II. Achaea and the Peloponnese in the Late Fifth-Early Fourth Centuries Klaus Freitag The present contribution investigates the relationship of Achaea to Sparta in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE [1] in order to find out whether ethnicity played a role in that relationship and, if so, in which contexts. For this reason, I will not discuss the ethnogenesis… Read more
III. Elis James Roy Background In the Dark Age there was limited settlement in northern and central Elis, grouped principally in the Peneios valley and the Alpheios valley. [1] Then between the Dark Age and the archaic period the communities of the Peneios valley must somehow have coalesced to form a political unit. The details of this process are not… Read more
IV. Triphylia from Elis to Arcadia Claudia Ruggeri Tριφυλια and its inhabitants, the Τριφύλιοι, provide an important example of the creation of a new ethnic identity that can be dated to a precise historical context and investigated at the very moment of its emergence. Even more interestingly, some thirty years after its emergence this ethnic identity was transformed in order to make the Triphylians members of… Read more
Image Credits Figure 1. Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1953; acc. no. 53.11.4. Photo, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 2. Musée du Louvre, acc. no. G 104. Photo, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Figure 3. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, acc. no. IN 2695. Photo, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Figure 4. Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of… Read more
For my uncle, Harry Kagan Acknowledgments I have presented parts of this book at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Bryn Mawr, the 1998 meeting of the American Society of Legal Historians in Toronto, the New York Classical Club, Johns Hopkins, the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, and the Bibliotheca Classica in St. Petersburg. My gratitude to those audiences, and also to Stephen Colvin,… Read more
Chapter 1: The Challenge of Court Speech Few aspects of classical Greek literature are as well preserved as the oratory of the lawcourts of classical Athens. Of the approximately 150 speeches composed by or attributed to the Attic orators who constitute the Canon, about two-thirds were written for real or imaginary forensic occasions. For some purposes we can also consult partly or entirely imaginary court speeches by… Read more
Chapter 2: Amateur Litigants, Amateur Speakers The idiôtês on His Own It often said that a litigant in an Athenian court was required to speak for himself, [1] though the evidence for an actual law making such a stipulation is very weak indeed: a single remark in a second-century AD work, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (2.15.30). [2]… Read more
Chapter 3: Natural and Artificial Speech from Homer to Hyperides; A Brief Sketch From Homer to the Mid-Fifth Century The continuity of Greek rhetorical tradition has become controversial, with much of the controversy centering around those Plato identifies as teachers of rhetoric in the Phaedrus. [1] Others take a broader view and see abundant material in the earliest texts, including Homer… Read more
Chapter 4: Terrors of the Courtroom In Demosthenes 22.25, a passage made famous by Osborne’s 1985 article on the multiplicity of procedural routes available to prosecutors, we have one of the very few general references within a speech to the possibility that litigation, and specifically speaking in court, might intimidate some idiôtai: καὶ μὴν κἀκεῖνό γε δεῖ μαθεῖν ὑμᾶς, ὅτι τοὺς νόμους ὁ τιθεὶς τούτους Σόλων… Read more
Chapter 5: Performance as Evidence Far from being a small town where everybody kept everybody else under continual surveillance, Attica was a large territory with a large population, and it would be exceptional for a juror to know the people involved in a trial, unless perhaps they lived in the same deme or had served together in the army. Hence the outcome of a trial often depended… Read more
