- 1 Gagarin (1986).
- 2 Meiggs & Lewis (1969).
- 3 Jeffery (1961), Buck (1955).
1The publication in 1994–5 of the two volumes of Henri van Effenterre and Françoise Ruzé’s Nomima: Recueil d’inscriptions politiques et juridiques de l’archaïsme was of enormous scholarly significance. The work of Michael Gagarin, above all, in his Early Greek Law had put the question of the nature and significance of early Greek law onto the scholarly agenda in a way which had not been true earlier.1 One measure of the modest place that early Greek law had had in earlier scholarly understanding of the archaic Greek world is the scant attention paid to it in Meiggs and Lewis’s A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC,2 where the only legal texts from before the Persian Wars included were the Dreros law, the Chios law on the Council, Drako’s Homicide Law, and the law of the Locrians about Naupaktos. It was not that other archaic laws were unknown—the combination of L. H. Jeffery’s Local Scripts of Archaic Greece and C. D. Buck’s collection of illustrative material in his Greek Dialects: Grammar, Selected Inscriptions, Glossary ensured that—but the significance of the material was nonetheless neglected because it was so scattered and had received little or no accessible commentary.3
2Nomima did not simply make a great deal of material—in total 211 inscriptions—very much more easily available, it organised that material to draw attention to particular issues. Rather than organise the collection either by city or purely chronologically, documents of different periods and from different cities were grouped according to the topic that they illustrated. This built in not an assumption that the archaic Greek world was unchanging and uniform across all cities, but at least an assumption that the measures that cities took in relation to particular issues could usefully be made to speak to each other across time and space (see further below).
3In its organisation the second volume was, in one way at least, relatively conservative. It offered a picture of Greek law that began with procedure, starting with the rules for court action and then dealing with oaths and fines; it then proceeded to law of persons, looking at social status, marriage, divorce and widowhood, and finally issues to do with children and adoption; thirdly it turned to property, looking in turn at ownership, succession, gifts and wills, and then at contracts to do with loans, sales and rental, at mortgages and at issues arising in overseas trade; from this it turned to penal law—homicide, violence, rape and adultery, before ending with regulations to do with funerals, the environment, rubbish, and a miscellany dominated by wine—though ending, somewhat surprisingly, with the earliest of all significant Athenian inscriptions, the graffito on the Dipylon jug offering it as a prize for what van Effenterre and Ruzé translate as “gracious” dancing.
4It was the first volume of Nomima that made a more radical intervention. Here, after front-loading a fragment of a homicide law that might be attributed to Charondas and Drako’s homicide law, the first part of the treatment was devoted to “civic identity”, first to the distinction between those who belong to the city and outsiders, and then to how those from elsewhere might come to be identified as members of another community, to agreements with other communities, to specific grants of rights to others, and finally to proxenies. The second section, “The city in the Greek world”, looked at decisions cities made about their own territory and at treaties with other cities. The third section examined the powers of the city—covering civic organisation, specific regulations about magistrates and magistrates’ roles, and how public institutions and decisions were protected.
- 4 Brock & Duplouy (2018).
5The important thing about this organisation was that it made questions of civic identity, not questions of magistrates’ powers or of “constitution”, prime. This had an impact in two ways. Discussions of archaic Greece before Nomima did not raise issues of citizenship. Indeed they had little interest in the individual: it is the “big stories” of “colonisation” (treated as a state initiative, with the case of Thera and Cyrene as a paradigm) and of tyranny (treated as a matter of the tyrant getting popular support or help from powers outside the state to overthrow an oligarchic government) that dominated archaic political history. Since Nomima, citizenship has become a central topic. Arguably without Nomima such as volume as Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock’s collection Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece would have been unthinkable.4
- 5 IC IV, 13; Gagarin & Perlman (2016).
