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Michael Gagarin, WRITING GREEK LAW Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org), 2008. xi + 282 pp. ISBN 978052188661. £55.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 May 2010
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0013
Pages333-335
Date01 May 2010

In recent decades orality and writing in ancient Greek culture have become fashionable topics. In his Early Greek Law (1986) Michael Gagarin held a theoretical position based on Maine's Ancient Law (1861) and Hart's The Concept of Law (1961), namely that before writing one cannot generally speak of law. Without entering that broad philosophical discussion, the late Raymond Westbrook's refutation of such evolutionary models should nevertheless be noted. From Ancient Near Eastern sources Westbrook demonstrated that human societies used highly developed legal rules long before writing came into existence (see “The Early History of Law” (2010) 127 Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (Rom Abt) 1). Classicists have also recently tended not to explain the origin of law in a philosophical way, but rather to focus on the question of why writing in archaic Greece – borrowed from the Phoenicians around 750 BC – very soon produced legal texts, and what influence writing had on the development of Greek law. Gagarin also now follows a strictly empirical approach. His new book is based on studying the earliest stone inscriptions, mostly from Crete. His conclusion is that the reason for publishing statutes on stone was the free access to law for every citizen.

The book is divided into ten chapters with appendices including Greek texts cited in the various chapters. Following the book as a whole, the Introduction and Conclusion are both entitled “Writing Greek Law”. Introducing his topic, Gagarin scrutinises in turn the implications of each of the three words of his title. He notes in relation to writing how, by adding signs for vowels to those for consonants, the Greeks first invented a fully alphabetic script, easily legible for everybody. He then states that his examination of law and writing in Greece is necessarily confined to the period after the Bronze Age, clarifying that the earlier prehistoric period of Greek civilisation falls outside his treatment. In terms of law, Gagarin stresses a non-positivist view that “law may be a forum for regulating and even promoting conflict, and for negotiating community values, but at the same time, it prevents conflict from becoming warfare” (4). Summing up, Gagarin's most significant conclusions are that, in Greece, law began with an oral period. Following this period writing was used only for public legislation. Everybody had direct access to the statutes, written in ordinary, non-technical language. Legal...

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