Oaths and Dispute Settlement in Ancient Greek Law

Abstract

Abstract As a lawyer I feel a little uncomfortable when addressing historians. Our common interest is, generally speaking, human behaviour. The historian is interested in its descriptive aspect, ‘as it is or was’, the lawyer in a normative one, ‘as it ought to be’ (cf. Foxhall, this volume). A legal historian falls between the two stools; my field of study is law as part of everyday life in Greek antiquity–’law as it was’. Naturally I am also concerned with the ideas the ancient Greeks had about what law ought to be. One might expect to find such ideas in the writings of the Greek philosophers, but in fact the Greek philosophers never considered everyday legal problems in the ways ancient Roman jurists did and modern jurists continue to do. Consequently one has to reconstruct both the details and the principles of Greek law by studying every available source: literature (including philosophy), inscriptions, papyri–evaluating every piece of evidence in its special local and temporal context. The so called legal texts–laws (nomoi), contracts, judgements, and forensic speeches–are no more significant than epic, lyric, tragic, or historiographic writings. References to the principles of Greek law as an everyday phenomenon may be found in all sorts of statements of ancient Greek contemporaries. From the beginning of this century legal historians, particularly Ernst Rabel and Hans Julius Wolff, have emphasized that modern legal categories are not adequate tools with which to understand ancient Greek legal sources.