6The second impact is methodological. The opening section of “Civic Identity”, devoted to “Étranger et cité : le couple astos-xénos (ksénos)” starts with parts of a very fragmentary Gortyn law which van Effenterre and Ruzé date to the end of the 7th century (Gagarin and Perlman date it to 600–525),5 which owes its place to mention of a xenodokos and of “receiving wastia dika in the agora”—“the citizen’s justice”, with the implication, they suggest, that Gortyn also had xeneia dika, “foreigners’ justice”, as indeed is attested in later Gortynian inscriptions. Whether what is at issue here is δίκα in the sense of “justice” or δίκα in the sense of trial (so Gagarin and Perlman) is disputed, but that these fragments show Gortyn distinguishing its legal treatment of the local community from its legal treatment of incomers or visitors is certain. How you deal with those coming from elsewhere emerges as a key issue. We are in a world where there is a significant enough level of mobility to require communities to give thought to how they deal with non‑locals, and sufficient at stake in being a member of the community to mean that non‑locals need to be identified.
7Nomima’s key methodological move is to illustrate this straightforwardly legal material with graffiti offering a jug of wine as a prize for dancing and other material that would not normally be considered by those writing about Greek law. For Nomima I.2 is the Athenian epitaph for Tettichos calling upon everyone,6 whether astos or xenos, to mourn Tettichos, who has died in war, before going on to their affairs. The effect of this inclusion is immediately to alert the reader to the fact that the distinction that is implied in the Gortyn law is not simply a legal nicety, it is one fundamental to how ancient communities think of themselves (and Nomima further cites a slightly later epitaph from Thisbe and a poem of Anacreon to highlight the banality of the expectation that passers-by may be either locals or incomers).
- 7 Nomima I.3; IC IV, 59.
- 8 Nomima I.4; Inschriften von Olympia 5 and 6; Minon 3, 2.
8Tettichos’ inscription is juxtaposed, after a further tiny fragment from Gortyn referring to “the whole polis”,7 to regulations from Olympia from the end of the 6th century dealing with xenoi coming to the sanctuary.8 We move therefore from routine life in Gortyn and at Athens to the very particular life of a Panhellenic sanctuary, where the presence of non‑locals is fundamental to its function, but where that did not mean that non‑locals did not require separate provision.
9Nomima I.5 moves us from the formal modes of interaction with the gods in a regulated sanctuary, to the informal and unregulated modes of interaction with the gods through curses. SEG 4.37–8 is an early 5th‑century curse inscribed on a (now lost) lead disc from the sanctuary of Demeter Malophoros at Selinous. This disc was inscribed on both sides with four similarly formulated curses, against “the Selinountian” and “the xenos who is their legal advocate (συνδιϙος)”, against Timaso and against Tyrrana (= perhaps “the Etruscan woman”). In each of the cases the curse asks that their language is turned back on itself to become useless. The situation here seems to be one where the words of men and women, Selinountines and foreigners, are all potentially influential in the context of the law court, and their influence is being countered.
10Nomima I.6 is the earliest Athenian decree, laying down the conditions on which Athenians settle on Salamis.9 This inscription is important here not so much for its place in Athenian constitutional history, but because of the curious status whereby the Athenians take what they hope will be permanent control of Salamis but nevertheless do not incorporate it within the Athenian deme structure—even though the Athenians sent there are probably obliged either to reside themselves or to ensure that the land they take over is resided on by whoever rents it. This raises questions of belonging and not belonging to the city community, and what is expected of those who belong, and thus introduces factors which have not been raised in the earlier material which had dealt with individuals moving voluntarily, or at least not as agents of another state.
