In the twentieth century there were several works that assumed the essential unity of Greek Law: Griechisches Bürgschaftsrecht by J. Partsch, Griechisches Privatrecht auf rechtsvergleichender Grundlage by E. Weiss, and The Greek Law of Sale by F. Pringsheim. In a review of Pringsheim’s book, and in an essay on the topic, however, M.I. Finley challenged the notion of the unity of Greek Law. Finley observed that the Greek world was divided into hundreds of different city-states, each with its own political institutions, laws, and legal procedures. According to Finley, there was just too much diversity in the laws of the Greek city-states to justify any discussion of ‘Ancient Greek Law’ as a unified body of statutes and legal concepts. He did however allow that there might have been some unity in commercial law. More recently, M. Gagarin has claimed in the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law that there was unity in the laws of the Greek poleis in respect to procedure but not in respect to substantive provisions. This essay revisits this issue and shows that there was a considerable amount of unity in the laws of the Greek poleis in substantive and constitutional matters. The article examines several areas of unity: marriage law, contracts, real security, the status of freed persons, the accountability of officials, and the relationship between Council and Assembly. It will also examine the unity of Greek law in regard to legal terminology. On the other hand, it will show that there was considerable diversity in legal procedures, which often varied according to the political constitution of a state.
This essay argues that athletics contributed significantly to whatever unity there was in the Greek world in the late archaic and early classical period. It does so by considering the significance of the so-called Panhellenic sanctuaries as one of the few contexts in which the collective appellation ‘the Greeks’ was appropriate and by emphasizing that what the four great sanctuaries of the periodos had in common was athletic competitions of great prestige. The crowds which assembled for the contests at the Panhellenic sanctuaries were discursively constructed as ‘the Greeks’ by contemporary sources. The athletic centrality of the four Panhellenic sanctuaries was a reflection of the fact that the festivals here were the ones that the athletes of the leisured elites valued most highly. By the classical period the agon gymnikos on the model of the Olympics had, by peer polity interaction, become a Panhellenic phenomenon and this allowed athletes to travel from festival to festival and compete in their chosen speciality.
The article explores the position of the Gerousia in the associative universe of the Greek cities of the Imperial period. The first section examines the public dimen- sion of the Gerousia, as it emerges from its interaction with the civic institutions, the local notables and the imperial power. The second section focuses on the Gerousia’s sim- ilarities with private associations, both in their organizational form and in several of their activities, such as the protection of graves and the administration of funerary endowments. The third section draws a comparison between the public role of the Gerousia and that of private associations. Finally, the last section proposes a taxonomy of the various corporate bodies of the Greek polis in relation to their access to events, acts and symbols that expressed the sovereign power of the civic community and its collective identity. In these terms, the Gerousia occupied an impressively high position which brought her very close to the Council and the People.
This article interprets Varro’s etymological discussion of locus in book 5 of Delingua Latina (1-56) as representative of a Varronian “place-based” history. It argues thatVarro’s reconstruction of Rome’s loci as cosmically essential and structuring elementsof both the city and Roman culture in his present day depended upon the author’s peculiarunderstanding of the past and of historical truth – namely, that fundamental principlesof truth manifest both on different levels of reality, and at different points in time.Places – temples, hills, groves, or otherwise – therefore were particularly significant inproviding access to the essential meaning of Rome’s institutions, religion, and people.Varro’s consideration of the Septimontium is then analyzed within this framework. Theargument demonstrates how Rome’s natural environment, construed as part of an originalcosmos, could explain the social and political facts of the present in Varro’s reconstructionof word-history. In particular, the religious importance of the Capitoline hill,and the separation of the Aventine from the rest of the city in the first century BCE, areboth given etymological explanations that depend upon the long-lost natural topographyof the city.
Alciphron’s books of imaginary letters depict both the rural and urban environment of Attica in the 4th century BC, in miniature and from the perspective of lowerclass characters. Alciphron uses all the rhetorical options offered by the epistolary form to illustrate the thoughts, feelings and experiences of his characters. The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of threats, and their function as rhetorical devices and/or means of expressing emotions in Alciphron’s letters. I will demonstrate that the author may not only have been inspired by New Comedy and other literary genres, but also by his contemporary private correspondence in which various threats towards the addressee are used as a rhetorical strategy, as shown by the preserved papyri and ostraca from Egypt.
