Ancient Greek Law in the 21st Century

Ancient Greek Law in the 21st Century

Author: Paula Perlman

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1477315217

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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.


The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law

Author: Michael Gagarin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-09-12

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139826891

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This Companion volume provides a comprehensive overview of the major themes and topics pertinent to ancient Greek law. A substantial introduction establishes the recent historiography on this topic and its development over the last 30 years. Many of the 22 essays, written by an international team of experts, deal with procedural and substantive law in classical Athens, but significant attention is also paid to legal practice in the archaic and Hellenistic eras; areas that offer substantial evidence for legal practice, such as Crete and Egypt; the intersection of law with religion, philosophy, political theory, rhetoric, and drama, as well as the unity of Greek law and the role of writing in law. The volume is intended to introduce non-specialists to the field as well as to stimulate new thinking among specialists.


Laws

Laws

Author: Plato

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-05-28

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13:

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The Laws is Plato's last, longest, and perhaps, most famous work. It presents a conversation on political philosophy between three elderly men: an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinias. They worked to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony that would make all of its citizens happy and virtuous. In this work, Plato combines political philosophy with applied legislation, going into great detail concerning what laws and procedures should be in the state. For example, they consider whether drunkenness should be allowed in the city, how citizens should hunt, and how to punish suicide. The principles of this book have entered the legislation of many modern countries and provoke a great interest of philosophers even in the 21st century.


Early Greek Law

Early Greek Law

Author: Michael Gagarin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1989-04-27

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 052090916X

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Drawing on the evidence of anthropology as well as ancient literature and inscriptions, Gagarin examines the emergence of law in Greece from the 8th through the 6th centuries B.C., that is, from the oral culture of Homer and Hesiod to the written enactment of codes of law in most major cities.


Early Greek Lawgivers

Early Greek Lawgivers

Author: John Lewis

Publisher: Bristol Classical Press

Published: 2007-07-09

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13:

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Examines the men who brought laws to the early Greek city states, as an introduction both to the development of law and to the basic issues in early legal practice. This book is an introduction to the establishment of law in ancient Greece. It is written for late school and early university students.


From Bedroom to Courtroom

From Bedroom to Courtroom

Author: Saundra Schwartz

Publisher: Barkhuis

Published: 2017-01-23

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 9492444208

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From Bedroom to Courtroom argues that the fictional trial scenes in the Greek ideal romances reflect Roman legal institutions and ideas, particularly relating to family and sexuality. Given the genre's emphasis on love and chastity, the specter of adultery looms over most of the scenarios that develop into elaborate trials. Such scenes shed light on the Greek reception of the criminalization of adultery promulgated by the moral legislation during the reign of Augustus. This book focuses on three major novels whose composition coincided with the extension of Roman citizenship when access to Roman courts was granted to increasing numbers of inhabitants of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Chariton's Callirhoe is interpreted as an artifact of the generation after the implementation of the Augustan moral legislation, particularly its criminalization of adultery. Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon was created in a legally pluralistic milieu where shrewd sophists learned to navigate and exploit the interstices between the overlapping jurisdictions of imperial and local law. Finally, Heliodorus' Aethiopica, widely regarded as the masterpiece of the genre, adapts the type-scene of the trial to present a series of case studies of different types of government, culminating in the utopian kingdom of Meroe. Through the novels' melodramatic trial scenes, we can begin to see how the opening of Roman courtroom to Greek-speaking citizens of the Roman Empire stimulated dreams of a world in which universal justice under Rome was wed to Hellenism.


Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens

Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens

Author: Edwin Carawan

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1421439506

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The definitive book on judicial review in Athens from the 5th through the 4th centuries BCE. The power of the court to overturn a law or decree—called judicial review—is a critical feature of modern democracies. Contemporary American judges, for example, determine what is consistent with the Constitution, though this practice is often criticized for giving unelected officials the power to strike down laws enacted by the people's representatives. This principle was actually developed more than two thousand years ago in the ancient democracy at Athens. In Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens, Edwin Carawan reassesses the accumulated evidence to construct a new model of how Athenians made law in the time of Plato and Aristotle, while examining how the courts controlled that process. Athenian juries, Carawan explains, were manned by many hundreds of ordinary citizens rather than a judicial elite. Nonetheless, in the 1890s, American apologists found vindication for judicial review in the ancient precedent. They believed that Athenian judges decided the fate of laws and decrees legalistically, focusing on fundamental text, because the speeches that survive from antiquity often involve close scrutiny of statutes attributed to lawgivers such as Solon, much as a modern appellate judge might resort to the wording of the Framers. Carawan argues that inscriptions, speeches, and fragments of lost histories make clear that text-based constitutionalism was not so compelling as the ethos of the community. Carawan explores how the judicial review process changed over time. From the restoration of democracy down to its last decades, the Athenians made significant reforms in their method of legislation, first to expedite a cumbersome process, then to revive the more rigorous safeguards. Jury selection adapted accordingly: the procedure was recast to better represent the polis, and packing the court was thwarted by a complicated lottery. But even as the system evolved, the debate remained much the same: laws and decrees were measured by a standard crafted in the image of the people. Offering a comprehensive account of the ancient origins of an important political institution through philological methods, rhetorical analysis of ancient arguments, and comparisons between models of judicial review in ancient Greece and the modern United States, Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens is an innovative study of ancient Greek law and democracy.


Introducing Greek Philosophy

Introducing Greek Philosophy

Author: Rosemary Wright

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-12-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1317492463

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Aimed at students of classics and of philosophy who would like a taste of the subject before being committed to a full course and at those who have already started and need to find their bearings in what may seem at first a complex maze of names and schools, "Introducing Greek Philosophy" is a concise, lively, philosophically aware introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. The book begins with the Milesians in Asia Minor before moving over to the developments in the western Greek world, then focusing on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Athens, finishing with the Hellenistic schools and their arrival in Rome, where the main ideas are set out in the Latin poetry of Lucretius and the prose of Cicero.The book eschews the method of most histories of ancient philosophy of addressing one thinker after another through the centuries. Instead, after a basic mapping of the territory, it takes the great themes that the Greeks were engaged in from the earliest times, and looks at them individually, their development in argument and counter-argument, from the beginnings of recorded Greek history, through the various upheavals of tyrannies, democracies, oligarchies and kingships, to their introduction into Rome in the first century BC.


The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society

Author: Paul J du Plessis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-09-29

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0191044423

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The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society surveys the landscape of contemporary research and charts principal directions of future inquiry. More than a history of doctrine or an account of jurisprudence, the Handbook brings to bear upon Roman legal study the full range of intellectual resources of contemporary legal history, from comparison to popular constitutionalism, from international private law to law and society, thereby setting itself apart from other volumes as a unique contribution to scholarship on its subject. The Handbook brings the study of Roman law into closer alignment and dialogue with historical, sociological, and anthropological research into law in other periods. It will therefore be of value not only to ancient historians and legal historians already focused on the ancient world, but to historians of all periods interested in law and its complex and multifaceted relationship to society.