11If Nomima I.6 regulates a situation where one state has completely taken over and smothered any governmental or legal framework previously valid in the occupied territory, Nomima I.7 is the text from Gortyn,10 dated to the early 5th century by van Effenterre and Ruzé (though to c. 450–400 by Gagarin and Perlman), which lays out relations between Gortyn and Rhitten, recognising Rhittenian laws and magistrates, guaranteeing Rhittenian property rights, and laying down the process for settling any queries that arise. This offers another sort of “subsidiary community” relationship, where the community keeps its autonomy and is offered very specific protections, while at the same time being very obviously the junior partner in the relationship. Even more clearly than in the case of the Salamis decree, the centrality of property and of economic protection is manifest here—perhaps years before the Athenian empire saw Athenians acquiring large estates abroad, plausibly at least in part through calling in loans secured on land, loans from Gortynians on Rhettenian security are banned here.
12Nomima I.8 reinforces this. Here, perhaps shortly before (Gagarin and Perlman) or after (Nomima) 500, one Dionysios, who is apparently not a Gortynian, is rewarded for services rendered by being given property (a house and a building plot) in Aulon, which appears to be a dependent community which joins with Gortyn in granting the honour, along with exemption from all taxes.11 He is also given access to “citizen’s justice” (ϝαστία δίκα). Once more we see that property and legal protection go closely together and that differences in status consequent on differences of origin are reinforced by tax obligations, here remitted.
- 12 Nomima I.9; CEG 57; IG i3 1357.
13The final inscription in Part IA on civic identity is another grave stele, that for Anaxilas of Naxos from the Athenian Kerameikos,12 dating to perhaps the last decade of the 6th century. The earliest of all use here of the term “metic” at Athens emphasises, as van Effenterre and Ruzé stress, Anaxilas’ migrant status rather than some formal “metic” status. Anaxilas is distinguished from the xenos by virtue of the fact that he has migrated and made his home in Athens, where he has been able to show off both his modesty and his excellence before meeting what seems to have been a premature death.
14I have revisited van Effenterre and Ruzé’s selection of inscriptions in the first section of Nomima in order to stress how important is both their method and their story. The great reveal of the method is that understanding the legal regulation of civic identity in the archaic period (or indeed any period) depends not merely on accumulating explicit rules, but on seeing civic identity being negotiated in both routine and less routine interactions. It is when civic identity is flagged up in grave stelai, on the one hand, or in curses, on the other, that we see how the formal rules that cities invent as they negotiate their way out of situations of conflict and rivalry actually translated into interpersonal relations on the ground. It matters to those who commemorate Tettichos that his tragically young death should be noted not just by locals but by foreign visitors. For them there is a story that deserves to get out beyond the local community. It matters to Timomachos that Anaxilas son of Ariston should be recognised as a man of outstanding qualities despite his not belonging to the community by birth—both no doubt to emphasise that stranger does not always mean danger, and to prompt those who are citizens to take pride in not being outdone by an outsider. As the mention of Anaxilas’ outstanding personal qualities indicates, it is not simply that in the archaic city people of all sorts of origin mingle, but that those who do not belong to the city by birth nevertheless contribute to the civic community. The curses from Selinous recognise this by including foreign advocates among those whose words need to be made nonsensical. Their foreignness does not necessarily carry with it not being listened to. These are the real‑life interactions that stand behind the more formal agreements about property rights or provisions for passing on, or not passing on, lots of land, or regulations about where significant disputes get settled.
15But if the methodological point is that only by looking together at different sorts of epigraphic material, at inscriptions in verse as well as unmetrical inscriptions, at private funerary epigrams or scribbled curses as well as at formal “state” documents, can we properly understand any aspect of civic identity, the story is that we should not assume too easily that there is a story. That is, we need to be very careful about thinking that there is some general evolution in civic identity over time across the seventh, sixth and early fifth centuries. Even if Gagarin and Perlman’s later date for Nomima I.1 is to be preferred, Tettikhos’ epitaph tells us that early 6th century communities routinely expected to host visitors from elsewhere. Those visitors will have needed looking after: it had to be possible to offer them formal means of dispute settlement—one cannot have a set of laws which leaves some people outside the law. And the interaction of those born in a community with others who had come from elsewhere inevitably involved questions of property and of taxation as soon as any form of state finance was constructed, and of ritual participation as soon as any sanctuary advertised itself to, and invited participation from, those beyond the local community (and Olympia was doing this not merely in the 6th century but almost certainly back to the 8th century). How were those from elsewhere to be accommodated? How was civic identity to be maintained in their presence? What effect did acquisition of control over places elsewhere have upon how civic identity could be maintained? These are questions we can only answer in specific terms for particular places at particular moments, but they are questions to which every city, and every sanctuary, had to have answers.
