Talk:Ancient Greek law

Triage
This article still needs some attention. I have done a quick adding of headers and subheaders, but I don't know enough about and they ate big blue bananas all day long Ionesco 20:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I do know a fair amount about this subject. It's my belief that, unfortunately, the majority of the content in this page is misleading or wrong. It seems to represent a sort of schoolboy view of ancient law of the sort taught cursorily in comparative law courses in law schools many decades ago -- look at all the false analogies to modern common-law concepts, for instance, like "tort". Worse, it even gets details wrong that are rather clearly discussed in 19th-Century sources such as Maine. As a third major flaw, this article freely mixes mythological or literary details about Greek law, particularly about the lawgivers, who may never (with the probable exception of Solon) have even existed, with the empirical evidence offered by scholarly research in archaeology and ancient studies.

The present contents of this article should probably be completely discarded. The standard contemporary work on this topic is "The Law in Classical Athens" by MacDowell (which discusses other Greek systems to the extent that actual evidence exists); someone (perhaps me, when I have the time) should reread the introductory chapters of that book and rewrite this article from scratch. For the moment, we should add prominent caveats about the most obvious howlers in each section, at the very least. I've begun by adding one to the ridiculous "torts" section.

Tls 00:06, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Upon reflection, here's what I think we should do: this article should be reverted to its very first revision, which was from the 1911 Brittanica. Though brief, that version of the article does not contain the wealth of misinformation, speculation, mythology masquerading as history, etc. that the later revisions do.

That would be an acceptable starting point upon which to expand. The newer versions of this article are... garbage.

Tls 00:26, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Back to Square One
Zot! First step done -- we're back to where we were. I'll try to steal some time this weekend to refresh myself with the MacDowell and add back some more correct details on this topic; but at least we're not spreading this particular misinformation any more. I wonder what those "Ethan Flint Notes" the bogus text cited were, as well as whether the text "citing" them wasn't actually an unauthorized cut-and-paste -- but for sure they aren't doing anyone any good. :-)

Reworking the article entirely
Added some actually cited (yay!) content to the article. Mainly focussing on Athenian law, as that is what I am most familiar with, though I'd like to add something at least on Gortyn's legal code, the Dreros inscription, and Sparta. Probably also going to start chopping out some of the unsourced claims, considering how simplistic many of them appear to be... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 16:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Great job on all the Athenian law in the article! Though the article is still very much lacking on other Grecian state laws, and due to old content was also poorly written. Hopefully it's better now that I copyedited it. FlagFlayer (talk) 15:18, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Delete this page?
Since the question of whether there is any unified 'Ancient Greek law' at all is highly controversial (see Gagarin 'The Unity of Greek Law' in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law), it may be better to turn this into a sort of disambiguation page, with links to e.g. Gortynian Law, Athenian Law, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Snevet888 (talk • contribs) 22:34, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

While there is no 'unified' Ancient Greek law there are many similarities in laws between different states. This article's purpose is to mention laws from many states and compare them though it is currently lacking laws from any states besides Athens FlagFlayer (talk) 15:14, 11 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Perhaps instead of having sections for each aspect of the law in ancient Greece, there should be a section for each major city where the law is vastly different, and a section for "universal" Greek law, i.e., Greek laws that were accepted in all of Greece. Psychotic   Spartan  123  19:52, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Not delete but rename, the contents of the current page are about Attic Law, not ancient Greek law in general. Gts-tg (talk) 22:39, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Excuse me, what?
"Homer and Hesiod were the most recent written codes of law in the major cities of ancient Greece."

I.e. there were no new laws written after about 750 B. C. Really? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:36D:113:29C2:AD29:A712:BF01:145A (talk) 09:22, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Clearly nonsense. Removed. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 16:04, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

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