Writing Greek Law by Michael Gagarin

Abstract

166 PHOENIX aware of this debate (248, n. 12; 309, n. 16), but her own contribution to this evolving field is limited. Her digression on temporal projections in Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Isocrates reveals a certain homogeneity in the selection of past events and figures favored for citation in these speakers, but acknowledges that there is also “considerable variation in their use and presentation of the past” (272). Also, the concluding sections on historians and itinerant intellectuals wander somewhat from the original topic in the sense that they document the ongoing negotiation of time between various constituent parts of the polis, but they hardly reveal how this negotiation shaped the temporal attitudes, sentiments, and beliefs of the average citizen. This is an extremely thoughtful account, laden with sources and anecdotal evidence. Clarke is fully in command of the material, and she masters the entire canon of ancient and modern conceptions of time, including the arcane assumptions of more poetic approaches to the topic (see the literary “Epilogue”). The construction of time as social negotiation itself might be too thorny a subject to allow for crude conclusions, and it certainly requires a nuanced balance of the streams of social history and the history of thought. Despite her firm commitment to the former, Clarke’s book often reads like the latter—with many and, at times, brilliant aperçus. McGill University Hans Beck Writing Greek Law. By Michael Gagarin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 282. What difference does it make that the Greeks wrote down their laws? No one seems more qualified to offer an answer than Michael Gagarin, who has written on early Greek law for over thirty years. Here he provides a chronological survey, starting with Homer and Hesiod, for whom there are no written laws, discussing archaic inscriptions at length, and giving more limited discussions of writing in classical Athens and in hellenistic law. The heart of this book, therefore, is in its discussion of the first written laws in Greece, which are known to us almost entirely from inscriptions. There is little that is new in Gagarin’s description of law before writing. As he has argued persuasively elsewhere, he again emphasizes here the open and public nature of legal procedures in early epic poetry; he also relies, perhaps more than he should, on Herodotus’ description of Deioces, a classical Greek’s imagining of early legal process among the Medes that happens to fit his argument. The Greeks were writing for almost a century before they got around to writing laws, so they clearly did not adopt writing in order to write laws. But the alphabetic system that they did adopt was a particularly user-friendly phonetic system. Unlike Semitic scripts that left out vowel pronunciation and required professional scribes, diverse writers of Greek accounted for every sound, and they used their early writing for a variety of purposes. When they came to writing laws, they did not simply write down what was already understood orally: written law was qualitatively different. Gagarin emphasizes the physical characteristics of the writing. For Dreros 1 (ML 2), for instance, he shows how the mason used vertical lines to mark off divisions. I was made to think of the divisions created by a minister reciting wedding vows for repetition. In the case of this law in particular, since it limited an individual’s right to hold the high office of kosmos, its regular recitation might have been useful for constitutional security. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 167 Many of the earliest legal inscriptions were found on Crete. Gagarin argues that they were publicly inscribed not just as monuments but in order to be read by the people who participated in legal processes, who were thus at least somewhat literate. The writing was large and clear, placed in public areas, and it had markings to assist in seeing word divisions. Gagarin’s points are good ones, but I would register a small complaint in not finding the texts transcribed on the page in a footnote. We see only a drawing of the text with translation (to follow the argument through we are detoured to the collection of transcribed texts in the appendix). Gagarin...