The Poetry of Justice: Hesiod and the Origins of Greek Law

Abstract

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.