Greek History

[...]the colonial undertone of the text is a theme that proves the unity of the text and provides many opportunities for him to explore the problems of authorial self-reference. Extra-legal arguments were viewed as vital in reaching resolutions that were just in the eyes of the popular juries; courts (unlike their modern counterparts) did not envisage that their verdicts would provide precedents for future disputes. In the mid-fourth century, therefore, they created a procedure for maritime suits that demanded focus on the terms of written contract and excluded arguments from extra-legal fairness: this procedure was designed to appear less disadvantageous to non-Athenian litigants, in an attempt to facilitate trade and attract foreign merchants, and the close attention paid to contracts precluded the necessity for detailed legislation regulating maritime trade. A yet more closely focussed work is Phillips study of the relationship between Athenian customs of revenge and homicide law.4 Phillips argues against the widely held view that Dracos laws addressed conflict between aristocratic clans and proposes instead that they attempted to arrest vertical strife between the aristocracy and the masses; while they failed to resolve the grievances of the demos (that was left up to Solon), Dracos homicide law was a success because it deterred revenge-killings and persuaded kinsmen of the deceased to play out a ritualized form of enmity (echthra) in the law-courts (where it retained certain key features such as reciprocity, escalation, transivity to philoi, and heritability).