Introduction

The reason that Euelpides gave for leaving Athens was that he and Peisetairos had been unjustly found guilty in a law-suit. Whatever the actual rights and wrongs of the matter, the Athenians' reputation for litigiousness was notorious throughout the Mediterranean. Pericles (Περικλῆς) had introduced pay for dikasts (δικασταί, jurors) in c. 461 BC, so that even the poorest might be encouraged to take part in the democratic process of judging their fellow-man, and it would appear that some men were happy to scrape a living out of serving as dikasts. The courts handled not only judicial business, but political cases as well: their power was, potentially, enormous, and could be wielded to deadly effect. There was little ‘procedure’ in the courts; certainly no judge to guide dikasts and clarify the law; no question of the dikasts (usually 501 Athenian males) retiring to discuss what they had heard; few rules of evidence; and no cross-questioning of witnesses. The dikasts listened to both sides, and voted on the issue at once. In such an atmosphere, the law could easily be abused.

In Wasps, Aristophanes presents his vision of the ‘typical’ Athenian dikast, and leaves us to ponder its implications for the administration of justice in Athens.

In World of Athens: the law-courts 6.39ff.

Law-court mania in Athens

It has been estimated that, when allowance is made for festivals, ἐκκλησίαι and so on, juries might sit on between 150 and 200 days in the year … If we are to believe Aristophanes' Wasps of 422, some elderly Athenians had a passion to serve.

Introduction

These selections are adapted from the speech Κατὰ Νεαίρας, The Prosecution of Neaira (attributed to Demosthenes), given by Apollodoros in the Athenian courts about 340. Neaira is accused of being non-Athenian and of claiming marriage to the Athenian Stephanos, and so usurping the privileges of citizenship. Citizenship at Athens was restricted to the children of two Athenian citizen parents, legally married, and it was a jealously guarded privilege. Apollodoros was therefore able to bring the charge as a matter of public interest, in a γραφή. He sketches Neaira's past to prove that she is an alien, but also makes great play of the fact that she was a slave and prostitute as well, thus making her ‘pretence’ to Athenian citizenship all the more shocking; and goes on to show that Stephanos and Neaira were treating Neaira's alien children as if they were entitled to Athenian citizenship. This evidence gives Apollodoros the occasion to claim that Neaira and Stephanos are undermining the whole fabric of society.

Apollodoros had a personal interest in the matter as well, for he had a long-standing feud with Stephanos, as the start of the speech makes clear. If Apollodoros secured Neaira's conviction, she would be sold into slavery: Stephanos' ‘family’ would be broken up (and Neaira and Stephanos, formally married or not, had been living together for probably thirty years by the time of this case) and Stephanos himself would be liable to a heavy fine; if he could not pay it, he would lose his rights of citizenship (ἀτιμία).

Introduction

The extracts from The Prosecution of Neaira may have given you one impression of the responsibilities, dignity and status of Athenian women, and of other women, seen through the eyes of one man. In the following brief extract, taken from Greek drama – the circumstances and conventions of which place it on a far different level from a speech in a courtroom (though both are written to win – the one a case, the other a dramatic prize) – you may receive a quite different impression, and one no less important than that given by Neaira.

The god Apollo, sentenced by Zeus to live a life of serfdom to a mortal (because he had killed Zeus' firemakers, the Cyclopes), serves his time under the human Admetos and, finding Admetos a pious man, tricks the Fates into offering him a reprieve from imminent death – on the condition that another will die in his place. Only Admetos' wife, Alkestis, can be found to take his place. The day has now come on which Death is to take Alkestis away.

In World of Athens: Greek tragedy 8.49ff.; women, marrriage and the home 5.9ff.; death and burial 5.78ff.

Introduction

Apollodoros has now established that Neaira is non-Athenian. He has sketched her past as a slave and prostitute in Corinth, detailed a number of her lovers, and shown how she came to live with Stephanos in Athens. Now that it has been proved that Neaira is non-Athenian, Apollodoros has to prove that she is living with Stephanos as his wife. A formal betrothal was normally validated by witnesses and the marriage itself confirmed by cohabitation to produce legitimate heirs. Apollodoros, however, produces no evidence of the birth of children to Neaira and Stephanos. In the absence of evidence from such children, Apollodoros concentrates on establishing the marriage of Stephanos and Neaira in other ways. The most important evidence is that Stephanos attempted to pass off Neaira's children as if they were his own children (as he indeed boasted that he would do at 12. I.).

