Athenian Lawcourts Research Articles

Speakers Diffident and Speakers Brash in the Athenian Courts

Abstract In many of the surviving Athenian law court speeches, litigants and sunēgoroi claim that, as amateurs, they come to trial at a disadvantage. Occasionally, they acknowledge a reputation for wishing to advance themselves by a display of rhetorical abilities. Whatever stance the speaker takes, these maneuvers add to the complex texture of Attic oratory. We find a remarkable variety of approaches, e. g., Antiphon giving a Lesbian-speaking client an ornate acknowledgment in lightly Ionicized Attic of his rhetorical inadequacy; Lysias posing as a forensic novice when he represents himself; Dinarchus mimicking a speaker at a loss for words; Lycurgus warning the jury that the defendant will (mis)represent himself as an amateur under attack by a malicious prosecutor. And the orator who has, however falsely, spoken to his audience of his own sense of formidable rhetorical challenge might thereby be better prepared to improvise his response to his opponents’ speeches. Alcidamas, champion of improvisation, would be sympathetic.

Socrates’ Understanding of ‘Protection’ (Boētheia) in His Other-Oriented Ethics: The Case of the Athenians in Plato’s Apology and Gorgias

Abstract In this article I argue that Socrates appropriated a traditional discourse characteristic of Athenian law courts and politics keyed to the concept of protection (boētheia). More specifically, I argue that Socrates aimed at protecting the Athenians, though not directly, but indirectly, namely via his life-long endeavour to serve (boēthein) Apollo. I thus read Plato’s Apology as a political text, though not “political” in the sense of Socrates being suspect of overthrowing democracy, as sometimes claimed, but “political” in the sense that Plato’s Socrates latched on to this concept of boēthein in the Apology.

THE AESCHYLEAN STING INWASPS’ TALE: ARISTOPHANES’ ENGAGEMENT WITH THEORESTEIA

The sting to Aristophanes’ ‘little tale’ inWasps(λογίδιον,Vesp.64) materializes from the comedy's interplay with theOresteia. This article argues that Aristophanes alludes to bothAgamemnonandEumenidesin the scenes running up to (and including) the trial scene, and that he exploits this intertext in the cloak scene (Vesp.1122–264). While isolated allusions to theOresteiahave been identified inWasps, a systematic consideration of these references has not been undertaken: a surprising absence in discussions of the ongoing competition between the comic and the tragic genres permeatingWasps’ dramatic action. Moreover, Aristophanes’ engagement with theOresteiaoffers a special type of tragic intertext, in which the first and the last plays of a connected trilogy are referenced simultaneously, provocatively destabilizing the original. Furthermore, this allusion has implications for our understanding of a scene which recent scholarship has established as pivotal within the comedy, namely the cloak scene. The first part of this article, therefore, establishes the extent ofWasps’ engagement with theOresteiaand considers the significance of the ‘pastiche’ formed through the combined intertextual references toAgamemnonand toEumenides. The second part explores the impact of this intertext on the interpretation of the cloak scene, revealing that its use of costume can be understood as a criticism of Aeschylus’ dramaturgy, inviting a negative reading of Bdelycleon's ideological stance and reinforcing the play's pessimistic view of the Athenian law courts.

Hoe je moeder te vermoorden?

Summary In this paper I argue for a psychological reading of the Electra of Euripides. The negative qualifications of Clytaemnestra by the farmer, the chorus and the old man strengthen the conviction of Electra and Orestes that they have no choice but to kill their mother, so that in the first half of the play they only consider how to do it, not if they should do it. Their conviction is challenged when Clytaemnestra arrives on stage in the fourth episode and is allowed to defend herself, but only radically changes after they have committed the murder. Then they come, as it were, to their senses and the chorus too sees their actions in a different light. To shed light on the processes at play, I draw comparisons with such modern concepts as ‘peer pressure’ and ‘tunnel vision’ and discuss the jealousy Electra seems to feel for her mother, which fuels her anger. As a starting point, the introduction explains the democratic qualities of the genre of tragedy, in particular the way it asked the original audience to judge the characters on stage in the same way as they had to judge plaintiffs or the accused in the Athenian law courts.

Rethinking Mass and Elite: Decision-Making in the Athenian Law-Courts

In the Athenian law-courts, wealthy, educated, and powerful elites fought one another to prevail as leaders and advisors of the masses. Regulated by the masses’ ideals of a good society, elite competition pushed Athens toward stability, prosperity and cultural immortality. Or did it? This article puts pressure on the mass and elite model of Athenian litigation (ME elite litigants seek to win over their opponents as a means to gain honor; and the masses constitute a monolithic body with identical preferences. This model, we suggest, does not adequately explain the dynamics of law- and policy-making in the Athenian courts. Combining findings from two separate bodies of literature in classics and political science, we build a new model of Athenian litigation that modifies the ME and second, litigants want to win, but they also have preferences over policy/legal outcomes. Our model identifies the mechanisms that enabled diverse interests to be advanced and negotiated in ways that fostered both stability and innovation in Athenian law- and policy-making.

