| This dissertation explores the aims and ideals of the Athenian legal system, focusing on the issue of legal relevance, i.e., notions of the types of information and arguments appropriate for presentation to a jury. Rather than approaching the legal system as a single unit, I focus on the differences between ordinary popular court cases and two special types of suit—homicide and maritime cases. In popular court cases the jury was presented with a mixture of legal argumentation and non-legal argumentation that would normally be considered irrelevant in a modern courtroom, and was given broad discretion in reaching their verdict. Homicide and maritime cases, by contrast, followed (at least in theory) a perceptibly more formal, legal approach.; The varied approach to legal process reflects not an historical evolution toward legalism (the homicide procedures predate the popular courts), but rather a dynamic tension between the values of flexibility and consistency. The special homicide and maritime procedures suggest that the Athenians could imagine—and, to a lesser extent, implement—a legal process in of the dispute. In the vast majority of cases, however, the Athenians chose to sacrifice some measure of consistency and predictability in favor of a highly individualized and contextualized form of justice. The prevalence of non-legal argumentation in the surviving speeches is not evidence for a model of the Athenian courts, favored by some recent scholarship, as primarily an arena for elite competition over honor and prestige unrelated to the formal legal charge. Rather, for popular court jurors, such material was “relevant” to reaching a just resolution to the dispute that went beyond the strict application of the law and incorporated an assessment of responsibility and the appropriate penalty in accord with the particular circumstances of the parties and the act in question. The Athenian popular court system reflects not only a normative belief in the importance of contextual information in reaching a just decision according to contemporary social values, but also a political commitment to wide-ranging jury discretion in the classical democracy. |
