libro ameno, de fácil lectura que acerca tanto a entendidos como a profanos en la materia a las Ciencias anteriormente referidas. Al ser humano nada de lo que ocurre en su entorno le es ajeno. Ni el más leve aleteo de una mariposa dejará de sentirse en todo el Universo. El Derecho, en suma, lo que pretende como objetivo principal es mejorar la vida del ser humano y de crear una sociedad más justa y equitativa; en la cual se dé a cada cual lo suyo. Eso, a lo largo de la Historia ha tenido una génesis y una evolución.

Was passiert, wenn Menschliches - teils auch allzu Menschliches - und Juristisches auf der Komödienbühne der Antike aufeinandertreffen? Die Beiträger des vorliegenden Bandes präsentieren zu dieser Frage sieben Fallstudien, wovon vier im Rahmen eines Oberseminars über das Thema'Menschen und Recht in der griechischen und römischen Komödie'im Sommersemester 2011 an der Universität Göttingen unter der Leitung der beiden Herausgeber stattfanden. Sie wollen zeigen, wie in der griechischen und römischen Komödie - von Aristophanes bis Terenz - menschliche Beziehungen und juristische Gegebenheiten sich zu'dramatischen'Handlungsabläufen verbinden, die bis heute nicht an Aktualität eingebüßt haben.

This timely volume brings together leading scholars and rising researchers in the field to examine the role played by the law in thinking and practice in the legal system of classical Athens. The aim is not to find a single perspective or method for the study of Athenian law but to explore the subject from a variety of different angles. The focus of the collection on ‘use and abuse'raises fundamental questions about the status of law in the Athenian constitution as well as the use of law(s) in the courts, the nature of law itself, and the elusiveness of a definition of ‘abuse'. An introduction sketches the major developments in the field over the last century.

Le tribunal de l'Héliée est une des institutions les plus importantes de la démocratie athénienne aux Ve et IVe siècles avant J.-C. Au début de chaque année, six mille Athéniens, non professionnels, sont tirés au sort et jugent la grande majorité des affaires de la cité. Mais, contrairement au Conseil des Cinq Cents, à l'Aréopage et même à l'Assemblée du peuple, on ne peut pas identifier l'Héliée dans les faits à une assemblée précise de six mille juges. C'est exactement sur ce point que s'impose sa particularité et donc son intérêt. En proposant un travail consacré à l'Héliée, ce livre suit la mise en place progressive de cette institution depuis la première époque qui offre un contexte favorable à l'organisation d'une justice démocratique aux changements apportés aux procédures judiciaires au cours du IVe siècle avant J.-C. L'Héliée est sans doute un espace institutionnel dont la fonction est de résoudre les conflits judiciaires qui sont nés dans le cadre de la communauté athénienne. Toutefois, elle constitue en même temps un lieu de transformation de la cité, puisqu'elle est intégrée dans la continuité de ses pratiques. Le destin croisé de la polis et de son tribunal invite ainsi à examiner le rôle dynamique de l'Héliée dans la vie d'Athènes : les procès intentés, les acteurs concernés, les chefs d'inculpation et leur issue interagissent souvent avec les débats au sein de l'Assemblée, l'influence des orateurs, les conditions politiques, les périodes de rupture et de tension. L'angle d'attaque est chronologique et met en lumière les problèmes spécifiques qui se posent à chaque période. La démarche repose sur l'analyse des témoignages anciens et examine si les modèles intellectuels utilisés jusque-là pour traiter de l'Héliée sont vraiment pertinents. Le livre permet d'aborder la question du rapport qui s'est développé au cours des siècles entre justice et politique et donne à réfléchir sur ce rapport aujourd'hui.

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The ancient Greeks invented written law. Yet, in contrast to later societies in which law became a professional discipline, the Greeks treated laws as components of social and political history, reflecting the daily realities of managing society. To understand Greek law, then, requires looking into extant legal, forensic, and historical texts for evidence of the law in action. From such study has arisen the field of ancient Greek law as a scholarly discipline within classical studies, a field that has come into its own since the 1970s. This edited volume charts new directions for the study of Greek law in the twenty-first century through contributions from eleven leading scholars. The essays in the book's first section reassess some of the central debates in the field by looking at questions about the role of law in society, the notion of “contracts,” feuding and revenge in the court system, and legal protections for slaves engaged in commerce. The second section breaks new ground by redefining substantive areas of law such as administrative law and sacred law, as well as by examining sources such as Hellenistic inscriptions that have been comparatively neglected in recent scholarship. The third section evaluates the potential of methodological approaches to the study of Greek law, including comparative studies with other cultures and with modern legal theory. The volume ends with an essay that explores pedagogy and the relevance of teaching Greek law in the twenty-first century.

