C1 - ORDER AND DISORDER: Gortyn

KEY

• PEOPLE/CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS

• PLACES and DATES

• MY THOUGHTS

• SECONDARY AUTHOR’S WORDS

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: Views of later Athenian thinkers on connection between written law and justice

• In late fifth and fourth century Athens it was a platitude that written law brought justice for all alike, and thus that it was the basis for the democracy.

  • As a character in Euripides' Suppliants says (433f.), 'When the laws have been written down both the weak and the rich have equal justice'.

  • Górgias also saw written law as the guardian of justice (DK 82, fr. 11a §30 (Palamedes)).

  • This close relation between justice, democracy and written law was apparently confirmed still earlier by Solon's codification of the laws in writing. As he says himself in one poem, 'I wrote down laws alike for rich and poor, fitting straight justice to each' (fr. 36W = Ath.Pol.'2A).

  • Aristotle criticized the Spartan ephors because they determined cases by their own judgement and not by written law (Kara ypáppata Kai tovç vópovç): there is an implicit comparison with the rule of law at Athens (Pol. 1270b 28-31). The Cretan leaders receive the same criticism a little later (Pol. 1272a 36-39): 'their arbitrary power of acting on their own judgement and dispensing with written law is dangerous

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: the beginning of laws being written, why did graphical codification begin?

• If we may believe the tradition, the earliest lawgivers, Zaleucus and Charandas, were active in the 7th century, Zaleucus perhaps as early as the mid 7th century; Drakon wrote down laws at Athens in the second half of the century. The earliest stone record of a law found so far is the law from Dreros on Crete limiting tenure of the main office, perhaps 650-600 (ML 2). By Solon's time the custom of written law was well established, though single laws may have been more common than full scale codification. But can we read back to this early period the aims and implications of written law visible in classical Athens?

• I find it hard to believe that 7th century Dreros was particularly enlightened despite its fine inscribed law, let alone that all or even most of its citizens could read the inscription - Thomas points out that literacy levels might make the written nature of laws obselete, why then does written law receive such gravitas by the 5th century?

• Various explanations for the origin of Greek written law have been advanced: perhaps most commonly, that it was the result of popular pressure in which the people demanded that customary law be stabilized and freed from arbitrary interpretation by the aristocracy.2 Or that it had more conservative aims: it has recently been argued that written law in both archaic Greece and Rome was an aristocratic attempt to freeze the current legal and political conditions before revolutionary demands could erode any more of the traditional way of life

• Or that the laws were simply written down to fix them because memory and oral tradition were weakening: but once they were written down, a literate mentality developed which (ipso facto) enabled people to perceive inequality. Thus instead of written law being the product of popular demand for equality, it helped create it.4 More puzzling, Gagarin's recent book sees the writing down of laws as corresponding to a 'clear and obvious need'.5 Since these laws were publicly inscribed, he argues that the first written laws reflect the development of the polis and its increasing interference in the lives of its citizens: The decision to write down a set of laws was . . . in effect a decision to enact legislation'.6 (But since he thinks law must by definition be written law, this is surely a circular argument). He implies (p.78) that written law demonstrated the power of the polis and gave it more control over penalties - Thomas demonstrates a critical view of Gagarin 1992

• Yet there is little reason to think that written law is in itself inherently democratic or egalitarian - or even simply a check on arbitrary judgement. Totalitarian regimes have been just as prone to extensive codification as democracies. And even if the laws are themselves just, the judicial machinery and political administration must correspond in order to transfer the equality of the laws to the society. Written law still needs interpretation. As Finley has pointed out succinctly, 'the application and efficacy of all law codes depend on the interpretation by magistrates and courts, and unless the right of interpretation is 'democratized', the mere existence of written laws changes little'.7 In his indirect and rhetorical way, Demosthenes seems to have been aware of this when he proclaimed that the force of the laws - which were just written letters - were made authoritative only through the demos (XXI 223-4).

