8 - Litigation and the family

Summary

Violent assaults and humiliating insults were not the only kinds of conflicts leading to feuding relations which expressed themselves through litigation. While not all family quarrels may have led to long-term bitter enmity, the extant Athenian inheritance cases indicate that private law litigation between kin followed essentially the same dynamic as the cases discussed in Chapters 4–6. That is, in the family sphere litigation provided an agonistic arena for the ongoing pursuit of conflict rather than furnishing a binding mechanism for the final resolution of disputes. Further, following the argument developed in Chapters 5 and 6, this chapter suggests that litigants in family disputes were well aware of the structural features of Athenian litigation that made it difficult for courts to discover the “truth” of allegations about kinship and testamentary relations. In many of the extant cases litigants exploited this difficulty in creating, in practice, a system that worked much more effectively to prolong familial conflict than to reach “just” and conclusive results. In this context as well litigation was shaped by the participatory nature of the Athenian legal system, that is, by the agonistic values of citizen litigants and judges rather than by the principled imperatives of an autonomous legal order.