Law in action in classical Athens

Abstract

The fine modern scholarship on Athenian law has concentrated on (a) the scope of particular laws, and (b) the technical aspects of the legal process. This paper attempts to examine how the legal system worked in practice.The Athenians classified legal cases in various ways. On the one hand there was a division by subject matter between private cases (dikai idiai) and public cases (dikai dēmosiai), and on the other there was a division according to the procedure involved. There were a number of specialised procedures, but the most important procedural division was between those cases which anyone was free to bring (graphai) and those which only an interested party could bring (dikai in the narrow sense). These divisions on grounds of subject matter and on grounds of procedure overlap, but they are distinct and neither corresponds to the modern European legal division between civil and criminal cases.