7 - Differentiated Rhetorical Strategies in the Athenian Courts

Summary

It is widely recognized that the procedural complexity of the Athenian administration of justice provides us with an important key to understanding how the legal system worked in practice. The way in which individual statutes were framed meant that a citizen who wished to bring a complaint before a court would often have a range of different procedures to choose from, each of which would have different consequences for the defendant if he was found guilty as charged. What has not attracted similar attention from modern scholars is the extent to which the choice of procedure affected the rhetorical strategies employed by the litigants involved in the action. Nor has there been much discussion of the question whether the nature of the dispute itself affected the way in which the litigants were expected to present their cases before the courts.