Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part One THE WORLD OF BELIEF
- Chapter 1 The use and value of Greek legal documents
- Chapter 2 Roman perceptions of Roman tablets: aspects and associations
- Chapter 3 The Roman tablet: style and language
- Chapter 4 Recitation from tablets
- Chapter 5 Tablets and efficacy
- Part Two THE EVOLUTION OF PRACTICE
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Chapter 1 - The use and value of Greek legal documents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part One THE WORLD OF BELIEF
- Chapter 1 The use and value of Greek legal documents
- Chapter 2 Roman perceptions of Roman tablets: aspects and associations
- Chapter 3 The Roman tablet: style and language
- Chapter 4 Recitation from tablets
- Chapter 5 Tablets and efficacy
- Part Two THE EVOLUTION OF PRACTICE
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
Greek legal documents provide an important contrast – in language, treatment, and consequence – to Roman legal documents, for in the Greek world, what can be known about the wording and style of legal documents, as well as what can be known about attitudes towards them, underlines their ambiguous status and lack of independent legal authority. The evidence is mixed and uneven: for classical Athens, legal documents themselves do not survive, and are instead only referred to by fourth-century orators, while for the later Hellenistic world, especially Ptolemaic Egypt, the legal documents themselves exist, but in no descriptive context that allows a direct understanding of their value and relationship to their legal act. This has left considerable room for scholarly disagreement over how Hellenistic documents in particular were conceived and valued. Only relatively recently has a consensus over the legal strengths and, especially, weaknesses of these documents been forged, led by J.-P. Lévy and H.-J. Wolff. What is written here adds to what has already been done by giving particular emphasis to what is known about the generation of these documents, what can be deduced from the wording of the documents themselves, and what can be hypothesized from social attitudes about documents when these are known, components specifically chosen because of the contrast they will provide to a discussion of the same components in Roman documents on tablets that follows.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Legitimacy and Law in the Roman WorldTabulae in Roman Belief and Practice, pp. 12 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004