Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens. By ADRIAAN LANNI. 
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 210. ISBN 
0–521–85759–7.

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Print Version: CJ 103.4 (2008): 459–61

The rule of law is perhaps the most vital legacy of ancient Hellas, but the 
record of actual cases at Athens does not inspire much reverence. The rules 
distinguishing one procedure from another were vague; verdicts were 
sometimes outrageous, sometimes meaningless. The entire arrangement seems 
designed to frustrate experts and empower layman juries (Ath. Pol. 9.2). 
Modern readers, especially since the 1980s, have often concluded that rules 
and principles counted for little, and that social ties and agonistic 
values prevailed. Perhaps most provocative is David Cohen’s model [n. 1] 
describing litigation as feuding by other means. Now, in defense of a 
rule-based rationale, comes Adriaan Lanni’s (L.) thoughtful study. L. makes 
two major corrections to the agonistic paradigm: (a) The Athenians made 
conscious and reasonably consistent distinctions between the rules that 
applied in one jurisdiction and those that applied in another; and (b) in 
order to grasp the Athenian attitude toward those rules, we must also 
recognize the artificiality of our own “received view” of how jury trials 
work. L. is a law professor as well as an historian, and her aim is “to 
uncover the values and concerns that seem to underlie the practices and 
procedures” (p. 5). In this way, “[t]he Athenian courts can tell us 
something about the ‘Athenian mind’…: the product of many generations and 
many hands may bear the imprint of the collective more deeply than that of 
any individual’s work; that a group’s traditions may be arbitrary in origin 
does not make them less valuable in assessing the group’s peculiar 
understanding of the world.”

The central issue is relevance: Why is it that the Athenians admitted so 
much that strikes us as irrelevant or immaterial? The difference between 
their approach and ours may not be so great. Recent studies of the modern 
trial reveal a broader scale of justice, weighing social values and 
cultural norms against legalistic criteria. [n. 2] With this perspective, 
L. introduces the Athenian problem (Ch. 1) and gives a succinct 
introduction to democratic justice at Athens and the values that guided its 
juries (Ch. 2). Then (with Ch. 3) she turns to the problem of relevance in 
more detail: at Athens ordinary juries seem broadly tolerant of 
“extra-legal” arguments about the background to the dispute, and about 
compassion and character. They saw these contextual considerations as 
integral to the issue before them.

The two clearest exceptions are homicide trials and maritime suits, dikai 
phonou and dikai emporikai (treated in Chs. 4 and 6, respectively). In 
cases of homicide before the Areopagus or the ephetai we find that pleas 
for sympathy and arguments based on past history seem to be restricted (or 
cast as a challenge to the evidence: How can you trust plaintiff’s case, 
given his past machinations?). The homicide courts were respected as much 
for ancient tradition as for their effectiveness, but the evolving 
democracy could and did devise alternatives; thus the fact that Athenians 
retained dikai phonou in something like the original form indicates broad 
respect for the rule-based ideal.

In the mid-4th century the Athenians established a special procedure for 
contract disputes involving trade to and from Athens. (Such were the cases 
in D. 32–5 and 56.) This adaptation responded to the demands of the 
marketplace—foreign merchants needed assurance that their cases would be 
decided expeditiously and without prejudice. The rules seem designed to 
offset “legal insecurity”—the fear of arbitrary verdicts. Of course the 
maritime suits are not devoid of extraneous pleas, but litigants doggedly 
insist upon the wording of the written contract and what specifically was 
done in compliance. There is some question of how this focus was achieved; 
L. concludes that it was not the province of special personnel, as in the 
Areopagus, but a situation where ordinary jurors were called upon to apply 
a special standard. That stricter standard owes much to the framing of the 
statute: if the suit did not meet the special conditions for this expedited 
process, the defendant could challenge the suit (paragraphê). The 
legislation was debated before a panel of nomothetai and was subject to 
some deliberation in the assembly (on the decree to convene nomothetai). 
This was a rule-based adaptation, not an accident of historical 
development.

Even outside the special courts there was some concern for “legal 
consistency,” to ensure that similar cases were similarly decided (Ch. 5). 
If litigants cannot predict how or whether the judges will apply the rules, 
laws cease to be effective instruments for social control. This concern is 
reflected in “arguments from precedent”: occasionally we meet with a plea 
that the jury should take an earlier verdict as its guide, and litigants 
often urge the jury to weigh their verdict against the example it will set. 
[n. 3]

L. writes with precision, largely undistracted by needless quarrels. Her 
objections to the agonistic model, however, might be put more 
constructively. She insists that Cohen’s view of litigation as a zero-sum 
competition for honor is inconsistent with prevailing values of reciprocity 
and fair dealing (p. 53); the “primary aim” of extra-legal argumentation 
was to assist the jury in reaching a just resolution of the dispute, not to 
further the feud (p. 44). But it sometimes seems a fine line between 
Cohen’s honor-based calculus and the contextual considerations (weighing 
past history, disproportionate penalties, etc.) that Athenians found 
essential to a just resolution. In many disputes, as L. herself observes 
(p. 9), “how ‘the case’ should be framed was precisely what was at issue.” 
Even in our system, as Burns (n. 2, above) puts it (esp. pp. 183–201), 
“meta-issues”—issues that emerge from the tension among separate spheres of 
norms and loyalties—often trump the merits. So too, it is reasonable to 
suppose, Athenian juries sometimes regarded their task as a dilemma of just 
this sort: balance the scale of honor or decide by the rules. This is not 
to diminish L.’s contribution. Rather, it is to her credit that other 
perspectives can be adapted to her paradigm, for she captures something 
essential in Athenian legal thinking with a vital connection to its legacy.

[n. 1] Law, Violence and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1995).

[n. 2] Especially R.P. Burns, A Theory of the Trial (Princeton, 1999).

[n. 3] Cf. L.’s study in E.M. Harris and L. Rubinstein, eds., The Law and 
the Courts in Ancient Greece (London, 2004) 159–71; see also Rubinstein’s 
“Arguments from Precedent,” in E. Carawan, ed., The Attic Orators (Oxford, 
2007) 359–71.

EDWIN CARAWAN
Missouri State University


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