The editors plus eighteen other scholars contributed a total of twenty-two articles. Despite the suggested breadth β ancient Greek law β the majority of the contributions treat topics in ancient Athenian law, not surprisingly since the greatest quantity of evidence comes from Athenian sources. The dominant feature of the book is manifested in the selections by a decided preference for innovation over tradition in the study of Greek law.
This feature is unabashedly announced in D. This principle of selection provides a convenient structure for review. Instead of a serial approach, we strike a division between traditional and innovative pieces. We take as tradition those so designated by Cohen and those, while not so classified, displaying no intention to stretch boundaries or undermine orthodoxies.
At these proceedings witnesses performed one of two mutually exclusive functions. They confirmed that they would verify at trial the pre-formulated pre-trial statements, or they denied the truth of such statements by swearing an oath known as an exomosia , which in turn exempted them from the obligation to so testify at trial. Athenian witnesses, therefore, were not an independent evidentiary source for the development of factual knowledge through the process of litigation, but part of a complex procedural mechanism ordered more to the formal presentation of opposing positions.
He did not engage with larger interdisciplinary concerns. In setting his results against the most recent work of the last twenty-five years, he had occasion to refer to scholars who utilized new approaches, e. He draws largely from inscriptional evidence ranging from the fifth to second century B.
He begins with the irreducible point that there was no fundamental separation between religion and politics in the polis.
