1 - Introduction

Summary

what role did the law courts play in the world's first well-documented democracy? Ancient Athens is celebrated for its democratic political institutions, but its law courts have been largely ignored by lawyers and legal historians. This neglect is not mysterious. Athenian law has failed to attract the interest of legal historians because it was run by amateurs and did not generate jurisprudential texts. It has not helped that the best-known example of Athenian justice is an outrage: the trial and execution of Socrates.

Classicists have begun to remedy this neglect, but much of their work has emphasized the arbitrariness and anti-legal aspects of Athenian litigation. Most of what we know of Athenian law comes from court speeches, and these scholars have focused on the fact that these speeches contain information – boasts of their family's public services, character attacks, appeals to pity – that would be considered irrelevant or inadmissible in a modern courtroom. On this basis, they argue that the aims and ideals of the Athenian courts were radically different from those of modern courts. On this view, the Athenian courts did not attempt to resolve disputes according to established rules and principles equally and impartially applied but rather served primarily a social or political role. According to this approach, litigation was not aimed chiefly at the final resolution of the dispute or the discovery of truth; rather, the courts provided an arena for the parties to publicly define, contest, and evaluate their social relations to one another, and the hierarchies of their society.