Abstract
In the rhetorically charged law courts in which ancient Athenian lay judges exercised their knowledge of the laws and so decided questions of justice, particularly where the quaestio iuris was most at issue, they exercised some quite sophisticated thinking. The judges abided by their oath to vote ‘according to the laws’, but did so with a comprehensive understanding both of the multiplicity of laws that might apply to particular cases and of the even greater number of legal principles implicit in them. After sketching the democratic aspects of Athens’ legal system, the paper begins with Plato’s Apology of Socrates before going on to detail legal reasoning advanced in Lysias’ On the Murder of Eratosthenes and Hyperides’ Against Athenogenes.
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