The use of writing in connection with Greek law has attracted a good deal of interest in recent years. Several papers in Marcel Detienne's collection on writing bear on law, and law has had a significant place in Rosalind Thomas' work on orality and writing. Others have considered writing and early legislation primarily from the political perspective of the role of written legislation in the development of the polis. My own interest centers on the legal effects of writing, and in particular its role in shaping the legal systems of ancient Greece and its effect on the Greeks' thinking about law. I will begin by sketching the picture we have of Greek law from our earliest evidence, the poems of Homer and Hesiod, and will then consider the ways in which written texts were introduced into this system. Comparison with other premodern legal systems will help us appreciate the unusual way in which writing interacted with law in Greece.

EARLY GREEK ADJUDICATION

The poems of Homer and Hesiod, which probably reached their more-or-less final shape around 700 b.c.e., show that by this time a standard procedure for settling disputes between members of the community was well established in Greece. This suggests that the procedure probably had reached this form before the introduction of alphabetic writing, around 750. The procedure is most fully illustrated by the famous trial scene on the shield of Achilles. The people are gathered in the agora to hear a dispute between two men.