• Even in classical Athens, there was no automatic machinery to ensure that the written laws were adhered to - at least till the establishment of the nomothetai in 403, and they controlled new laws. Much was left to the individual knowledge of Athenian citizens: evidence that individuals did go and look at the laws is surprisingly rare and laws could be ignored partly because no one knew of them. At the same time the 'unwritten laws' the laws of the gods, unquestioned rules that you should look after your parents and so on - commanded the highest respect in the 5th century. So even in the Athenian democracy, attitudes to written law were ambivalent and the relation of written law to the 'unwritten laws' curiously enigmatic. After 403, the use of 'unwritten laws' was banned for Athenian magistrates, yet there seems to have been no statute specifically banning incest, which obviously remained prohibited by the force of social disapproval. Aristotle could still say that 'customary laws (oi Kara ia eůrj) have more weight and relate to more important matters than written law, and a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not safer than customary law (Pol. 1287b)

• In other words the mere fact that laws or legal pronouncements have been written down is hardly enough to determine their significance and role.

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: oral background

• We can go further: the role and effect of writing - and therefore of written law - seems to be very closely related to the society that is using it, and not simply to some inherent qualities of the written word.10 It is surely anachronistic to attribute the characteristics of written law or written codification - which we take for granted now to much earlier periods. The effect of writing in any society can vary immensely and is partly determined by previous customs, and any earlier system onto which the writing is being grafted. These previous customs must include extensive oral communication, perhaps even oral law. We therefore cannot understand the full significance of early written law in Greece without grasping the oral background.

• We stray here into highly treacherous areas where the evidence is sparse or partial and invariably slanted in favour of what was written in stone. But they are worth pursuing, partly because much that is written about Greek law (especially its early forms) seems to be influenced by ideas about written law and documents more appropriate to the modern world (e.g. the idea that law is by definition written law).11 Most emphasis is in fact usually laid on the act itself of writing down laws as if, once written, the laws would immediately gain a certain and obvious character - Thomas points out the bias that evidence, Classical authots, and our own legal system has had on our perception of the importance of written law to the Archaic Greeks

• Detienne, for instance, stresses the essentially public nature of Greek documents and how Greek written law makes for justice, equality and democracy (as opposed to the secret and tyrannical use of writing). Yet later in the volume Camassa tentatively discusses aspects of the social and political context which make this view hard to maintain without considerable modification, and Ruzé can point to the immense power of scribes in archaic Greece and stresses the power of writing, which should undermine any reassuring picture of openness and public written law accessible to all citizens. We seem to be left with a stark choice: was writing in early Greece a source of power or a source of openness? These two different views surely correspond to opposing views about the nature of writing. Clearly the role of those first written laws, as of writing itself must be more complex than usually thought - Thomas explores the dissonance between the idea that public writing = transparency and longevity versus the idea that scribes writing those laws might write anything (thus possessing untrustworthy power) and the illiterate population would know no better. she questions the attitude that written law was immediately trusted or engaged with by the populace

• It is sometimes held that, by definition, law cannot be oral, for only writing would be able to set law apart from other customs; or that the effect of writing down customs is to dissociate laws from custom, making law in effect primarily written law. Gagarin and others have recently insisted that the Greeks did not have oral laws as such. Yet the word nomos did not refer only to written law in Athens until after 403. Greek writers were quite happy with the concept of oral or unwritten laws, and we should take the implications of this seriously. - scholarly debate on the legitimacy of oral law and its importance to archaic society, do we consider law only as those written?

• Thus the laws {nomoi) of one of the earliest lawgivers, Charondas, were said to have been sung by the Athenians when drinking. He enforced the singing of his laws at festivals just after the paeans 'so that the ordinances should become ingrained',18 and, according to Strabo, the Mazakenoi in Cappadocia still used his laws and had a voßcpöog, or 'law-chanter'. The use of music for educating citizens in the laws crops up in Crete where, according to Aelian, free Cretan children had to sing the nomoi. Terpander is said to have sung the laws of Sparta and some thought Solon tried to put his laws into verse. In a piece of folk etymology, pseudo-Aristotle thought sung nomoi (i.e. 'nomes') were so called 'because before men knew the art of writing they used to sing their laws in order not to forget them, as they are still accustomed to do among the Agathyrsoi'. In contrast to these late and motley sources, no less sober an authority than Cicero seems to have sung the laws in his youth: he blandly recalls that, unlike nowadays, they used to learn the XII Tables as boys, as a 'compulsory song', a carmen necessarium. So the existence of sung or chanted laws was accepted without a qualm by later ancient writers. The educational value of music and poetry was taken for granted in archaic and classical Greece. Plato particularly favoured the way music infiltrated the soul. Archaic poets were the educators and thinkers of society. Against this background of music and poetry, nothing could be more natural than the oral transmission - and performance of laws. - Thomas sets out her argument for the social engravement of orality, particularly regarding law, all through the ages, beyond the more common use of written law suggesting it has become deprioritised by us due to a lack of evidence (orality is by nature impossible for us to access)

