ABSTRACT
Consideration of the extent of exchange in the archaic and classical Greek world plunges us rapidly into issues of law. Some kind of mechanism for dispute settlement has to exist in any community, as it exists in any family. The agon that is the courtcase goes back in Greek literature just as far as the agon that is the athletic competition. Dispute settlement lies at the heart of both Homeric epics: the Iliad turns on the difficulty of finding a satisfactory settlement to the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, and what happens in the end is less that a solution is found than that the parties come to view matters differently. The Odyssey relies on the suitors’ inability to settle the question of which of them is to get Penelope’s hand, and upon a criterion for dispute settlement, the ability to draw the bow, which none of them can manage. In Hesiod’s Works and Days it is part of the one-sided settlement of the dispute between Zeus and Prometheus that determines the human condition and the fact that men have to labour to produce food. What is more, both the Iliad and Works and Days allude to more mundane dispute settlement in the world with which their audience could be expected
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On the shield which Hephaestus makes for Achilles the scene of the city at peace includes a gathering of the people in the agora to watch the elders offer judgement on a dispute over whether or not a man who has killed another should be allowed to buy himself off (Iliad 18.497-508). The elders are apparently to offer their individual judgements, the case is decided according to the ‘straightest judgement’, and the ‘straightest’ judge takes home two talents of gold. Straightness of judgement is at issue too in Hesiod’s Works and Days where Hesiod complains that his brother Perses has taken more than his share of their inheritance, then argued his case before the basileis (‘kings’) and, apparently, won it (Works and Days 27-41). Hesiod implies that the victory was achieved by bribes, thereby perhaps explaining the enormous sum offered for straight judgement on the shield of Achilles: one can ensure one gets good judgements only by making straight judgement more financially worthwhile than crooked judgement.
