Ancient Greek law

Ancient Greek law consists of the laws and legal institutions of Ancient Greece. Ancient Greek law consists of the laws and legal institutions of Ancient Greece. The existence of certain general principles of law is implied by the custom of settling a difference between two Greek states, or between members of a single state, by resorting to external arbitration. The general unity of Greek law shows mainly in the laws of inheritance and adoption, in laws of commerce and contract, and in the publicity uniformly given to legal agreements. While its older forms can be studied by the laws of Gortyn, its influence can be traced in legal documents preserved in Egyptian papyri and it may be recognized as a consistent whole in its ultimate relations to Roman law in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, with scholars in the discipline of comparative law comparing Greek law with both Roman law and the primitive institutions of the Germanic nations. There is no systematic collection of Greek laws, thus the knowledge the earliest notions of the subject is derived from the Homeric poems. The works of Theophrastus 'On the Laws', included a recapitulation of the laws of various barbaric as well as of the Grecian states, yet only a few fragments of it remain. Incidental illustrations of the Athenian law are found in the Laws of Plato, who describes it without exercising influence on its actual practice. Aristotle criticized Plato's Laws in his Politics, in which he reviews the work of certain early Greek lawgivers. The treatise on the Constitution of Athens includes an account of the jurisdiction of the various public officials and of the mechanics of the law courts, and thus enables historians to dispense with the second-hand testimony of grammarians and scholiasts who derived their information from that treatise. Other evidence for ancient Athenian law comes from statements made in the extant speeches of the Attic orators, and from surviving inscriptions. Historians consider the Ancient Athenian law broadly procedural and concerned with the administration of justice rather than substantive. Athenian laws are typically written in the form where if an offense is made, then the offender will be punished according to said law, thus they are more concerned with the legal actions which should be undertaken by the prosecutor, rather than strictly defining which acts are prosecutable. Often, this would have resulted in juries having to decide whether the offense said to have been committed was in fact a violation of the law in question. The earliest Greek law to survive is the Dreros inscription, a seventh century BC law concerning the role of kosmos. This and other early laws (such as those which survive in only fragmentary form from Tiryns) are primarily concerned not with regulating people's behaviour, but in regulating the power of officials within the community. These laws were probably set up by the élites in order to control the distribution of power among themselves. One of the earliest dateable events in Athenian history is the creation of the Draconian law code, c.620 BC. We know little about Draco and the code, with the homicide law being the only one known due to it surviving the Solonian reforms. The law seems to have distinguished between premeditated and involuntary homicide, and provided for the reconciliation of the killer with the family of the dead man. The homicide law of Draco was still in force in the fourth century. Though the rest of the code is unknown, it was by Athenian tradition known to have been very harsh.