• The implications for written law are intriguing: if Charondas made elaborate preparations for having his laws sung as well as writing them down, then he was clearly not relying on the written text alone for transmission or even preservation. Oral transmission continued to be fundamental even once laws were written down.

• there was probably no sudden change in behaviour when laws were written down (and illiteracy did not always matter). But sung laws would also help stabilize and preserve a coherent body of customary law. Could they help us recreate the atmosphere before the laws were written down? In other words, there is a distinct possibility that some of the earliest lawgivers fixed, or worked from, a corpus of laws which had already been transmitted orally.

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: unwritten law

• There is also a wealth of evidence for the concept of 'unwritten law' (agraphos nomos). One would think this too showed a) the existence of oral laws which were regarded as 'laws' in every important sense and b) that the Greeks were content with the concept of unwritten law. Both points have been challenged on the grounds (among others) that the term only appears in the late 5th century.27 Ostwald makes an elaborate analysis of all occurrences from the Antigone onwards, to find that each reference refers to slightly different things, thus that there was no (unified and coherent) concept of unwritten law

• You do not distinguish unwritten laws from written until you are beginning to see written law as a definite category. The fact that 'unwritten law' only begins to appear in our sources in the second half of the 5th century presupposes the development of a concept of written law - perhaps about the same time. Ostwald tried to argue that the use of nomos to mean specifically written law or statute began with Kleisthenes and the Kleisthenic democracy (Solon's laws were thesmoi not nomoi). But the first attested use of nomos to denote what is apparently written law is in Aeschylus’s Suppliants (387-91) (not absolutely certain, in fact) and Prometheus Bound (149f., 402f.), the Suppliants belonging to the 460s, the Prometheus rather later. As Ostwald also admits, Euripides is the first tragedian to refer to written nomoi specifically and to see them as a protection against injustice ( Suppl . 433). The term nomos continues to be used sometimes of unwritten law and is the standard word for 'custom' throughout the fifth century. Mostly no distinction is made in the sources between written and unwritten rules: again, as Ostwald admits, even in the mid 5th century, ' nomos might or might not refer to written legislation; in other words, the question of writing is immaterial to the definition of a political nomos ' (what was important was that it was regarded as binding). Nomos does not primarily denote written law till the very end of the 5th century, and, as Sally Humphreys has pointed out, the first certain use of nomos as written law on an Athenian inscription is as late as 418/7 (IG i3 84). Not only is the use of nomos to mean written law rather late in the history of Greek law but it is also extremely blurred.

• Nor should we neglect the background of intellectual debate. The sophists and those influenced by them in the late 5th century were much preoccupied with the many connotations of nomos: from law to custom, from merely human laws to divine ones, from custom to 'mere' convention.

• It looks as if the distinction between written and unwritten nomoi is in fact largely a product of this late 5th century Athenian and sophistic debate. The most famous example occurs in Sophocles' Antigone (esp. 450ff.) where there is conflict between the laws of the state (i.e. Creon) and the unwritten laws of the gods - here the right of burial - which have higher moral value. The discussion may well have been influenced, indeed focused, by the ability of the Athenian demos to make law under the radical democracy.

• It is at this time we first find written law expressly linked with justice, in Euripides' Suppliants and Górgias' Palamedes. Xenophon records a conversation between Pericles and Alcibiades about the nature of law in which Pericles defines law as what is written down by the people and then, with prompting from Alcibiades, he includes even what is written down by oligarchs, as long as the citizens are persuaded, not forced, to accept these rules (Mem. 1.2.40-46).

• Further on in the Memorabilia the sophist Hippias questions whether justice can be simply equated with keeping the law, since the same men can reject or alter the very laws they have just made, whereas the unwritten laws are the divine ones which are kept everywhere, such as the law that you should look after your parents. Hippias' image of written law hints at the criticisms made of the radical democracy and the demos' tendency to change its mind.