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Douglas M. MacDowell (1931–2010) was a scholar of international renown and the articles included here cover a significant area of classical scholarship, discussing Athenian law, law-making and legal procedure, Old Comedy, comedy and law, politics and lexicography. All of these articles, published between 1959 and 2010, bear the characteristic marks of his scholarship: precision, balanced judgement, brevity and deep learning; they are rational and sober accounts of complicated and controversial issues. Many of these essays are virtually inaccessible as they were originally published in celebratory volumes or article collections which are now out of print or difficult to find outside major libraries. This collection of MacDowell's articles will make these works available to a broad scholarly audience, and make it easier to bring this scholarship to the classroom as part of courses in Classics, ancient history, legal history and theatre studies. The volume includes a biography of MacDowell by Christopher Carey, based on the testimony of his closest colleagues and personal friends, which was presented to the British Academy.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. At the heart of this volume are three trials held in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The defendants were all women and in each case the charges involved a combination of ritual activities. Two were condemned to death. Because of the brevity of the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise charges are unclear, and the reasons for taking these women to court remain mysterious. Envy, Poison, and Death takes the complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a a riddle to be solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the changing factors—material, ideological, and psychological—that may have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the dual role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which communities identified people and activities that were dangerous, and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials reveal a vivid picture of the socio-political environment of Athens during the early-mid fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in women's status and behaviour, and attitudes to ritual activities within the city. The volume reveals some of the characters, events, and even emotions that would help to shape an emergent concept of magic: it suggests that the boundary of acceptable behaviour was shifting, not only within the legal arena but also through the active involvement of society beyond the courts.

Having demonstrated that about a third of the speeches in our corpus of forensic oratory were written for delivery by synegoroi rather than main parties, the author investigates the way in which synegoroi and main parties divided the argumentation between them in individual cases. She shows that trials of major political importance were conducted by teams of pleaders, and she concludes that such legal actions are best understood as team-based contests rather than as rhetorical confrontations between individual members of the Athenian élite. The implications of this for our overall understanding of the Athenian democracy and the political part played by the courts are discussed, and it is suggested as a possibility that team-based public actions offered a wider scope for participation by ordinary citizens than is normally allowed by modern historians.

Solon (c 658-558 BC) is famous as both statesman and poet but also, and above all, as the paramount lawmaker of ancient Athens. Though his works survive only in fragments, we know from the writings of Herodotus and Plutarch that his constitutional reforms against the venality, greed and political power-play of Attica's tyrants and noblemen were hugely influential-and may even be said to have laid the foundations of western democracy. Solon's legal injunctions covered the widest range of topics and issues: economics and labour; sexual morality; social issues; and society and politics. Yet despite their fame and influence (and Solon's life and work generated a lively reception history), no complete edition of these writings has yet been published. This book offers the definitive critical edition of Solon's laws that has long been needed. It comprises the original Greek fragments with English translations, commentaries, a comprehensive introduction and important comparative Latin texts. It will be enthusiastically welcomed by specialists in ancient Greek language and history.

Much has been written about the world's first democracy, but no book so far has been dedicated solely to the study of enmity in ancient Athens. Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens is a long-overdue analysis of the competitive power dynamics of Athenian honor and the potential problems these feuds created for democracies. The citizens of Athens believed that harming one's enemy was an acceptable practice and even the duty of every honorable citizen. They sought public wins over their rivals, making enmity a critical element in struggles for honor and standing, while simultaneously recognizing the threat that personal enmity posed to the community. Andrew Alwine works to understand how Athenians addressed this threat by looking at the extant work of Attic orators. Their speeches served as the intersection between private vengeance and public sanction of illegal behavior, allowing citizens to engage in feuds within established parameters. This mediation helped support Athenian democracy and provided the social underpinning to allow it to function in conjunction with Greek notions of personal honor. Alwine provides a framework for understanding key issues in the history of democracy, such as the relationship between private and public realms, the development of equality and the rule of law, and the establishment of individual political rights. Serving also as a nuanced introduction to the works of the Attic orators, Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens is an indispensable addition to scholarship on Athens.

