Lene Rubinstein – författare

How successful were the Athenians and other Greeks in bringing about the rule of law? What did the Greeks recognise as 'law' both in the 'polis' and internationally? How did the courts attempt to implement this ideal, and how successful were they? This collection of essays sets out to answer these questions, concentrating on the following themes: law, religion and the sources of legitimacy; substance and procedure; legal arguments in court; documents and witnesses; and law in an international context. There is much here to interest not only specialists in Greek law, but also those concerned more generally with both Greek history and the history of law.

This important volume collects essays on topics in Greek history and epigraphy by an international cast of highly respected historians and epigraphers. Contributions include new and authoritative papers on Athenian politics and political institutions, the language and significance of honorific decrees, the role of inscriptions in the Athenian democratic state and elsewhere, as well as analyses of the methods for interpreting them. Together this collection represents an appropriate celebration of the work of the distinguished historian Professor Peter Rhodes.

Having demonstrated that about a third of the speeches in our corpus of forensic oratory were written for delivery by synegoroi rather than main parties, the author investigates the way in which synegoroi and main parties divided the argumentation between them in individual cases. She shows that trials of major political importance were conducted by teams of pleaders, and she concludes that such legal actions are best understood as team-based contests rather than as rhetorical confrontations between individual members of the Athenian elite. The implications of this for our overall understanding of the Athenian democracy and the political part played by the courts are discussed, and it is suggested as a possibility that team-based public actions offered a wider scope for participation by ordinary citizens than is normally allowed by modern historians.