Telling Stories in Athenian Law

Abstract

when students first encounter Athenian law, it seems quite different from what they know as our own law; and when they begin to read scholar ship on the subject, especially Anglo-American scholarship of the last two decades, they will probably find some discussion of the so-called of Athenian law. Scholars these days don't write books that try to make Athe nian law more familiar, like Robert Bonner 's fine little introduction, Lawyers and Litigants in Ancient Athens, published three-quarters of a century ago. New approaches have taken over, approaches that, although healthy and stimulat ing in many ways, tend to exaggerate the otherness of Athenian law. This is not so much because historians present a false picture of Athenian law, as be cause they misrepresent aspects of our own legal system, relying on a tradi tional, idealistic view of it that is increasingly being challenged by certain branches of contemporary legal studies. When we take a more realistic look at our own system, however, Athenian law may not appear so different. One of the new approaches to understanding our own law is to look at storytelling. Storytelling has been the subject of serious academic study for almost a century now, but it has drawn the attention of legal scholars only in recent decades, as part of the broader field of Law and Literature. Classi cists too have studied storytelling, as well as newer approaches such as narratology and performance studies. But storytelling in Athenian law has not received much attention, so today I would like to take a couple of stories from Athenian legal cases and try to show how the study of storytelling in law can shed light on these cases and on Athenian law more generally. I'll begin with a story familiar to many of you, from Lysias 1, On the Mur der of Eratosthenes (this is the case of the man who kills his wife's lover). A