An international cast of distinguished scholars here offers seventeen new contributions on the detail and development of Athenian law; the life, work, and political background of the Attic orators; and the intersection of Attic Comedy with Athenian law, politics, and society. In their detailed and careful use of evidence and deep awareness of social and historical contexts, the essays aspire to standards set by their distinguished honorand, Professor D.M. MacDowell.

Papers presented at a conference, Athenian Law and Life, held in Glasgow, 30 June-2 July 2001.

This volume brings together essays on Athenian law by Edward M. Harris, who challenges much of the recent scholarship on this topic. Presenting a balanced analysis of the legal system in ancient Athens, Harris stresses the importance of substantive issues and their contribution to our understanding of different types of legal procedures. He combines careful philological analysis with close attention to the political and social contexts of individual statutes. Collectively, the essays in this volume demonstrate the relationship between law and politics, the nature of the economy, the position of women, and the role of the legal system in Athenian society. They also show that the Athenians were more sophisticated in their approach to legal issues than has been assumed in the modern scholarship on this topic.

This book argues that writers of Old Comedy belonged to recognisable political circles and used their comedy to disparage their political enemies.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.

In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.