The Law of Ancient Athens contains the principal literary and epigraphical sources, in English, for Athenian law in the Archaic and Classical periods, from the first known historical trial (late seventh century) to the fall of the democracy in 322 BCE. This accessible and important volume is designed for teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ancient Greek world, the history of law, and the history of democracy, an Athenian invention during this period. Offering a comprehensive treatment of Athenian law, it assumes no prior knowledge of the subject and is organized in user-friendly fashion, progressing from the person to the family to property and obligations to the gods and to the state. David D. Phillips has translated all sources into English, and he has added significant introductory and explanatory material. Topics covered in the book include homicide and wounding; theft; marriage, children, and inheritance; citizenship; contracts and commerce; impiety; treason and other offenses against the state; and sexual offenses including rape and prostitution. The volume's unique feature is its presentation of the actual primary sources for Athenian laws, with many key or disputed terms rendered in transliterated Greek. The translated sources, together with the topical introductions, notes, and references, will facilitate both research in the field and the teaching of increasingly popular courses on Athenian law and law in the ancient world.

In this volume, Mirko Canevaro studies the'state'documents (laws and decrees) preserved in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus. These documents purport to be Athenian statutes and, if authentic, provide invaluable information about Athenian history, law, and institutions. Offering a comprehensive account of the presence of the documents in the corpora of the orators and in the manuscript tradition, this volume summarizes previous scholarship and delineates a new methodology for analyzing the documents. Examining the documents found in Demosthenes'On the Crown, Against Meidias, Against Aristocrates, Against Timocrates, and Apollodorus'Against Neaera, the core of the volume, which includes a chapter by Edward M. Harris, provides a guide for the reliability of the individual documents, and advances new interpretations of important Athenian laws, such as homicide regulations, legislative procedures, laws on theft, seduction, naturalization, and outlawry. Canevaro argues that some of the documents have been inserted into the speeches in an Athenian environment at the beginning of the third century BC and are therefore reliable, while many others are later forgeries. These forgeries are early products of the tradition of historical declamations and progymnasmata, and could be used as evidence of Hellenistic oratory and rhetorical education.

The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens examines how the Athenians attempted to enforce and apply the law when judging disputes in court. Recent scholarship has paid considerable attention to the practice and execution of Greek law. However, much of this work has left several flawed assumptions unchallenged, such as that Athenian law was primarily concerned with procedure; that the main task of enforcement lay in the hands of private citizens; that the Athenians used the courts not to uphold the law but to pursue personal feuds; and that the Athenian courts rendered ad hoc judgments and paid little attention to the letter of the law. Drawing on modern legal theory, the author examines the nature of'open texture'in Athenian law and reveals that the Athenians were much more sophisticated in their approach to law than many modern scholars have assumed, and thus breaks considerable new ground in the field. At the same time, the book studies the weaknesses of the Athenian legal system and how they contributed to Athens'defeat in the Peloponnesian War. By reexamining the available evidence, Edward Harris provides a much needed corrective to long-held views and places the Athenian administration of justice in its broad political and social context.

Il metodo di indagine chiamato nei paesi anglosassoni ‘Law and Literature'(classificato tra i ‘Postmodern Legal Movements') si è espresso, negli ultimi decenni, in due diversi filoni: quello indicato come ‘Law in Literature', che si propone di discutere se e come i testi letterari possono essere utilizzati per conoscere la realtà giuridica, e quello indicato come ‘Law as Literature', i cui cultori considerano il diritto come una narrazione, e si propongono di applicare le tecniche e i metodi della teoria e dell'analisi letteraria ai testi giuridici. Per gli antichisti, il ricorso ai testi letterari per una miglior conoscenza del diritto non è certo una novità. Negli ultimi anni, in particolare, questo metodo di indagine sembra riscuotere un rinnovato interesse sia tra gli storici del diritto greco che fra quelli del diritto romano. Come i saggi raccolti in questo volume confermano, i testi letterari, quale che sia il genere cui appartengono, sono strumento insostituibile per chi si proponga di ricostruire le regole giuridiche all'interno del contesto socioculturale in cui sono nate, e dunque di comprenderne la ragione e il vero e più profondo significato.

