Egypt came under Greek rule after the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.; the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled until the conquest by Octavian in 30 B.C. Egypt was then a province of the Roman Empire until the Arabs conquered it in 641 A.D. After the Greek conquest, an important migration of Macedonians, Greeks, and other groups took place from Greece and the surrounding areas of the Mediterranean. These groups then settled either in Greek poleis, such as old Naucratis, or in the newly founded cities of Alexandria and Ptolemais, but by far the majority settled all over the flatland of the chora (countryside).

In keeping with their ancient customs, the immigrants brought their own law and lived according to it. The resulting questions about the continuity and development of law, the possibility of mutual influence between Greek and native Egyptian law, as well as questions about the practice of law, are of general legal-historical interest. In this chapter, these questions will be examined primarily for the Ptolemaic period. The problematic nature of the relationship of Roman law (“Reichsrecht”) to native law, or better, to native laws (“Volksrechte”) developed in different ways after the Roman conquest, and the question of provincial law will only be sketched here.

According to Aristotle, first philosophy or, as he sometimes calls it, theology, investigates being as being, which is to say the highest principles and causes of all things. In dealing with Maimonides, it is important to see that, unlike Aristotle, he did not write a systematic treatise on the nature of being. The subject matter of the Guide of the Perplexed is identified as natural science (the Account of the Beginning) and metaphysics or divine science (the Account of Ezekiel's Chariot). In Maimonides' view mastery of these subjects is needed for human perfection, and it is impossible to fulfill the commandments without them. Simply put: One cannot love God in ignorance. But instead of making an original contribution to physics and metaphysics, Maimonides claims (GP 2.2) that his purpose is to explain the meaning of key terms in the Torah.

There are two reasons for this hesitation. From a religious perspective, Jewish law forbids one to discuss the Account of the Beginning or the Account of the Chariot in a public setting. Thus all Maimonides can do is offer hints or clues that point readers in the right direction and encourage them to reach their own conclusions. From a philosophic perspective, once we get beyond the existence and unity of God, Maimonides doubts that anyone can achieve more than a few momentary insights about the metaphysical realm so that much of what people take to be certain is really a form of conjecture. Although conjecture can be well founded or ill, Maimonides does not regard human knowledge as a seamless web of causes and principles but rather as a patchwork of established truths, educated guesses, and admissions of ignorance. We will see that, in some cases, the third component is as important as the first two.

Introduction

During the period of the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean basin, a singular form of deracinated but coherent society came into being. Starting as mercenaries, even pirates, and moving seamlessly into the world of commerce and ultimately the management of Roman provinces, a whole diaspora of mobile, opportunistic Italians outside Italy - men and women, slaves and free, very rich and grindingly poor - had come into being by the beginning of the first century B.C. Their identity was not much shaped by a sense of a common homeland, because Italy itself was so heterogeneous and - especially at this time - changing so fast. The changing fortunes of this loose collectivity have resisted generalization because of its erratic and labile distribution in space and time. Yet it can claim to be one of the great diasporas, to be compared with the archaic Phoenician and Hellenic diasporas, or that of the Hellenistic Jews. It was maintained through common interaction with the Roman state, especially through military service, and through a growing feeling of shared advantage over non-Romans. It was therefore indeed neither a simply colonial nor a truly ethnic phenomenon: but in it lie clues to the dynamic of Roman imperial power, and to the cultural weave of the empire itself, east and west, of the provinces and, in many respects, of Italy too. These - besides free-born Romans they included grantees of citizenship, and freedmen and their descendants - were the people who formed the Roman core of provinces and who bound client-kingdoms into the fabric of the imperium.

Despite its small size and inauspicious geography, Judea played a significant role in the Augustan Empire. This, quite apart from the greater limelight still that would be cast upon it as a result of the eventual “triumph” of Christianity both in Roman politics and European culture. Yet long before Judea became synonymous with Jesus or “Holy Land” (Wilken, 1992, 21-45), it had become Augustus' gateway to the East, thanks in large measure to the political fortunes of Herod. Indeed, Augustus' rise to imperial power was very much tied to Herod's career at a number of key points. As client to Rome, and under the patronage of Antony and then Octavian, Herod greatly expanded the Judean kingdom from 40 to 4 BCE. Along the way he was associated with some of the most noted figures of his day, including Pompey, Caesar, Cleopatra, Agrippa, Asinius and Vedius Pollio, and more. On his death, his lands were divided among his surviving sons; however, in 6 CE Judea came under direct Roman provincial administration. This change would also have profound effects on the social and political climate of Judea - and Rome itself - under Augustus' successors and thus set the stage for the emergence of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.