In World of Athens: divorce and dowry 5.11, 16, 19.

Proving identity

Athenians had no birth certificates and no state registry of births. Nor were scientific methods of proof available to decide paternity. Instead, legitimacy and citizenship were most easily demonstrated to the satisfaction of a large citizen jury by producing witnesses who would testify to a child's introduction as an infant into a phratry at the Apatouria festival and into the deme at the age of majority.

Introduction

The questioning of traditional morality, which could be seen either as a new humanism or as moral degeneracy, was popularly associated with the influence of people like Socrates and the sophists. Socrates had a profound influence on Greek thought of his time, and the philosopher Plato, from whose writings we derive much of our idea of Socrates, was one of his most ardent disciples. Others, however, regarded him as a pernicious influence on Athenian society, and the claims that he ‘corrupted the young’ and ‘believed in strange gods’ led to his trial and execution in 399.

In his portayal of Socrates in his comedy Clouds (423), Aristophanes exploits all the humorous possibilities of popular prejudice against ‘intellectuals’ with their ‘new-fangled’ ideas and their arguments which are ‘too clever by half’.

In World of Athens: Greek comedy 8.67–80; festivals 8.45, cf. 3.44; Socrates 8.33.

Note

The Greek you have been reading so far has been adapted very heavily from original sources. The ideas and original vocabulary have been kept, but the sentence construction has been noticeably different.

From now on, you will, for the most part, be reading continuous extracts from single works (rather than collations of sources), and the Greek of the text will approximate more and more closely to the original. For example, Strepsiades' first ten words in this extract are the actual opening of the Clouds, though it must be emphasized that Aristophanes was a poet and composed in verse, not (as would appear from these extracts) prose.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE

408. Greek belongs to the great family of Indo-European languages. These include English, Welsh, Irish, Latin, Russian, Lithuanian, Albanian, and most modern European languages (notable exceptions being Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish), as well as Armenian, Persian and the languages of north India. Important extinct languages that belong to the same family include Hittite and Tocharian. Greek has the longest recorded history of any of them, running from the fourteenth century B. C. down to the present day. Its apparent similarity to Latin is due, not to any specially close relationship, but to the fact that both languages ultimately derive from the same source and are recorded at an early date; Greek and Latin are both strikingly close to the classical language of India, Sanskrit, and to the language of Darius I and Xerxes, Old Persian.

The earliest record of the Greek language is contained in the clay tablets written in the script called ‘Linear B’ in the palaces of Knossos, on Crete, and Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes, on the mainland in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries. This script is not alphabetic but syllabic, i.e. each sign represents not a single sound (e.g. ‘t’, ‘p’) but a syllable (e.g. ‘do’, ‘sa’, ‘mu’). Mycenaean (as the language of the Linear B tablets is called) represents an archaic form of the language, but demonstrates firmly that Greek had developed as a separate language – and, indeed, split into dialects – well before this date.

Introduction

Section Nine, the story of Adrastos, is taken from Herodotus. All places referred to will be found on the map. Croesus is king of Lydia, whose capital city was Sardis. The story takes place c. 590. For the previous 150 years, Asia Minor had seen many different peoples come and go. The Lydians and Phrygians between them now controlled most of the mainland, but the Greeks, through assiduous colonisation, had established a firm foothold on the coastal regions and were (generally) welcomed by the locals. It was through this crucial contact with Near East culture that Greek art, literature and philosophy developed as they did. Croesus was especially well-disposed to the Greeks and had adopted a number of their customs.

Croesus' wealth was legendary (cf. ‘as rich as Croesus’). The tale you are about to read, one of the most powerful and tragic in the whole of Herodotus, is just one incident in the saga of Croesus' life which Herodotus uses at the very start of his Histories to tell us about the way in which gods deal with men. The ‘reason’ that Herodotus propounds for Croesus' tragedy will be found in the translation of the episode immediately prior to the Adrastos story (given below) – the visit of the great Athenian politician and law-giver Solon to Croesus' court.