16I have chosen the first section of the first volume of Nomima for close attention. But the method and the story are to be found across the whole work. Those who simply dip into Nomima as they might dip into a corpus of inscriptions limited to a single city, single type of monument or single subject-matter, are in danger of missing the importance both of the method and of the story. It is important that topic, not chronology, is the principle on which inscriptions in Nomima are grouped. It is important that inscriptions from across the whole Greek world are included and juxtaposed. And it is important that customary practices are to be found not simply when rules are formally set, but also when people choose to behave in a certain way. What Nomima’s practice does is certainly to suggest a uniformity, if not to the form that the Greek city took then certainly to the nature of the issues that every Greek city faced. And it is this that is important. The name Nomima might suggest that what it holds within its pages are the customary behaviours of a singular entity, “the Greek city”. In fact, Nomima needs to be understood with a question mark after it: for what it does by flagging up the common issues that Greek cities faced is raise the question of how far there was a single set of “customary” responses, and how far each city worked out its own way through these issues.
17The last section of Nomima I raises this question in a particularly interesting way. Entitled “Protection des institutions et des décisions publiques”, the section groups together measures to ensure that what the city has decided is actually carried out and measures to allow review of those decisions. There are two issues that are dealt with here. One is the issue of ensuring that the public will is executed. The second is ensuring that public decisions can be revisited. Van Effenterre and Ruzé list material that deals with the first problem and then material that deals with the second. In doing so they risk implying a narrative where concerns about execution are replaced by concerns about review—as if the worry to start with is that the state is not strong enough, but the worry becomes that the state is too strong.
- 13 Nomima I.103; OR 123.
- 14 Nomima I.104, 105; OR 102.
- 15 Nomima I.106; OR 122.
18Getting the public will executed itself had two sides to it. One is making sure that those charged by the state with investigating and punishing offences carry out their duty. The other is ensuring that those state officials actually have the power to do what they are supposed to do. Looking closely at the evidence suggests that different states in different circumstances saw different aspects of the problem. The inscription with which van Effenterre and Ruzé open the section concerns ensuring that the sons of Nympharetos and Stratonax are exiled and preferably put to death.13 The worry here seems to be that some men who have, presumably, been exiled for a political crime against the state will retain sympathisers in Miletos who might not execute the full verdict that the people have delivered in this case. That is, this is a very particular concern about individuals. And the assumption is that monetary rewards and fines will solve the problem. By contrast, the inscriptions that follow are the two public curse documents from Teos aimed not at those who have already committed a particular crime, but at anyone who might undermine the Tean food supply or cause general poisoning, or abuse power either by resisting officials or abusing official power or causing revolution.14 These two Tean inscriptions show a particular mindset, and an assumption that only the threat of divine action brought on by curses will deal with the problem. The following inscription comes from Erythrai, and deals with the possibility of a prosecutor not completing a case and with opening up prosecution to non‑citizens.15 The offences involved seem not to have been particularly serious, and this looks to be a product of Erythrai’s membership of the Delian League heightening the political stakes in prosecutions and bringing engagement by non‑citizens.
- 16 Nomima I.107.
- 17 Nomima I.108; Inschriften von Olympia 3; Minon 13.
- 18 OR 103B.
- 19 Nomima I.109; Inschriften von Olympia 7; Minon 4.