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'[Wolpert and Kapparis's] anthology... stands apart in a number of key ways. Virtually all of the translations, which are of very high quality, are new for this volume....'Each of the introductions to the individual speeches is accompanied by a convenient outline, entitled ‘Key Information', of the important details about the dispute; this feature will be particularly welcome to undergraduates and other beginners, for whom Athenian forensic speeches often present at first glance a welter of soap opera-like complexity. In the summary that precedes Against Neaera, for example, the subheadings include'Speaker', Supporting Speaker','Defendant', ‘Other Individuals'(particularly helpful), ‘Action','Penalty'and ‘Date'. Having this information collected in one handy location is very useful indeed.'One minor yet remarkably useful feature is that [Wolpert and Kapparis] have placed all cross-references to speeches included in the collection in bold typeface. This allows the reader to know immediately whether he need only flip the pages to see the passage in question or must reach for another volume. It is hoped that this will encourage busy undergraduates to take the trouble to follow up a cross-reference.'The introduction truly shines. Without getting bogged down in debatable minutiae, it provides a remarkably detailed and clear account of the law and oratory of ancient Athens. Divided into five sections, it begins with an account of Athenian legal development from the Draconian and Solonian periods to the fourth century. It then tackles Athenian politics and society, the court system (a particularly helpful section), the Attic orators (with a substantial biographical sketch of each orator whose speeches appear in the volume), and rhetorical technique and style. The introduction could even be used in a course where no speeches are read but students need to be given a quick, solid initiation into the legal culture of the classical period.'--Classical Review

Recent literary-critical work in legal studies reads law as a genre of literature, noting that Western law originated as a branch of rhetoric in classical Greece and lamenting the fact that the law has lost its connection to poetic language, narrative, and imagination. But modern legal scholarship has paid little attention to the actual juridical discourse of ancient Greece. This book rectifies that neglect through an analysis of the courtroom speeches from classical Athens, texts situated precisely at the intersection between law and literature. Reading these texts for their subtle literary qualities and their sophisticated legal philosophy, it proposes that in Athens'juridical discourse literary form and legal matter are inseparable. Through its distinctive focus on the literary form of Athenian forensic oratory, Law's Cosmos aims to shed new light on its juridical thought, and thus to change the way classicists read forensic oratory and legal historians view Athenian law.

Raymond Westbrook (1946–2009) was acknowledged by many as the world's foremost expert on the legal systems of the ancient Near East and a leading scholar in the study of biblical and classical law. This collection brings together the 44 most important articles that Westbrook published in the 25 years following the completion of his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1982. The first volume, The Shared Tradition, contains 16 articles that lay out Westbrook's theory of a common legal tradition that spanned the ancient world from Mesopotamia to Israel and even to Greece and Rome. The second volume, Cuneiform and Biblical Sources, provides 28 articles that demonstrate Westbrook's unique method of legal analysis that he applied to the numerous texts he worked with as an Assyriologist and biblical scholar, from law codes to contracts to narratives. Each volume contains its own comprehensive bibliography, as well as subject, author, and text indexes. Together, they represent the life's work of one of the most important legal historians of our era.

The use of writing in the development of Greek law was unique. In this comparative study Professor Gagarin shows the reader how Greek law developed and explains why it became so different from the legal systems with which most legal historians are familiar. While other early communities wrote codes of law for academic or propaganda purposes, the Greeks used writing extensively to make their laws available to a relatively large segment of the community. On the other hand, the Greeks made little use of writing in litigation whereas other cultures used it extensively in this area, often putting written documents at the heart of the judicial process. Greek law thereby avoided becoming excessively technical and never saw the development of a specialised legal profession. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in the history of law, as well as ancient historians.

'Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece're-evaluates central aspects of the genesis and application of laws in the communities of archaic Greece, including the structure and function of legislative bodies, the composition of the courts, the administration of justice and the use and abuse of legal norms and procedures by litigants in the courts and everyday settings. Combining a detailed analysis of epigraphical and literary evidence and the application of a model of interpretation borrowed from cultural analyses of law, this book argues that far from being monolithic creations of archaic polities that unilaterally informed social life, archaic legal systems can be more appropriately viewed as ideologically polyvalent and socially complex.It includes legal norms and the administration of justice articulated associations with divine and secular authority but also incorporated, mainly in their reception and application by average citizens, discourses of utility and resistance that actively contributed in the composition of social relations.