Beweisführung und Wahrheitsfindung im athenischen Prozess

The article at hand deals with questions of objectivity and the conception of “truth” in the law courts of classical Athens. The surprising differences of Athenian and modern legal systems in this respect raise the question of how legal evidence was presented before the jurors and what was actually deemed relevant for reaching a just verdict in Athenian courts. In order to give an insight into Athenian legal thinking the article will explain first how (and by whom) evidence for a law suit was chosen. Next, some specific forms of evidence, their actual use in court and their incorporation in the law court speeches are to be presented in detail. This way, some unique structures in Athenian legal thinking will become apparent and show that the unusual perception of evidence in Athenian law courts must not be seen as a result of legal disability or lack of rationality but as a means of highly differentiated legal strategies.

From Epistemic Diversity to Common Knowledge: Rational Rituals and Cooperation in Democratic Athens

ABSTRACTClassical Athens provides a historical case study of effective joint action by a democratic community, at scale, over time, and across a socially and epistemically diverse population. Athens was concerned both with aggregating diverse knowledge for decision-making and with building common knowledge for coordinated joint action. A preserved prosecution speech delivered in an Athenian treason trial reveals how common knowledge was generated by democratic institutions and employed in legal arguments. Common knowledge facilitated effective coordination among citizens through productive alignment cascades. Yet Athenian lawcourt procedures rendered cascading difficult, pointing to an institutionalized awareness that coordination among jurors might violate fairness as equality before the law; such violations threatened democratic values and the equilibrium between elite and non-elite citizens. Common knowledge was promoted by repeated public rituals, public monuments, and public architecture that allowed for the interpresence of large numbers of deliberative and intervisible citizens.

From Epistemic Diversity to Common Knowledge: Rational Rituals and Cooperation in Democratic Athens

Classical Athens provides a historical case study of effective joint action by a democratic community, at scale, over time, and across a socially and epistemically diverse population. Athens was concerned both with aggregating diverse knowledge for decision-making and with building common knowledge for coordinated joint action. A preserved prosecution speech delivered in an Athenian treason trial reveals how common knowledge was generated by democratic institutions and employed in legal arguments. Common knowledge facilitated effective coordination among citizens through productive alignment cascades. Yet Athenian lawcourt procedures rendered cascading difficult, pointing to an institutionalized awareness that coordination among jurors might violate fairness as equality before the law; such violations threatened democratic values and the equilibrium between elite and non-elite citizens. Common knowledge was promoted by repeated public rituals, public monuments, and public architecture that allowed for the interpresence of large numbers of deliberative and intervisible citizens.

Was the Athenian Gnome Dikaiotate a Principle of Equity?

Modern scholars have expressed divergent views on the role played in Athenian law courts by , ‘the most just opinion,’ which the dikasts swore to observe in the heliastic oath. The most common view is that this embodied a principle of equity under which the precise letter of the law could be overridden. Hirzel and Vinogradoff are the leading advocates of this view. A variant has been proposed by Jones and Plescia, whereby this was not the intention of the oath, but it was used by speech-writers and accepted by the jury-courts in this fashion.A minority view is advanced by Meyer-Laurin, Wolff and Meinecke, that ‘the most just opinion’ was only a subsidiary means of decision, applied only when the law gave no guidance on a particular point. Biscardi proposes a middle way, in that ‘most just opinion did not override the letter of the law but was used as a principle of equity in the interpretation and formulation of the laws.’

Spectator sport or serious politics? όί περιεστηκότες and the Athenian lawcourts

In his tractA Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Jeremy Bentham repeatedly refers to the courtroom as the ‘theatre of justice’. Bentham's description has been borne out by recent scholarship on Athenian law. As a form of civic space, the Athenian lawcourts were similar to the Theatre of Dionysos in many respects: litigants faced each other in a competitiveagon, delivering lines written for them by logographers to a mass audience which would range, ordinarily, from 200 to 1500 jurors. Moreover, modern scholars have drawn on the notion of ‘social drama’ introduced by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the Athenian lawcourts as an arena for socially constructive feuding behaviour, as a public stage for the social élite to compete for prestige, or as a forum for ongoing communication between élite litigants and mass jurors ‘in a context which made explicit the power of the masses to judge the actions and behavior of élite individuals’.