19These very different local concerns about not being able to enforce judgement contrast with the inscriptions that follow, which are concerned with the undermining of authority. Argos or Halieis takes action against any who attack the Council—and the mention of the “Council presided over by Ariston” suggests that this attempt to protect the Council is made in some particular political context.16 Rather different is the insistence that rules can only be changed by Council and the full assembly of the people in a regulation from Olympia.17 This is a particularly interesting text because the insistence on the Council and People being involved parallels the Athenian “statute of limitations” which reserves to the people the right to decide on certain very important matters, including making war.18 But in the text from Olympia the fragmentary earlier clauses apparently concern the sanctuary at Olympia, and it appears that what is being protected here is the right of the council and people of Elis to determine practice at Olympia. Presumably at issue is the changing of rules, something that is explicit in the second text from Olympia where prescriptions concerning sexual intercourse in the sanctuary and the importance of judgements being made according to the written text are followed by explicit provision for changing the law by decision of the Council and the assembled people—but only changing it three times.19 What is striking here is that the offences concerned are religious. The issues look to be about how matters of sanctuary discipline are settled—with a concern to make change possible, but also to prevent endless change.
20But what exactly is the context for this concern over being able to change the rules? The occurrence of punishment for having sex in a sanctuary in Greek mythology might make us think that this was an unthinkable offence, and so one for which the penalty would never be questioned. But the plot of Menander’ Epitrepontes turns on a girl being made pregnant during an all night festival at a sanctuary, and sanctuaries offered most of the few occasions when young men and young women from different families might mix when inhibitions had been reduced by consumption of alcohol. It is easy to see that the temptation to condemn the offence might be heavily influenced by the identity of those involved. In I.109 the opening clause makes reference to a theoros—an official visitor to a sanctuary. Misbehaviour by theoroi would come close to a “diplomatic incident”, and the political pressures not to apply to law (as in line 2 here) or to change the penalty prescribed by law might be significant. This law both explicitly insists that its provisions apply to theoroi and allows that there will inevitably be questions.
21The last inscription in the section, the final lines of an otherwise illegible stele from Argos,20 raises again the question about whether what we are dealing with in these inscriptions that show sensitivity to the problems of having enforcement of rules, but also the possibility of changing rules, are serious matters of political dispute or the control of relations between different bodies within a political unit. This opens with mention of hiaromnamones and goes on to treat rendering the law ineffective as tantamount to treason. Is this a law passed in a fraught political context (the original editor thought that he could read mention of the Lakedaimonians earlier in the text), or is it concerned with sacred affairs (as the hiaromnamones might suggest)?
- 21 Plutarch, Lykourgos, 6.
22I have discussed the last section of Nomima I at length in order to highlight the way in which common issues may arise from very different circumstances. Far from there being some general development from nervousness about whether a city’s rules can be enforced to concern with how the rules can be changed, what we find is that different cities faced the common question about whether and how rules should be enforced or reviewed in different circumstances and with different needs. It is worth at this point reverting to a text known from literature, the Great Rhetra from Sparta.21 Famously this, too, makes provision for decisions to be reviewed—in this case decisions by the people held to be “crooked” can be set aside by the Gerousia and kings. It is the very differences in the circumstances behind cities looking either to ensure enforcement of decisions or to enable revision that are most revealing about archaic Greek communities.
- 22 Koerner (1993), Hölkeskamp (1999).
- 23 Duplouy (2019, 202–3).
23The publication of Nomima marked a very important moment for reconceptualising the archaic Greek city. Scholarship has, however, picked up its agenda only in part. In some ways the very success of the collection, along with the slightly earlier collection of archaic Greek laws by Koerner, Inscriftliche Gesetztexte der frühen griechischen Polis, and the emphasis on law‑making itself that came from Gagarin’s Early Greek Law and Hölkeskamp’s Schiedsrichter, Gesetzgeber und Gesetzgebung im archaischen Griechenland,22 led to laws in the narrow sense, rather than customary practices, receiving emphasis. Indeed Nomima is frequently treated by scholars as if it were a collection of “inscriptions juridiques” or “textes législatifs” (to quote Alain Duplouy).23
- 24 Hall (2007, 131–7), Rollinger & Ulf (2004, 282, 312, 370).