This volume brings together essays on Athenian law by Edward M. Harris, who challenges much of the recent scholarship on this topic. Presenting a balanced analysis of the legal system in ancient Athens, Harris stresses the importance of substantive issues and their contribution to our understanding of different types of legal procedures. He combines careful philological analysis with close attention to the political and social contexts of individual statutes. Collectively, the essays in this volume demonstrate the relationship between law and politics, the nature of the economy, the position of women, and the role of the legal system in Athenian society. They also show that the Athenians were more sophisticated in their approach to legal issues than has been assumed in the modern scholarship on this topic.

Die im vorliegenden Band dokumentierte Tagung hatte es sich zum Ziel gesetzt, eine genauso internationale wie interdisziplinäre Forschergruppe zum Thema'Soziale Kontrolle'zu befragen. Wenngleich mit Athen und Rom die antike mediterrane Welt im Vordergrund stand, war der kulturelle und historische Bezugsrahmen großzügig bemessen, so dass aktuelle theoretische Modelle, begriffsgeschichtliche Diskurse und komparative Perspektiven Eingang finden konnten. Die Autor(inn)en nutzten die ganze Bandbreite der Untersuchungsfelder und spürten Formen sozialer Kontrolle in Glaube und Aberglaube, in gesellschaftlichen und sozialen Ge- und Verboten, in Familientraditionen, geschlechtsspezifischen Rollenverständnissen, wirtschaftlichen Netzwerken und nicht zuletzt in politischen Interaktionen auf. Im Ergebnis waren sich alle Forscher(innen) einig: Soziale Kontrolle wird in Staat und Gesellschaft ständig neu erfunden, sie ist nicht starr und endgültig, sondern wandelbar und anpassungsfähig.

Winner, Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2003 Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day? Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato.

Saving the City provides a detailed analysis of the attempts of ancient writers and thinkers, from Homer to Cicero, to construct and recommend political ideals of statesmanship and ruling, of the political community and of how it should be founded in justice. Malcolm Schofield debates to what extent the Greeks and Romans deal with the same issues as modern political thinkers.

Athenians performed democracy daily in their law courts. Without lawyers or judges, private citizens, acting as accusers and defendants, argued their own cases directly to juries composed typically of 201 to 501 jurors, who voted on a verdict without deliberation. This legal system strengthened and perpetuated democracy as Athenians understood it, for it emphasized the ideological equality of all (male) citizens and the hierarchy that placed them above women, children, and slaves. This study uses Athenian court speeches to trace the consequences for both disputants and society of individuals'decisions to turn their quarrels into legal cases. Steven Johnstone describes the rhetorical strategies that prosecutors and defendants used to persuade juries and shows how these strategies reveal both the problems and the possibilities of language in the Athenian courts. He argues that Athenian'law'had no objective existence outside the courts and was, therefore, itself inherently rhetorical. This daring new interpretation advances an understanding of Athenian democracy that is not narrowly political, but rather links power to the practices of a particular institution.

Graeco-Roman New Comedy has traditionally provided a source for legal historians examining the language and operation of law both in Athens in the fourth century and in Rome in the second century BC. Adele Scafuro here provides the first comprehensive treatment in English of one crucial area of this vast field, namely, the way legal disputes are settled out of court in Athens, both on and off the comic stage. Beginning with a close examination of pre-trial scenarios in the Attic orators and looking for comparable ones in pre-classical Roman law, Dr Scafuro then turns to the plays of Greek New Comedy and their adaptations by Plautus and Terence. There she identifies similar scenarios especially in disputes concerning sexual violations, the marriages of heiresses, and divorces. She shows how the recognition of legal procedures aids interpretation of New Comedy texts.

Analyzing the'democratic'features and institutions of the Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., Martin Ostwald traces their development from Solon's judicial reforms to the flowering of popular sovereignty, when the people assumed the right both to enact all legislation and to hold magistrates accountable for implementing what had been enacted.Analyzing the'democratic'features and institutions of the Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., Martin Ostwald traces their development from Solon's judicial reforms to the flowering of popular sovereignty, when the people assumed the right both