“For you will live as in a theater in which the spectators are the whole world” (Dio 52.34.2). Dio's citing of an insight he imagines Maecenas having offered to Octavian more than two centuries earlier employs the truth of hindsight. Dio's Maecenas also counseled the young master of the Roman empire on how he might “enjoy fully the reality of monarchy without the odium attached to the name of 'King'” (52.40.2), and that he should “adorn this City with utter disregard for expense and make it magnificent with festivals of every kind” (52.30.1). Dio knew just how well Octavian and his successors had taken such advice to heart. Inside Rome's imperial theaters the spectators were presented with dazzling entertainments calculated to impress them with the glory of their patron, the princeps, whose performative presence added to the excitement and splendor of the occasion. The formal public spectacles - pervasive, massive, and influential as they were - demand our attention. But such performances are only the most obvious example of how the spectacular and the theatrical became progressively embedded in every aspect of public life during Augustus' reign. Indeed, the very city itself, according to Strabo (5.3.8), became a vast mise-en-scène “presenting to the eye the appearance of a stage-painting, offering a spectacle one can hardly draw away from.” Its inhabitants too, ruler and ruled alike, were exhorted by the symbols, mythology, poetry, art, and architecture of the age to conceive themselves as actors in a great historical pageant: the expansion, perfection, and celebration of Roman power and Roman achievement.

Today, globalization takes command. Tokyo, New York, Istanbul, and other cosmopolitan centers are dubbed “world cities,” generating activities enacted and visible around the globe (Clark 1996). The classical world centering on the Mediterranean basin was more circumscribed, but no less “global” in mentality. During the Hellenistic period, eastern cities such as Antioch, Alexandria, and Pergamon gained world-class status based upon both their importance in politics and commerce, and their urban environments. All had memorable monuments, majestic public spaces, and attractive amenities. As trade, politics, and military campaigns brought the Romans into direct contact with eastern cosmopolitan centers, they grudgingly admitted that the Greeks aimed at beauty in urban design (Strabo 5.3.8). Their own capital, Rome, by contrast was parochial in appearance, characterized by winding, unpaved roads, and uninspiring architecture (Cicero, Laws 2.35.95-96). Livy records that Macedonian courtiers openly jeered at both the Romans' limited achievements and “at the appearance of the city itself, which was not yet beautified in either its public places or its private districts” (40.5).

Past as Prologue

Art in the age of Augustus was such a sophisticated blend of monument and national identity that it is hard to believe that it did not emerge full blown like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. In truth, Augustan art was inspired by such diverse civilizations as Ptolemaic Egypt, Classical and Hellenistic Greece, and Republican Rome, yet what it derived from these was merged into an entirely new creation. Almost as if by magic, a city of brick became one of marble, legendary founders and contemporary dynasts coalesced, and Rome took on the eminence of Alexandria and Athens.

This stunning and nearly flawless result owes a great deal to one man - Octavian Augustus and to his alliance with one woman - Livia Drusilla. The union of Augustus and Livia started out conventionally enough - ambitious man on the rise, disappointed that his wife has not given him a male heir, decides to divorce her in order to marry a beautiful aristocrat with a son and another child on the way. He envisions the new bride's personal and financial assets as a perfect complement to his own soaring aspirations, and he is not disappointed. In fact, it soon becomes clear that her intellect and vision match his own and that they are the perfect power couple.

When Michael Gagarin and I first met in Berkeley in the mid-1970s, we were the only two scholars (both at the very beginning of our careers) in the United States who thought of their academic specialization as “Greek law.” At that time Douglas MacDowell was the only British scholar with such an established specialization. In other words, the study of Greek legal history was a largely continental European enterprise, and it was traditionally dominated by German, and secondarily French and Italian scholars. The composition of the contributors to this volume testifies to the dramatic changes to this field of study in the last twenty-five years. This is due to a variety of factors, including the decline in interest in most areas of pre-modern legal history in countries such as Germany that were once the bedrock of the discipline, as well as the marked increase in interest among British and American scholars. The majority of the contributors to the volume are thus British and American because this is where in recent years there has been the greatest amount of scholarly interest.