• We can probably go further and associate the manipulation of 'unwritten laws' with the late 5th century oligarchs (some of whom were sophists anyway): the very vagueness of the concept made them all the easier to exploit. Some of the more disreputable arguments of certain sophists about the prompting of nature (which could perhaps be conceived as unwritten laws too) further discredited them. Plato, hardly a democrat, comes up with some of the same ideas about controlling the citizenry through education, custom and 'unwritten laws' rather than written laws, as were attributed to the mythical Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus ( Laws 793a9-d5). Sparta prided herself on not needing written laws (Plut. Lyc. 13.3. This is an image of Sparta more appropriate to the classical period than earlier, since the Spartan rhetra was clearly a written law: perhaps the later ideal was developed in reaction to the Athenian democracy.) The decrees of the Athenian assembly, on the other hand, were written, and usually published on stone (decrees/psephismata and nomoi were not formally distinguished till after the revision of laws in 410-399). Fifth century decrees were inscribed 'so that anyone who wants can see'.41 This association of written publication with the demos' laws, an Athenian peculiarity, probably helped still more to set the ‘unwritten laws’ in a sinister light. - ideological purpose behind our sources anachronistically placing unwritten laws below those written (eg distinguish themselves from Sparta)

• Finally, when democracy was restored in 403, it was expressly enacted that magistrates should not apply an unwritten law (Andoc. I 85 and 87): clearly a measure against the oligarchs' unscrupulous use of unwritten law, and the final binding declaration that the democracy was run on written law only.42 This sanctified the close identification of written law with democracy, which, despite Solon's laws, seems largely a product of the climate of politics and discussion at Athens and the democratic ideal of publicity in the second half of the 5th century.

• We can be reasonably certain, then, that in the archaic period what we call law and custom were barely distinguished from each other as concepts. What is distinguished in archaic and early classical inscriptions is 'what is laid down', ó thesmos (as Solon refers to his laws), or 'what is announced', the 'rhetra', and very often simply 'the writing' (ta grammata), to distinguish what is written down from the others. The idea of law as a body of written rules seems to have developed in close conjunction with the political and legal experiences of 5th century Athens. - Distinction from thesmos and nomos - nomos = law, thesmos = written law. later in classical period nomos used exclusively for written law as spoken law is phased out creating an anachronistic idea that the only laws that were followed were written

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: Mnemones and Scribes

• The officials variously called mnemones and hieromnemones must form a lynch-pin in the transition to written law. Here we can observe both the continuation of 'memory' even after writing has been introduced to record certain laws, and the importance of personnel for the role of written law when it comes

• By definition we are un likely to find evidence for them until public inscriptions begin the 7th century: the earliest attested example is the hieromnemon in the late 7th century inscription from Tiryns recording some kind of sacred law. Hieromnemones occur later at 5th century Argos, Mycenae, Crete and Delphi. Mnemones occur in the Peloponnese, at Halicarnassus in the 5th century (ML 32), and Crete, especially Gortyn. Knidos has a council of anamnamones and The aisimnatai of Megara and East Greece may have had the same function

• What do these mnemones do once writing spreads to their communities and is used for public record? Many of them end up as scribes - at least in Hellenistic inscriptions. But do they simply become scribes and guardians of the written word? Far from it. Our evidence, scanty though it is, indicates a) that they were often important officials down to the classical period, and b) that they often combine their previous role as 'memorizers' with the new one of writing. Thus this is another example where writing does not take over public record completely and where there is a more complex overlapping of memory and written record than usually admitted

• whoever they are). The mnemon in the 5th century Gortyn Code is most interesting. He appears once alongside the judge as possible witness for a case which has already been judged (Col. IX 3 Iff.); and an adopted son whose (adopted) father is renouncing the adoption, is to receive money from the father through the courts and the mnamon (Col. XI lOff.).50 The mnamon is closely attached to the judicial processes and to the judge himself, and if he and the judge are witnesses for the result of a past case, this hints that part of his role was to remember court proceedings (there are clearly no written court records: in another place the judge alone has to decide on oath how long it was since an order had been issued, Col. I 38.