- 25 Pilz & Seelentag (2014), Seelentag (2015).
24The consequence of this is somewhat paradoxical. Just as within classical Greek history the study of law has been hived off from the study of other aspects of history to become the preserve of specialist scholars (above all the group involved in the Symposion conferences and publications), so archaic Greek law has become similarly “hived off”. So Jonathan Hall’s A History of the Archaic Greek World ca. 1200–479 BCE confines discussion of law to a single short section on “Laws and Institutions” and Richard Rollinger and Christoph Ulf’s Griechische Archaic: interne Entwicklungen – externe Impulse has passing reference to law (“Gesetzgebung”) on only 3 pages.24 The one area of archaic Greek history where the Nomima vision of archaic Greece has prevailed has been the history of Crete. Not only do we now have Gagarin and Perlman’s massive edition with commentary of The Laws of Ancient Crete, but discussion of archaic Cretan history has integrated the study of Cretan laws into a wider study of Cretan society, as is well seen in the collection of essays edited by Oliver Pilz and Gunnar Seelentag Cultural Practices and Material Culture in Archaic and Classical Crete as well as in Seelentag’s own Das archaische Kreta: Institutionalisierung im frühen Griechenland.25
25It was of course no accident that van Effenterre was primarily a scholar of things Cretan and that the legacy of Nomima is clearest in studies of Crete. For archaic Crete is both peculiarly richly supplied with inscriptional material (and from many different cities), is very little discussed in literary texts, and is notoriously thin on 6th‑century archaeological evidence. What Nomima offers us is, indeed, as Olivier Mariaud has put it, “the city of the inscriptions”. That is, it puts forward a vision of the archaic Greek world which is derived from the issues which those living in archaic Greek cities themselves flagged up to each other by advertising on stone. This vision stood in contrast to the traditional story of the archaic Greek city which had been heavily based on later Greek literary texts that offer only what later Greeks wanted to believe about the archaic city.
- 26 Snodgrass (1980).
- 27 Osborne (1996).
- 28 Hall (2007), Ulf & Kistler (2020).
26In making this move, Nomima was not alone. Already in 1980 Anthony Snodgrass, in his Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment,26 had offered a picture of archaic Greece that was based on archaeology and archaic poetry rather than on Herodotos and Aristotle and, under his influence, I would take the same route (not without some engagement with epigraphy) in my Greece in the Making 1200–479 BC.27 But if Nomima both encouraged and facilitated seeing the archaic city in its own terms, the difficulties of carrying that lesson through have remained apparent. While those who work closely with the archaeological evidence have generally been keen to present the “emic” archaic city (cf. Jonathan Hall’s A History of the Archaic Greek World or Christoph Ulf and Erich Kistler’s Die Enstehung Griechenlands),28 historians less embedded in material culture have remained more wedded to the “etic” city—and even those interested in aspects of the institutionalisation of the city sometimes find themselves attracted to Aristotle and away from the rich epigraphy that Nomima made available (so Duplouy’s Construire la cité cites Nomima on 2 pages for 5 inscriptions, but Aristotle on 25 pages).
27There is, therefore, still much more to be learned from careful consideration of Nomima not simply as a collection of individual texts, but as a carefully constructed invitation to revisit and reframe the stories about archaic Greece that we continue to be tempted to tell. The fragmentary inscribed texts from archaic Greece are often hard to understand, and we need the guiding hand that van Effenterre and Ruzé offer. But if we are to resist the temptation to distort the archaic Greek world through a classical lens, then these fragments on stone are the most precious anchor that we have. And indeed, to further enrich the “emic” picture, we could do with the example of Nomima inspiring others to offer us, to complement “the city of the inscriptions”, “the city of the poets” and “the city of the painters of pottery”.
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