METHOD

Greek tragedy abounds with political crises - struggles over wrongdoing and punishment, efforts to overturn or found regimes, contention about the rights of strangers and the weak. Clearly, punishment, constitutions, and asylum were all real legal issues in Athens, and the city had extensive institutions for dealing with them, some of which even work their ways into the plays as instruments available to the protagonists for resolving (or trying to resolve) their problems. Most famously in the Oresteia the Areopagus Court, with Athena's expert help, decides the fate of Orestes (Eum. 470-752) as does the Argive Assembly in Euripides' Orestes (866-956). Some form of conceptual continuum links tragedy and Athenian legal and political thought. But, because the political and legal crises of drama exist entirely in the realm of the imagination, what can be learned from them about the historical reality of law in Athens?

Scholars working on English-language literary texts have recently refined techniques for analyzing law and literature together. Following the lead of eminent legal historian F. W. Maitland, who argued that “law and literature grew up together in the court of Henry II,” scholars have been exploring how concepts that developed in the legal arena - e.g., contract, evidence, testimony, privacy - have affected literature and, inversely, how narrative techniques developed by writers have provided tools to lawyers and judges.

Athens' Old and New Comedy illuminate that city's laws and legal practices in contrasting ways, reflecting political and social differences between the fifth and fourth centuries and shifting literary foci.

Surviving chiefly in the plays of Aristophanes (active 427-388), Old Comedy pushed to its limits Athens' robust democracy, uncensored speech, and unrestrained freedom. These plays satirized many aspects of contemporary society, including politics and the democracy. Typically, their stance was that of conservative critic, in ambiguous tension with self-parody and comic release. Old Comedy is important for the history of law in three ways. First (and often incidentally), many plays provide detailed evidence for various Athenian laws and legal procedures, such as the denunciations called “showing” (phainein), the litigation of market offenses, and credit regulations. Although scattered and fragmentary, these testimonia can be of central importance in reconstructing Attic law during the fifth century, which is poorly known in contrast to “the age of the orators.” Old Comedy's representations of that notorious figure the “sykophant,” an abusive prosecutor, are fundamental to our understanding of that phenomenon.

Until the 1970s, more or less, the history of women and sexuality did not interest the academic community. When it was even considered, such history was limited to a few references within research dedicated to more traditional subjects, regarded as scientifically more interesting. In the past thirty years, however, the horizons of classicists have expanded to include these issues and to dedicate ever more attention to the problem of social construction of gender as a political organizing principle.

The opening up of these new horizons is part of a more general transformation of ancient and modern historiography, tied to the French school that followed Fernand Braudel, who criticized the history that concentrated on the great events and major figures (“l'histoire evenementielle,” as Francois Simiand defined it), neglecting the underlying social reality and ignoring the existence of millions and millions of anonymous individuals. In this light new historiographic subjects were born, the different and marginal from every epoch: the sick, the old and young, homosexuals, women - subjects, all of them, whose history is not determined by events, but rather by mental attitudes, ideologies, practicalities of everyday life and their position in a socioeconomic context. The history of women and sexuality and the reconstruction of gender problems have thus established themselves inside this new history, no longer only “evenementielle.”

INTRODUCTION

The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in scholarly research on aspects of the prosecution of crime in ancient Greece, and in particular in Athens. Scholarship has focused on the process of prosecution, the history and workings of courts such as the Areopagus, as well as specific crimes like homicide, adultery, theft, sycophancy, and hubris. Such research has enhanced our understanding of the procedures used in criminal prosecution and the substantive law of particular crimes. What has received far less attention, however, is the way in which Athenians conceptualized the category of “crime” and the laws enacted to deal with it. Did the Athenians in fact have conceptions of something like our notions of “crime” and “criminal,” as distinct from other types of wrongs and wrongdoers? Did they think of the methods of prosecuting and punishing criminal offenses as a separate legal category from other sorts of proceedings? Did they have a distinctive conception of punishment as opposed to other kinds of legal remedies? What did they believe were the distinguishing features of this area of the law and its relation to the larger framework of Athenian litigation and government? These are large and complex questions that could only be comprehensively answered in a book-length study.