• When these communities began to use writing in the public sphere, the name mnemon was retained, memory continued to be important and writing did not take over public business completely. As we saw in the Gortyn Code, judge and mnamon had to supplement the very scanty amount of written record. It may well have been hoped that the mnemon' s memory might ensure a certain consistency in the judicial process. But if officials were such that their very word (or oath) was enough, that was not going to change overnight with the use of writing - or of written law. The function of this writing was affected strongly by the previous customs of city and officials.

• The Cretan mnemones down to the 5th century were full-scale officials, not mere clerks: emphasis on the problem of meaning tends to obscure the fact that Spensithios was an exceedingly powerful man. Fifth century Teos did its best to ensure that the inscriptions were preserved and properly disseminated. And Erythrai, not mentioned so far, took extreme measures, probably in the 5th century, to prevent secretaries from serving the same magistrate twice and in various other ways to curb their power. There is certainly no easy confidence in any of these cases that public inscriptions would safeguard the laws and justice - argument against written word being binding is the anxiousness present in the decrees that they not be broken by those writing them

• If officials are forced, on pain of being cursed, to read out the inscription, it also looks unlikely that the demos was expected to be able to read it themselves (lurking amongst these inscriptions are hints that only the officials could read anyway). But it is surely not just a matter of who can read. The mnemones in their early form as 'remembrancers' were extremely powerful too, like the Halicarnassian mnemones whose very 'knowledge' is to be binding (ML 32 above). So this control over the community's past records (written and unwritten) was passed on when writing began to be used by the polis, not created from scratch from writing alone. The effect of written record was partly, if not entirely, a function of the kind of officials who used it. - writing of law not necessarily effective at democratising law due to power of scribes and mnemones who were relied upon by oaths and threats of curses to tell truthfully the law as it was stated

• The roles of mnemones and scribes would suggest, then: i) that writing was not regarded as an unmixed blessing since scribes were often controlled; ii) public inscriptions were not regarded as adequate guardians of the laws by themselves; and iii) that there was no sudden and simple change over to writing. Memory continued to back up writing, literate mnemones continued many functions unconnected with writing. Writing, and therefore written law, did not take over completely.

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: written laws - arguments against its importance

• To judge from our evidence, very seldom is anything approaching a written code produced. The lawgivers are attributed with almost codifying activities ('writing down the laws', as if complete). But the epigraphic evidence suggests a much more gradual process, and the extent of wholesale codification, whatever that means in a system of customary law, has probably been much exaggerated, in optimistic analogy with Solon’s law-giving.

• At Gortyn there was a long succession of individual laws and even the 'Great Code' is far from complete. At Dreros, we find individual laws written in stone at various times. We can probably assume that the 7th century law about kosmoi was the only written law of Dreros at the time. Drakon of Athens probably did not produce a lengthy 'code': his homicide law as preserved by later Athenians may even have been an isolated pronouncement if its opening clause really reads (as Gagarin argued), 'Even if a man kills someone unwillingly, he is to go into exile'. It was therefore supplementing unwritten law - and presupposing its existence - rather than supplanting it.

• Similarly, the evidence of the inscriptions does not fit at all well with the literary evidence about the lawgivers. On the inscriptions themselves, procedural law is dominant: it looks as if what gets written on stone is not usually substantive law but procedural. That is, it must be assuming the backround of substantive law - what should and should not be done - and is primarily adding prodecdure, fines and penalties - Inscriptions, though fragmented, can alert us to the unwritten laws through their procedural content rather than substantive which implies these rules are assumed or oralised

• Therefore oral law is in effect continuing long after the first laws are written up in stone; written law does not spell the end of 'oral law'. There is no mass writing down of customary law (but one can see how the later traditions came to attribute all to a single lawgiver). This also suggests that writing, or at least public writing on stone, was specifically and deliberately used for the judicial side of the polis, for controlling procedure and magistrates, but not for the values and beliefs that could be easily held orally. This is visible even in Sparta. The 'Lycurgan laws' which supposedly governed the peculiarly Spartan way of life were the unwritten customs enforced by her educational system; the great Spartan 'rhetra', which somehow got written down, was a law about procedure, albeit important constitutional procedure.

