Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Greek Law" to "Ground-Squirrel" / Volume 12, Slice 5

Articles in This Slice

GREEK LAW. Ancient Greek law is a branch of comparative jurisprudence the importance of which has been long ignored. Jurists have commonly left its study to scholars, who have generally refrained from comparing the institutions Greek law and comparative jurisprudence. of the Greeks with those of other nations. Greek law has, however, been partially compared with Roman law, and has been incidentally illustrated with the aid of the primitive institutions of the Germanic nations. It may now be studied in its earlier stages in the laws of Gortyn; its influence may 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.
The existence of certain panhellenic 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 is mainly to be seen in the laws of inheritance and adoption, in laws of commerce and contract, and in the publicity uniformly given to legal agreements.
Our earliest evidence is to be sought in the Homeric poems. In the primitive society of the heroic age (as noticed by Plato) written laws were necessarily unknown; for, “in Law in Homer. that early period, they had no letters; they lived by habit and by the customs of their ancestors” ( Laws , 680 A). We find a survival from a still more primitive time in the savage Cyclops, who is “unfamiliar with dooms of law, or rules of right” (οὔτε δικας εὖ εἰδότα οὔτε θέμιστας, Od. ix. 215 and 112 f.).
Dikē (δίκη), assigned by Curtius ( Etym. 134) to the same root as δείκνυμι, primarily means a “way pointed out,” a “course prescribed by usage,” hence “way” or “fashion,” “manner” Dikē. or “precedent.” In the Homeric poems it sometimes signifies a “doom” of law, a legal “right,” a “lawsuit”; while it is rarely synonymous with “justice,” as in Od. xiv. 84, where “the gods honour justice,” τίουσι δίκην.