Adriaan Lanni

Spectator sport or serious politics? όί περιεστηκότες and the Athenian lawcourts

In his tract A Rationale of Judicial Evidence , Jeremy Bentham repeatedly refers to the courtroom as the ‘theatre of justice’. Benthams description has been borne out by recent scholarship on Athenian law. As a form of civic space, the Athenian lawcourts were similar to the Theatre of Dionysos in many respects: litigants faced each other in a competitive agon , delivering lines written for them by logographers to a mass audience which would range, ordinarily, from 200 to 1500 jurors. Moreover, modern scholars have drawn on the notion of ‘social drama’ introduced by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the Athenian lawcourts as an arena for socially constructive feuding behaviour, as a public stage for the social elite to compete for prestige, or as a forum for ongoing communication between elite litigants and mass jurors ‘in a context which made explicit the power of the masses to judge the actions and behavior of elite individuals’.

Relevance in Athenian Courts

One of the most striking features of speeches intended for delivery in the Athenian popular courts is the presence of material that would be considered irrelevant or inadmissible in a modern courtroom. The interpretation of this tendency to include information that does not bear on the legal issue in dispute is central to our understanding of the aims and ideals of the Athenian legal system. In recent years, it has been argued that the 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. On this view, the extra legal arguments in surviving court speeches provide evidence that litigants were engaged in a competition for honor and prestige largely unrelated to the statute under which the suit was brought or the incident that ostensibly gave rise to the dispute. This approach to the Athenian legal system has been challenged by scholars who contend that the Athenian courts attempted to implement a rule of law.

The Laws of War in Ancient Greece

Lanni surveys what is known about the law of war in ancient Greece, addressing the laws sources, content, and enforcement mechanisms. She argues that although there was a relatively effective law of war in ancient Greece, it did not encompass humanitarian ideals. Instead, the laws of war focused on protecting sacred objects and observances. Despite the central role played by religion and honor in the Greek laws of war, these laws were indifferent to considerations of mercy and the protection of noncombatants. Lanni next asks what insight the evidence from ancient Greece might give us in the ongoing debate over whether international law can ever truly restrain states. The traditional scholarly account of the Greek law of war would support the realist position. But Lanni argues that the Greek example, which includes instances where Greek states observed international norms that were clearly contrary to their interests, suggests one time and place where international law served as a meaningful check on state behavior.

The Expressive Effect of the Athenian Prostitution Laws

This article argues that attention to the expressive function of law suggests that the Athenian laws prohibiting former prostitutes from active political participation may have had a much broader practical impact than previously thought. By changing the social meaning of homosexual pederasty, these laws influenced norms regarding purely private conduct and reached beyond the limited number of politically active citizens likely to be prosecuted under the law. Some appear to have become more careful about courting in public while others adopted a conception of chaste pederasty that would not run afoul of the law. The prostitution laws may also have provoked resistance among a particular subset of elites, the apragmones , contributing to this group9s deliberate disengagement from public affairs.

Disqualified Olympians: The Skeptical Greek View of Divine Judges

Greek literature and legal practice exhibit a reluctance, bordering on refusal, to deem the Olympian gods as fit judges, either of themselves or of humans. Although there is an occasional word of praise, the gods are routinely portrayed as preoccupied with advancing their own interests, and notably petulant over perceived slights to themselves. In Aeschylus’ mythical account of the creation of Athens’ first court, Athena declares herself incapable of judging the defendant, a mere mortal, without human jurors to help her. Respectable divine agents of justice are almost always figured as abstractions (“Themis” or the spirits in Hesiod), named, not portrayed with any specificity, devoid of personality — not to speak of judges who have decided a specific case in a specific way.Perhaps reflecting this ambivalence about the quality of divine judging, Athenian courts were conceived of as predominantly mortal affairs. To be sure, traces of divine participation can be seen, for example, in the use of oaths and the process of juror selection. But despite the ubiquity of religious symbols and rituals in Athenian life, Athenian jurors did not, for the most part, seek the assistance of the divine or draw legitimacy from the involvement of the gods in their decisions.This pessimistic view of the gods as judges is not merely a byproduct of anthropomorphism, for the Greeks imagined the gods not merely as flawed humans, but as lacking the seriousness mortals acquired precisely as a consequence of their impending death.