"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 book opens the world of the ancient Greeks to all readers through easily accessible entries on topics essential to understanding Greek high culture and daily life. The ancient Greeks provided the foundation for Western civilization. They made significant advances in science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and government. While many readers might have heard of Plato and Aristotle, however, or be familiar with the classic works of Greek tragedy, most people know significantly less about daily life in the ancient Greek world. This encyclopedia opens the world of the ancient Greeks, spanning Greek history from the Bronze Age through Roman times, with an emphasis on the Classical and Hellenistic Eras. The encyclopedia provides roughly 270 easily accessible entries on topics essential to understanding everything from Greek high culture to daily life. These entries are grouped in topical sections on the arts, science and technology, politics and government, domestic life, and other subjects. Sidebars on particularly noteworthy people, places, and concepts provide related information, while primary documents allow readers to delve into the mindset and feelings of the ancient Greeks themselves. Extensive bibliographic references give curious readers direction for further research.
"This book is for students, scholars, and general readers who are interested in the legal texts and ideas of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The book explains the nature and history of biblical law, the legal significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity"--
This is a highly original, interdisciplinary study of the archaic Greek word nomos and its family of words. Includes extracts from ancient sources, in both the original and English translation, to give us a new and complete understanding of nomos and its foundational place in the Western legal tradition.
This volume presents a wide range of literary and epigraphic sources on the history of the world's first democracy, offering a comprehensive survey of the key themes and principles of Athenian democratic culture. Beginning with the mythical origins of Athenian democracy under Theseus and describing the historical development of Athens' democratic institutions through Solon's reforms to the birth of democracy under Cleisthenes, the book addresses the wider cultural and social repercussions of the democratic system, concluding with a survey of Athenian democracy in the Hellenistic and Roman age. All sources are presented in translation with full annotation and commentary and each chapter opens with an introduction to provide background and direction for readers. Sources include material by Aristotle, Homer, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Tacitus and many others. The volume also includes an A-Z of key terms, an annotated bibliography with suggestions for further reading in the primary sources as well as modern critical works on Athenian democracy, and a full index.
A definitive new history of the origins, evolution, and scope of the ancient Greek city-state The Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and enduring to 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? Polis proposes a panoramic account of the ancient Greek city-state, its diverse forms, and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium. In this landmark book, John Ma provides a new history of the polis, charting its spread and development into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa and from the Near East to Italy. He explores its remarkable achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members. He also reminds us that behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. Ma’s sweeping and multifaceted narrative draws widely on a rich store of historical evidence while weighing in on lively scholarly debates and offering new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis. A monumental work of scholarship, Polis transforms our understanding of antiquity while challenging us to grapple with the moral legacy of an idea whose very success centered on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.
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.
In Writing Authority, Hawke argues that the rapidly changing political and economic landscape of early Greece prompted elites to begin committing laws to written form. The emergence of the polis and its institutions, the demographic growth of Greece, the development of market forces, and the commoditization of wealth all presented new challenges and difficulties for the Greeks of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. Hawke contends that no one felt the attendant anxieties of these changes more acutely than the leading members of early Greek communities—they confronted regulating their intense competition for status and power in an environment where traditional sources of authority, such as Homeric epic, offered no ready solutions for problems arising from the transformation of Greek society. Greek elites enshrined in writing rules aimed at stabilizing their relationships with one another and, by extension, their communities. Challenging both established and emerging orthodoxies about the appearance of written law in ancient Greece, Writing Authority questions the importance of a popular or communal role in the earliest Greek legislation. Approaches from anthropology, legal studies, and sociology are used to situate the emergence of Greek law in the broader context of Greek legal culture in the eighth through early sixth centuries B.C.E. as Hawke describes in rich detail the legal culture of Homer's world, considers the impact of literacy on Greek attitudes about law and authority and its practical consequences for the governing of the Greek polis, and examines the effects of the tumultuous changes in Archaic Greece on the leading members of Greek communities. The result is a compelling monograph that provides an exhaustive and nuanced history of earliest Greek law and the motivations of the elites that brought it into being. It will be of interest to scholars of Greek history, classicists, and early legal historians.
Ancient Greece was the model that guided the emergence of many facets of the modern sports movement, including most notably the Olympics. Yet the process whereby aspects of the ancient world were appropriated and manipulated by sport authorities of nation-states, athletic organizations and their leaders as well as by sports enthusiasts is only very partially understood. This volume takes modern Greece as a case-study and explores, in depth, issues related to the reception and use of classical antiquity in modern sport, spectacle and bodily culture. For citizens of the Greek nation-state, classical antiquity is not merely a vague "legacy" but the cornerstone of their national identity. In the field of sport and bodily culture, since the 1830s there had been persistent attempts to establish firm and direct links between ancient Greek athletics and modern sport through the incorporation of sport in school curricula, the emergence of national sport historiographies as well as the initiatives to revive (in the 19th century) or appropriate (in the 20th) the modern Olympics. Based on fieldwork and unpublished material sources, this book dissects the use and abuse of classical antiquity and sport in constructing national, gender and class identities, and illuminate aspects of the complex modern perceptions of classicism, sport and the body. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
The post-Cold War proliferation of international adjudicatory bodies and increase in litigation has greatly affected international law and politics. A growing number of international courts and tribunals, exercising jurisdiction over international crimes and sundry international disputes, have become, in some respects, the lynchpin of the international legal system. The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication charts the transformations in international adjudication that took place astride the twentieth and twenty-first century, bringing together the insight of 47 prominent legal, philosophical, ethical, political, and social science scholars. Overall, the 40 contributions in this Handbook provide an original and comprehensive understanding of the various contemporary forms of international adjudication. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part I provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies, from the nineteenth century to the present, highlighting the dynamics driving the multiplication of international adjudicative bodies and their uneven expansion. Part II analyses the main families of international adjudicative bodies, providing a detailed study of state-to-state, criminal, human rights, regional economic, and administrative courts and tribunals, as well as arbitral tribunals and international compensation bodies. Part III lays out the theoretical approaches to international adjudication, including those of law, political science, sociology, and philosophy. Part IV examines some contemporary issues in international adjudication, including the behavior, role, and effectiveness of international judges and the political constraints that restrict their function, as well as the making of international law by international courts and tribunals, the relationship between international and domestic adjudicators, the election and selection of judges, the development of judicial ethical standards, and the financing of international courts. Part V examines key actors in international adjudication, including international judges, legal counsel, international prosecutors, and registrars. Finally, Part VI overviews select legal and procedural issues facing international adjudication, such as evidence, fact-finding and experts, jurisdiction and admissibility, the role of third parties, inherent powers, and remedies. The Handbook is an invaluable and thought-provoking resource for scholars and students of international law and political science, as well as for legal practitioners at international courts and tribunals.
