In societies in which religion is important, oaths are commonly used to reinforce important undertakings—either that one will behave in certain ways in the future or that what one says is or was the case in the present or past is a true statement of what is or was the case — by adding a divine sanction to the human sanctions threatened for breach of the undertaking.² In Britain, where in the past conformity was demanded not merely to Christianity but to the particular version of Christianity currently approved, oaths were required in various political and judicial contexts; as...

Oaths were central to Greek international relations. Coleman Phillipson observed, ‘It may in truth be said that the oath is, in a certain sense, the underlying basis of the whole body of the ancient law of nations.’² Specifically, as D.J. Bederman has stated, ‘Ancient treaties were, as a matter of definition, an exchange of oaths.’³ Yet treaty-oaths were often violated, partly because in the sphere of international relations they presented unique difficulties, but also because one of the parties chose not to fulfill their obligations, an odd occurence in light of the binding nature of an oath. As R.A. Bauslaugh...

Discussion of litigants’ oaths in classical Athens must start from David Mirhady’s study of ‘The Oath-Challenge in Athens’ (Mirhady 1991b). As Mirhady observes, all litigants’ oaths, except for those sworn formally by each side at the beginning of a trial, involve aproklēsis—usually translated ‘challenge,’ though often ‘offer’ or ‘proposal’ better captures the force of the term.¹ Thus, a litigant or potential litigant would propose that he himself, or his opponent, or some third party swear an oath concerning some point of fact. This kind ofproklēsisand others are a common feature of Athenian forensic pleadings, and litigants...

The dikasts’ oath embodied the fundamental statement of Athenian jurisprudence. In swearing it, Athenian dikasts solemnly declared what reasoning guided their judicial decisions. The oath included two key elements: first, that they cast their votes ‘according to the laws’ (κατὰ τοὺς νόμους), and second, that they do so by their ‘most just understanding’ (γνώμῃ τῇ δικαιοτάτῃ). The meaning of the first clause has been problematic enough as scholars debate what it means that Athenian dikasts follow the ‘rule of law’.¹ But the meaning of the second clause has been a greater puzzle, from antiquity to the present. Interpreters generally divide...

This chapter arises from an interest in the use of modern language to explain ancient phenomena. An example of such language is the language of human rights. It is frequently tempting to resort to the modern language of rights in the context of, for instance, ancient ideas of free speech or citizenship. But to do so is to suppose that the Greeks had any such concept of rights at all; certainly, there was no single Greek word equivalent to the English ‘rights’ in this sense.¹ Modern scholarship remains divided on this subject.² My own view is that the Greeks were...

Sometime around 343 BC an Athenian named Callistratus was involved in a lawsuit against his brother-in-law Olympiodorus over their claims to an inheritance. The two had formed a partnership to divide the estate of their kinsman Comon in equal shares and to cooperate in dealing with any undiscovered assets or liabilities. They drafted a written contract and swore an oath to abide by it. At first, Olympiodorus honored the agreement, even sharing a small sum that a slave revealed; but later, without consulting his partner, he proceeded to torture the slave and discovered another 70 mnas, and this he did...

The first, and the most renowned, of the women to have won a crown at Olympia was the Spartan Kyniska, the sister of Agesilaos.¹ This victory (either in one or in two separate Olympic cycles) seems to have taken place in the 390s BCE,² and it is recorded in several—though contradictory—sources. The most familiar of these is the inscription attached to her (now lost) statue,³ fragments of which have been recovered at Olympia, and the full text of which is known from thePalatine Anthology:⁴

Σπάρτας μὲν [βασιλῆες ἐμοὶ] πατέρες καὶ ἀδελϕοί˙

ἅ[ρματι δ’ ὠκυπόδων ἵππων] νικῶσα Κυνίσκα...

The principal features of the Greek practice of oath-taking are well known: swearing on oath was a frequent and widespread practice in ancient Greece; it had deep social significance, and was a foundational safeguard of Greek society. Then as now it occurred in assertory and promissory contexts; it was an act in which people engaged with great solemnity, frequently intensifying the oath-taking by marking it with bloodshed¹ or the invoking of chthonic powers. In so doing the oath-taker placed himself/herself under a provisional curse and invited punishment by Underworld forces should he or she be found to have commited perjury....