• So written law on stone was perhaps intended to fix the kind of law or pronouncement which was not universally recognized.75 There could hardly be a more efficient way of preserving and fixing an enactment than setting it in stone

• The Gortyn 'Code' refers obsessively to 'the writing': judges are to judge 'according to the writing’ or they must 'decide on oath'. Stringent punishment is therefore threatened if anyone defaces the stone. Even if most people could not read them, the inscriptions could at least be seen in a public place, and if officials had to read them out, their content could be widely known. (But there was still a lot that was not written down at all, and it is important to ask who it is who decides to fix the law).

THOMAS, R. 1995 - WRITTEN IN STONE? LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ORALITY AND THE CODIFICATION OF LAW: written laws - how were they enforced?

• were there any real mechanisms to deal with an offender? Solon was probably most unusual in setting up a mechanism by which any citizen could prosecute, the graphe, as opposed to the dike which was initiated primarily by the wronged person himself.

• But many of the earliest laws on stone seem to leave no room for such procedure. Often the wronged person is to fall back on 'self-help'. So the law is only stating an ideal

• Remarkably often, however, the sanctions seem rather to be religious ones. Often the sanctions are in the form of oaths: for example the 7th century Dreros law regulating ambitious kosmoi ends with a list of those who are 'swearers'. It is not clear if they were swearing to obey or to enforce the law, but this oath was surely the main hope of enforcing the law (and those forced to swear would presumably be the main potential transgressors of the law).

• The fact that these inscriptions may state a decision of the polis is often emphasized as showing the beginning of state apparatus, the polis' legislative power, and the polis' self awareness. What is less often noted is how often these laws (right down to the 5th century) are actually under the protection of the gods. Many also begin with an invocation to a god (Dreros, the Spenisthos inscription). In other words it is not the writing in stone that is to make these laws effective and enforceable, but the gods, the curses or other sanctions which belong rather to the realm of what Gernet called 'pre law’.

• The fact that they are written law does not seem to be enough to make the laws valid, as so often implied. There is a conscious effort to include non-legislative sanctions.

• One wonders, then, whether the writing itself is seen in a superstitious light? Should we perhaps say that the writing of a law on stone helped to crystallize the religious sanctions or perpetuated the curse in a more authoritative way? Or that writing was seen as a way of making the law into a physical object that was more easily put under the protection of the god, even dedicated in its material form to the god? - Thomas suggests the act of writing was less about permanence and instead had a more religious function, akin to a curse-tablet, in which the object itself was dedicatory and added to the weight of punishment (ie viewed as an object more than a text)

• ts material form to the god? What is clear is that early public writings (i.e, laws) are often associated with temples, written up on temple walls or set in the precinct. And some of the earliest uses of writing in Greece, attested by 650-625, is for writing curses which are then left in a sanctuary. The other common use is for dedications.

• Not only does the epigraphic evidence suggest that laws were often written down gradually and in piecemeal fashion, but their role and intentions cannot be deduced merely from the fact that they were written. Behind these early inscribed laws lay customs and ideas which must partly have been inherited from the realm of customary and oral law and the mnemones ; also certain attitudes to the written word which differed from those in later periods and perhaps from polis to polis. What emerges above all is the strikingly sacred context of so much of early public writing and written law.

• What I have tentatively suggested is that the monumental inscription of a law was intended not only to fix it publicly in writing, but to confer divine protection and a monumental impressiveness on just those kinds of law which did not receive the time-honoured respect accorded the unwritten laws and customs. In later Athens, the stone inscribing of decrees symbolized publicity and democratic decision-making. In earlier times the inscription added weight and divine protection. It was precisely laws about procedure and constitution which so desperately needed them.

WILLEY, H. 2016 - Gods and men in ancient Greek conceptions of lawgiving

• In the opening lines of Plato’s Laws , the Athenian stranger asks his interlocutors, ‘is it a god or some man … to whom you ascribe the authorship of your legal arrangements?’ Echoes of this Platonic enquiry are found time and again in literary treatments of the early lawgivers. Are the early lawgivers mortal or divine? What is the nature of the cooperation between god and mortal legis lator? Are laws themselves mortal or divine? We shall see that these questions constitute a recurrent preoccupation in Greek thinking about lawgiving, in both literary traditions and the inscribed laws of the poleis.