In a modern state, a body of persons rules within a political structure and
comprises a government. Most modern states, for purposes of legitimacy, would seek to ascribe the
term democratic to their rule.
Democratic: a word shaded now with many meanings, although its Greek origins
are clear – demos, the people, and krateo, I rule. The Greeks, who provided the
classical model to which many Western societies pay political homage, based
their government upon the independent city-state. The citizens would assemble
and vote on the main issues – war or peace, taxation, or the appointment of an
official.
Both the ancient form of Greek government and Greek justice meant reliance
upon the will of the people and participation of the people. It has to be
remembered, however, that “the people” did not mean all the inhabitants of the
city-state. The will of the people was the will of those men who were citizens.
The judge or magistrate in the classical Greek system was an overseer and a
custodian of the legal proceedings. However, the role of the classical Greek
judge was less effectively regulatory than that of the modern judge. That
arbiter also differed from his modern counterpart in that the classical Greek
jury impinged upon the judicial domain by delving into both questions of fact
and law. It can be noted that the modern jury decides only questions of fact,
while the judge is the expert in law. In Athens, 200 to 2,000 citizens chosen by
lot would decide a case; 500 constituted a normal-sized jury. The court in
classical Greece appears to have been more of a popular assembly than the
primogenitor of the modern court. Litigants could employ learned legal persons to write speeches, then the
litigant pleaded his own case.
Athens, as the leading city-state, can provide a model for reference. The
civilisation of ancient Greece lasted from about 1400 B.C. to 4 B.C. It is sadly
true that in Greek development, there was reliance on slavery and later Greece
developed a slave code and practised disenfranchisement of non-citizens.
However, in the perception of Demosthenes the Athenian orator, Athenians
insisted on a proper code of behaviour towards the slaves, since without such
behaviour, one was not fit to be a citizen. There were also citizens, even then,
who considered slavery wrong, such as the playwright Euripides in 5 B.C. who had
written:
“Slavery,
That thing of evil, by its nature evil,
Forcing submission from man to what
No man should yield to.”
Women in Athenian society were also disenfranchised. They seem to have been
relegated to house and home while the men who were citizens occupied themselves
with affairs of state.
The Greeks laid the foundation from which Western societies have been
fashioned. In philosophy, law, logic, politics, oratory and in the concept of
democracy we use the terms of the Greeks, and are influenced by their basic
model of representative government.
The Greek population at its strongest, numbered in the thousands in each
city-state and about 40,000 in Athens. However, despite their relatively small
size compared to cities of today, from them emerged the founding fathers and
influential thinkers in many humanitarian disciplines. In medicine there was
Hippocrates; in philosophy, Socrates and Plato; in drama and poetry, Sophocles,
Aeschylus and Pindar; and in oratory, Demosthenes.
Of course, the Greeks were not the only ancient contributors to the
advancement of human knowledge. They can lay claim to being good at arithmetic
and the Egyptians, who had a stable society centuries before the Greeks, were
accomplished in geometry. The cultures of the east also had their influence in
the sometimes forgotten historical interplay of the many contributions to human
development.
After the Greeks reached the point where their civilization was in decline,
the Romans were on the rise.
And what of the Romans?
From about 220 B.C. to 68 B.C., the Romans had decisive victories over their
rivals. By the first century A.D., Rome was the strongest empire of the ancient
world. The significance of this empire was that it created a republic which
lasted for more than four hundred and fifty years until its demise in the fifth
century A.D. It had transformed allegiances from the city-states to allegiance
to the city and the polity which was Rome. Roman civilisation, like the Greek,
made contributions which flowed through the ages to the modern world. The
constitutional theory of Rome was symbolised and expressed at least up to
imperial times by SPQR – the Latin abbreviation of “the Roman Senate and
People.” In theory, sovereignty of the people and structures such as the Roman
Senate can be seen reflected in modern governmental practices. As in the earlier
Greek civilisation, there were citizens; but Rome had two tiers of citizens –
Patricians and Plebeians – of higher and lower status respectively.
Rome gave to the world a more coherent and comprehensive body of law than
had ever been known before. The product of Roman jurists was compiled by the
Emperor Justinian. From this foundation, Roman law spread across Western Europe.
The influence was lasting. After Roman law had embedded itself in European
culture, Europeans exported a pervasive force around the world, from its
classical base of Roman jurisprudence through distillations down the ages.
Briefly, what the Greeks had contributed to humanity by way of cultural and
intellectual gifts, the Romans equaled in the political, governmental, legal
and structural contributions of their empire. It is not just in a physical sense
that the remains of Greece and Rome are still with us.
The lady of justice has good reason to be standing on the cover of this book
between columns structured like those of the Parthenon in Athens. Let us find
Lady Justice, the goddess Themis, in Greek mythology.
Each part of Greece had its own explanation of its people’s creation. Of
central importance was Mount Olympus towering over the Aegean Sea. There on
Olympus was the throne of Zeus and the home of the twelve great gods and
goddesses. Themis, belonging to the race of the Titans, was an immortal of an
order below the twelve.
From these mythological origins, Themis (possibly translated “order”) has a
place in classical Greek religion as a personification of justice. She was a
goddess of wisdom and an oracle and interpreter of the will of the gods. On
Olympus, Themis was the one who maintained order and also gave counsel to Zeus.
The cult of Themis existed throughout Greece and a temple was built in her
honour in Athens. The daughter of Themis and Zeus was Dike, the goddess of human
justice, who is sometimes confused with her mother.
The stately lady who graces the cover is intended to be a symbol of equity.
She is often represented as a dispenser of justice, being blindfolded and
holding a sword. Her main attribute is her scales. She kindly agreed to weigh
this book and fairly gave her verdict.
And in relation to the rest of the cover, the Graeco-Roman visage, in the
light of what I have said, seems most appropriate.
That is my cover story
Learn the Law:
a retarded text
for advanced readers
by NOTABLE
Published by Trafford Publishing