Horkos, its cognates and related terms recur throughout theOresteia, which seems only natural given that the oath is such an essential feature of Greek justice and this drama is about justice.¹ Yet although much has been written ondikēin theOresteia, commentary on the oaths which structure and obtain this justice is surprisingly scant, limited only to remarks on individual oaths sworn or mentioned at various points in the drama. Oaths are verbal bonds, and in a literary work which employs nets and binding as one of its central image systems one might reasonably expect the persistent reference...

When Euripides produced hisMedeain 431 BC a number of different versions of the Jason and Medea story existed, although it is probable that not all versions would have been known in all places.¹ Nevertheless, it is apparent that Euripides availed himself of several of these pre-existing storylines in the construction of his play.² Notably, the version of the tale that lies behind Pindar’sPythian4 informs the argument used by Jason in hisagōnwith Medea,³ while the dramatist Neophron may have preceded Euripides in making Medea an infanticide as well as using Aigeus in his story.⁴ It...

It is a paradoxical feature of Aristophanes’Cloudsthat though all three of the major characters reject belief in the traditional gods during at least part of the play—and one of them, Socrates, is an unbeliever from beginning to end—they all nevertheless go on swearing oaths by these gods. Or at any rate they use expressions such as μὰ τὸν Δία ‘no, by Zeus’ and νὴ τὸν Ποσειδῶ ‘yes, by Poseidon’, which, though they do not contain a verb of swearing (e.g. ὄμνυμι) or an explicit imprecation (e.g. κάκιστ’ ἀπολοίμην, εἰ μὴ … ‘may I perish most miserably...

This article is offered as a reply to Dr Stephanie West’s recent study ‘῞Ορκου πάτς ἐστὶν ἀνώνυμος: the aftermath of Plataean perjury’.¹ She raises important questions about Thucydides’ treatment of religion. But I shall argue that we shall go wrong if we concentrate on Plataian behaviour to the exclusion of Thebes, and especially on Plataian perjury to the neglect of the matching, prior and much longer-lived allegation of Theban perjury.

It may be helpful to summarise what I take West’s argument to be, putting it more crudely than she does herself. She holds, invoking several contemporary tragedies, that perjury was...

The oath, said Lykourgos in 330 BC in his speech against Leokrates, binds the democracy together.¹ Swearing oaths, he could have added, reaffirms the unity of the community and assures its permanence.² Oaths also create bonds between the humans swearing them and the gods invoked by them.³ These functions made the oath a potent weapon for communities reconciling afterstasis, civil strife, a familiar feature of many Greek cities in the fifth century BC.⁴ For Athenians during most of this century, however, stasis was something which happened in other communities, such as Korkyra, but certainly not in their own. As...

We know of only two occasions when the Great Oath ormegas horkosof the Syracusans was administered. Both times it was sworn by faithless political schemers of the fourth century BC—a typical example, it might seem, of Greek readiness to let power and politics trump religion, as soon as the sacred rites have served their purpose as a prop to ambition. Our review of the few known facts surrounding these particular political oaths will in itself seem only to justify this skepticism. If, however, we take the particularities of this local religious ritual seriously enough to seek their...

Alcaeus fr. 129 calls the Lesbian gods to their sanctuary to witness the poet’s demand that an Erinys be sent after Pittacus, Alcaeus’ former co-conspirator, who has forsworn his oath, forcing Alcaeus into exile and supposedly subjecting the Lesbian people to the suffering caused by internecine conflict. The structure of the poem has intrigued many critics,¹ who note the juxtaposition of the formal invocation and the crude curse against his enemy. If it is analyzed in the light of its ritual utility, however, the poem turns out to be a unified whole whose wording echoes the wording and gestures of...

It has long been observed that, relying on the fundamental principle that the same natural laws condition microcosmic and macrocosmic processes, Presocratic philosophers map social and political concepts onto the universe; in so doing, they describe new concepts in comprehensible terms and thus shed light upon their own version of the structure and workings of the material cosmos.²

It is in this spirit that Empedocles makes use of social and political imagery in order to conceptualise for his pupil both the relationship between the cosmic principles Love and Strife and the behaviour of the unchangeable first beginnings of things, what...

It may surprise readers to find in this volume a contribution that discusses the Roman world—that mentions not just kings or assemblies, but emperors, and comments on events from the closing years of the Roman Republic and the start of the Principate, long after the glorious days of Athens. Yet it is testimony to their persistent and pervasive features that an examination of Greek oaths in the Roman world can shed light on the effectiveness and adaptability of many of the elements of oaths discussed in earlier articles in this collection.

In 3 BC, the people of Neapolis, formerly...