This book draws on contemporary legal scholarship to explain why Athens was a remarkably well-ordered society.

A topic fundamental to understanding the ancient world

Using comparative anthropological and historical perspectives, this analysis of the legal regulation of violence in Athenian society challenges traditional accounts of the development of the legal process. It examines theories of social conflict and the rule of law as well as actual litigation.

How successful were the Greeks in bringing about the rule of law? What did the Greeks recognise as law both in the polis and internationally? This collection of essays sets out to answer these questions.

The Laws is Plato's last, longest, and perhaps, most famous work. It presents a conversation on political philosophy between three elderly men: an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinias. They worked to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony that would make all of its citizens happy and virtuous. In this work, Plato combines political philosophy with applied legislation, going into great detail concerning what laws and procedures should be in the state. For example, they consider whether drunkenness should be allowed in the city, how citizens should hunt, and how to punish suicide. The principles of this book have entered the legislation of many modern countries and provoke a great interest of philosophers even in the 21st century.

The Law of Ancient Athens contains the principal literary and epigraphical sources, in English, for Athenian law in the Archaic and Classical periods, from the first known historical trial (late seventh century) to the fall of the democracy in 322 BCE. This accessible and important volume is designed for teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ancient Greek world, the history of law, and the history of democracy, an Athenian invention during this period. Offering a comprehensive treatment of Athenian law, it assumes no prior knowledge of the subject and is organized in user-friendly fashion, progressing from the person to the family to property and obligations to the gods and to the state. David D. Phillips has translated all sources into English, and he has added significant introductory and explanatory material. Topics covered in the book include homicide and wounding; theft; marriage, children, and inheritance; citizenship; contracts and commerce; impiety; treason and other offenses against the state; and sexual offenses including rape and prostitution. The volume’s unique feature is its presentation of the actual primary sources for Athenian laws, with many key or disputed terms rendered in transliterated Greek. The translated sources, together with the topical introductions, notes, and references, will facilitate both research in the field and the teaching of increasingly popular courses on Athenian law and law in the ancient world.

Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject World History - Early and Ancient History, grade: 1,0, University of Hamburg (Fakultät Geschichte), language: English, abstract: Around the 5th century BC, the people of ancient Athens pioneered the concept of demokratia, a system of self-governance that means power to the people in its original sense. Different from previous regimes, the establishment of democracy guaranteed direct political and legal access for free Athenian citizens despite wealth, property, or power relations. Nevertheless, there is fierce controversy concerning the question of how democratic the Attic legal system was for the female population. Critics claim among others the arbitrariness of judgments and the lack of legal education of most of Athens’s population who were neither in the position to make proper decisions in court nor to revise verdicts, in addition to gender inequality in regard to the access to Athens’s law system. Most strikingly is that previous work in this field focused predominantly on the scope of men within the justice system, while written pieces concerning female voices barely exist. Ultimately, this urges us to ask whether the Athenian justice system provided legal access for women and how they have been legally prosecuted at the time.