The Attic Orators' have left us a hundred speeches for lawsuits, a body of work that reveals an important connection between evolving rhetoric and the jury trial. The essays in this volume explore that formative linkage, representing the main directions of recent work on the Orators: the emergence of technical manuals and ghost-written speeches for prospective litigants; the technique for adapting documentary evidence to common-sense notions about probable motives and typical characters; and profiling the jury as the ultimate arbiter of values. An Introduction by the editor explores the speechwriter's art in terms of the imagined community. Four essays appear in English here for the first time, and all Greek has been translated.

The definitive book on judicial review in Athens from the 5th through the 4th centuries BCE. The power of the court to overturn a law or decree-called judicial review-is a critical feature of modern democracies. Contemporary American judges, for example, determine what is consistent with the Constitution, though this practice is often criticized for giving unelected officials the power to strike down laws enacted by the people's representatives. This principle was actually developed more than two thousand years ago in the ancient democracy at Athens. In Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens, Edwin Carawan reassesses the accumulated evidence to construct a new model of how Athenians made law in the time of Plato and Aristotle, while examining how the courts controlled that process. Athenian juries, Carawan explains, were manned by many hundreds of ordinary citizens rather than a judicial elite. Nonetheless, in the 1890s, American apologists found vindication for judicial review in the ancient precedent. They believed that Athenian judges decided the fate of laws and decrees legalistically, focusing on fundamental text, because the speeches that survive from antiquity often involve close scrutiny of statutes attributed to lawgivers such as Solon, much as a modern appellate judge might resort to the wording of the Framers. Carawan argues that inscriptions, speeches, and fragments of lost histories make clear that text-based constitutionalism was not so compelling as the ethos of the community. Carawan explores how the judicial review process changed over time. From the restoration of democracy down to its last decades, the Athenians made significant reforms in their method of legislation, first to expedite a cumbersome process, then to revive the more rigorous safeguards. Jury selection adapted accordingly: the procedure was recast to better represent the polis, and packing the court was thwarted by a complicated lottery. But even as the system evolved, the debate remained much the same: laws and decrees were measured by a standard crafted in the image of the people. Offering a comprehensive account of the ancient origins of an important political institution through philological methods, rhetorical analysis of ancient arguments, and comparisons between models of judicial review in ancient Greece and the modern United States, Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens is an innovative study of ancient Greek law and democracy.

Trials for murder and manslaughter in ancient Athens are preserved in a singularly full and revealing record. The earliest surviving speeches were written for such proceedings, and the laws governing such trials - laws that tradition ascribes to Draco himself - also survive in large part. These documents bear witness to the birth of the jury trial and of democratic rhetoric. This book, the first study of its kind, offers a systematic interpretation of Draco's law and the legal reasoning that grew out of it. The author outlines the historical development (7th to 4th centuries BCE), and then analyses the surviving speeches to unravel the underlying issues and practical consequences.

This volume explores the amnesty which ended the civil war at Athens in 403 BC. Drawing upon ancient historians and speechwriters, together with the surviving inscriptions, it presents a new interpretation of the Athenian Amnesty in its original setting and in view of the subsequent reconstruction of laws and democratic institutions in Athens. Beginning with the evidence on the original agreement and the events that shaped it, the volume also discusses the major trials that challenged and reinterpreted key elements of the amnesty agreement, including the trial of Socrates. These studies reveal the Athenian Amnesty as a contractual settlement between the warring parties, a bargain for peace and reconciliation. The oath that came to symbolize the Amnesty was the closing to that contract, a pledge not to go back on the covenants that spelled out remedies and restrictions-not a promise to forgive and forget. The same contractual principle inspired major reforms of the restored democracy, barring litigation on settled claims and ensuring that new legislation did not conflict with the constitution. While this book deals largely with the ancient agreement, Carawan also draws perspectives from parallels in modern history, such as the post-apartheid settlement in South Africa, illustrating how the Athenian Amnesty is generally regarded as the model for political 'forgiveness' or 'pardon and oblivion' embraced in later conflict resolution.