The witness's exomosia in the Athenian courts

My purpose in this note is to examine the evidence for the witness's oath of disclaimer in the Athenian lawcourts. This is an issue on which modern discussions tend to be brief for want of ancient evidence. However, although our ignorance on matters of detail relating to the exomosia remains, and is likely to remain, profound, I believe that we can, by a careful reading of the limited evidence which is available, draw a number of more or less confident conclusions about the form and content of the oath and the degree of restriction it imposed on witness and litigant. The lexicographers have the following to say on pressures applied to recalcitrant witnesses:Polydeukes 8.37: τóν δ' ο βονλóμενον μαρτρεῖν κλἠτενον το μαρτνρεῖν πρρστιθντεσ ἔδɛι δ αῖτóν ἠ μαρτνρεῖν ζομóσασθαι ὡσ οῖκ εíδεíη ἦ μἤ χιλíασ ποστíνειν. κλητεσθαι μν οῖν στí καλεíσθαι εíσ μαρτνρíαν, κκλητεεῖεσθαι δ τó δíκην óφεíλειν πí τπí τι τσ χιλíασ καταβαλεíν.

The Lawcourts at Athens Sites, Buildings, Equipment, Procedure, and Testimonia

A comprehensive, three-part study of the sites and procedures of Athenian lawcourts in the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries B.C. Part I discusses various courts, their names and possible sites, and reconstructs their history and daily workings, synthesizing literary, documentary, and physical evidence. Part II discusses the buildings which could have served as courts and the objects found in them. Such court paraphernalia included ballots, receptacles for documents, water clocks (used to time speeches), allotments machines and their accessories (for assigning jurors to the courts), seating tokens, and a curse tablet. Part III collects 355 testimonia on Athenian lawcourts, with Greek text, translation, and commentary.

The East Side of the Agora: The Remains beneath. The Stoa of Attalos

The Stoa of Attalos now covers the remains of several centuries of previous occupation: Mycenaean burials, houses, shops, and from the late fifth century, a succession of structures here associated with the Athenian lawcourts. The most imposing of these buildings was the Square Peristyle, still unfinished when it was dismantled in the first quarter of the second century B.C. Because it is now largely limited to excavation finds and records, the evidence is reviewed here in detail.

Social relations on stage: Witnesses in classical Athens

The study of witness testimony raises questions which are fundamental for the student of other cultures, whether past or contemporary. What are the standards expected of a reliable informant and how is reliability to be recognised? How is reliable knowledge about the past established? The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of witnesses in classical Athenian lawcourts both for its epistemological implications — what does it tell us about Athenian ideas of ‘expert witnesses’, of reliability, of truthfulness and bias — and for the information it gives us about Athenian society and court practice. What kind of men did Athenian litigants select to act as witnesses for them, and what effect did they hope their witnesses’ testimonies would have on the jury? If we start out from the assumption of modern courts that witnesses are called to ‘establish the facts of the case’ we shall misunderstand the Athenian data. What witnesses actually testified often was not very important: their testimonies might be insig...

A statistical study of authorship in the Corpus Lysiacum

Thirty-five speeches, fragments and abstracts of speeches' comprise the corpus that has survived from a body of over four hundred attributed in ancient times to the Greek orator Lysias2. All three of the genres of oratory recognised by ancient critics are represented deliberative, epideictic and forensic. Most belong to the last category, being products of the profession which he practized during the latter part of his life, composing speeches for litigants to deliver in their own persons, as they were required to do in Athenian law-courts. Lysias, a Syracusan whose father Cephalus settled in Athens before the Peloponnesian War, conducted his own case against Eratosthenes, who had murdered his brother and despoiled his estate as one of the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens briefly in 404/3 B.C. The speech which he wrote for this prosecution survives as 12 in the Corpus (Oxford Text numbering, which is used in this article), and was probably the only speech that he made on his own behalf. But his name occurs

The Murder of Herodes and Other Trials from the Athenian Law-Courts

These remarkable documents of Greek social and cultural history include masterpieces of lively narrative and subtle argument prepared by such orators as Lysias, Antiphon, and Demosthenes. The fifteen cases presented represent the first recorded instances of the working of a democratic jury system under a definite code of law aimed at inexpensive and equal justice for all citizens. Issues examined include murder, assault, property damage, embezzlement, contested legacies, illegal marriage, slander, and civil rights. Also provided are comprehensive background chapters on the professions of law and rhetoric in ancient Athens and explanatory notes clarifying the course of each trial .

Poetry in Athenian Courts

Previous articleNext article FreePoetry in Athenian CourtsAlfred P. DorjahnAlfred P. Dorjahn Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 22, Number 1Jan., 1927 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/360863 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alastair J. L. Blanshard The Permeable Spaces of the Athenian Law-Court, (Jul 2014): 240–276.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107323766.008Tony M. Lentz From recitation to reading: Memory, writing, and composition in Greek philosophical prose, Southern Speech Communication Journal 51, no.11 (Apr 2009): 49–70.https://doi.org/10.1080/10417948509372646

On Secrecy in Voting in the Athenian Law-Courts in the Fifth Century, B.C

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