What was the law of Leptines\u2019 really about? Reflections on Athenian public economy and legislation in the fourth century BCE

Mirko Canevaro

doi:10.1007/s10602-018-9260-7

Abstract

The article investigates a case study of fiscal policy formation in fourth century BCE Athens: that of the law of Leptines. The law was enacted but later challenged through a procedure of constitutional judicial review (graphe nomon me epitedeion theinai). Through a detailed analysis of the arguments at the trial, the article reconstructs the financial issues that the law was meant to solve, regarding the liturgical system and its wider implications. Recent scholarship has highlighted the complexity and sophistication of Athenian public finances and economic policy. The article finds a window into the debates from which the relevant institutions originated.

Highlights

Scholarship on the ancient Greek city-states has abandoned in recent years primitivist assumptions to acknowledge the extraordinary level of economic and fiscal
The latter is a field in which Athens, both at the level of the central state and of the demes, played a pioneering role’
These results can be vividly illustrated by one fact observed by van Wees (2013: 1): Athens in the fourth century BCE spent more silver than France did during the Napoleonic Wars

Summary

Lawmaking and constitutional judicial review

The case against the law of Leptines was part of a wider, multi-stage procedure of lawmaking: nomothesia. Before enacting new laws, the proposers had to repeal all existing contradictory laws, arguing that their new laws were more epitedeion (‘appropriate’, ‘fit’ to be laws of the city) than the ones they were repealing, and this occurred not in the Assembly, but in a lawcourt, against advocates of the contradictory laws elected by the Assembly at the end of the ‘publicity’ month. Judicial review stages were not concerned exclusively with minute contradictions with existing statutes, but with the coherence of the nomoi under examination with the laws in their entirety, with their overall ethos.[24] It is through such cases of judicial review that we learn the most about actual proposals for fiscal reform in the mid-fourth century BCE. Demosthenes argues that the law of Leptines is me epitedeios: it is a bad law (inferior to the one he proposes) because it is inconsistent with specific existing laws that Leptines did not repeal in advance, and with the ethos of the laws as a whole, and fully inadequate in tackling the problems it aims to address—the shortage of available liturgists

The liturgical system

Findings

Conclusions