Athenian Homicide Law In The Age Of The Orators

Focusing on extant speeches from the Athenian Assembly, law, and Council in the fifth–fourth centuries BCE, these essays explore how speakers constructed or deconstructed identities for themselves and their opponents as part of a rhetorical strategy designed to persuade or manipulate the audience. According to the needs of the occasion, speakers could identify the Athenian people either as a unified demos or as a collection of sub-groups, and they could exploit either differences or similarities between Athenians and other Greeks, and between Greeks and ‘barbarians’. Names and naming strategies were an essential tool in the (de)construction of individuals’ identities, while the Athenians’ civic identity could be constructed in terms of honour(s), ethnicity, socio-economic status, or religion. Within the forensic setting, the physical location and procedural conventions of an Athenian trial could shape the identities of its participants in a unique if transient way. The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory is an insightful look at this understudied aspect of Athenian oratory and will be of interest to anyone working on the speeches themselves, identity in ancient Greece, or ancient oratory and rhetoric more broadly.

Douglas M. MacDowell (1931–2010) was a scholar of international renown and the articles included here cover a significant area of classical scholarship, discussing Athenian law, law-making and legal procedure, Old Comedy, comedy and law, politics and lexicography. All of these articles, published between 1959 and 2010, bear the characteristic marks of his scholarship: precision, balanced judgement, brevity and deep learning; they are rational and sober accounts of complicated and controversial issues. Many of these essays are virtually inaccessible as they were originally published in celebratory volumes or article collections which are now out of print or difficult to find outside major libraries. This collection of MacDowell’s articles will make these works available to a broad scholarly audience, and make it easier to bring this scholarship to the classroom as part of courses in Classics, ancient history, legal history and theatre studies. The volume includes a biography of MacDowell by Christopher Carey, based on the testimony of his closest colleagues and personal friends, which was presented to the British Academy.

This volume brings together leading scholars and rising researchers in the field of Greek law to examine the role played by the law in thinking and practice in the legal system of classical Athens from a variety of perspectives.

In 621/0 B.C., the Athenians appointed Draco as their first lawgiver. His homicide laws, which alone survived the general recension of Athenian law by Solon (594/3 B.C.), remained in force down through the Classical period. This book traces the development of Athenian legal and social responses to homicide from the legislation of Draco to the time of the orator Demosthenes (d. 322 B.C.), with particular attention to the Athenian institution of private enmity (echthra), the circumstances and aims of Draco's legislation, familial and religious issues surrounding homicide, and the regime of the Thirty Tyrants and its aftermath.

This study identifies specific features in the legal procedure and social perception of homicide in Athens in the time of the orators and examines how these features affected and were represented and utilised in forensic rhetoric. The socially transgressive nature of the crime in Athens resulted in homicide receiving a distinctive treatment in Athenian law, where it was ‘set apart’ from other crimes in a number of ways, including the courts in which it was tried, the procedures involved, and the fact that uniquely these laws were attributed to Drakon as mytho-historical lawgiver. Plastow explores how four distinctive features of homicide procedure and law at Athens played out in rhetoric: ideology, pollution, relevance, and the connected issues of motive and intent. Through exploration of these rhetorical themes, the volume also provides insight into the popular perceptions of homicide amongst the Athenians, since the orators’ speeches make extensive use of persuasive techniques that tap into the deeply held beliefs and ideologies of the jury members. A secondary aim is to explore the effects of the physical context of delivery on the rhetoric of homicide: the courtroom spaces themselves, whether homicide courts or popular courts, with the variable ideologies that their locations and physical attributes provoked, as well as the aspects of ritual that would have been performed physically during a homicide trial. Homicide in the Attic Orators offers insight into this complex subject, and is of interest to anyone with an interest in Athenian law, rhetoric, and society.

The relationship between law and literature is rich and complex. In the past three and half decades, the topic has received much attention from literary critics and legal scholars studying modern literature. Despite the prominence of law and justice in Ancient Greek literature, there has been little interest among Classical scholars in the connections between law and drama. This is the first collection of essays to approach Greek tragedy and comedy from a legal perspective. The volume does not claim to provide an exhaustive treatment of law and literature in ancient Greece. Rather it provides a sample of different approaches to the topic. Some essays show how knowledge of Athenian law enhances our understanding of individual passages in Attic drama and the mimes of Herodas and enriches our appreciation of dramatic techniques. Other essays examine the information provided about legal procedure found in Aristophanes' comedies or the views about the role of law in society expressed in Attic drama. The collection reveals reveal how the study of law and legal procedure can enhance our understanding of ancient drama and bring new insights to the interpretation of individual plays.