To understand why the Greeks wrote these early laws we must ask several questions: Who wrote the laws? Who read them? What kinds of laws were written? What effect does putting a rule into written form have on that rule? The physical features of the inscriptions examined in Chapter Two suggest answers to some of these questions; for others we will have to look more closely at the content of laws and their social and historical context.

I begin with the vexing question, who could read these early texts? As we saw (Chapter Two), during the first century (ca. 750–650), when writing was used only for private inscriptions, these inscriptions were written, and presumably read, by a range of people including some who were not members of the elite. We also noted that, beginning around 650, archaic laws were displayed in easily accessible public spaces, were often written in large clear letters suitable for reading, and almost always contained features like word-division markers that would make the text easier to read and understand. These physical features strongly suggest that the laws were intended to be read, but this does not tell us by whom. It is tempting to conclude that the readers of archaic laws included the same broad range of people as the writers of the earliest private inscriptions, but there are at least two potential obstacles to this conclusion. First, the widespread popularity of writing during its first century may not have continued in subsequent years.

None of the inscriptions surveyed thus far comes from Athens, but we do have later information about archaic legislation in Athens; in particular, the text of Draco's homicide law was reinscribed on a stone stele at the end of the fifth century (IGi3 104, dated to 409/8). The text from this stele provides no evidence for the original physical appearance of Draco’s law, but it does tell us much about the content, style, and organization of the law, and this can help us understand why the law was enacted and why it was written down and displayed in public. After examining this law in some detail, we will look briefly at archaic Athenian legislation after Draco.

Tradition holds that Draco wrote the first Athenian laws in 621/0 (Ath. Pol. 4.1, 41.2). Best attested is his homicide law but he may have written laws on other subjects too. A generation later, in 594, Solon wrote a new set of laws covering many different issues, but he kept Draco's homicide law. The Athenians reinscribed this law in 409/8 as part of their attempt to republish all valid laws (Chapter Eight). Part of this later reinscription survives, from which scholars have reconstructed a fragmentary text that, in the opinion of many, accurately reproduces the original text of Draco's law, though it is uncertain whether we have the original beginning of the law.

In the fifth century, Greek cities everywhere continued to inscribe laws on stone and other materials and display them in public. Judging from the surviving inscriptions, the most active city in this regard continued to be Gortyn, and it is here that we can best study developments in the organization and presentation of legal texts. The crowning glory of fifth-century legal inscriptions is the Great Code (ICret 4.72), probably from about the middle of the century, with almost twelve full columns of text. We also have a second large inscription, the so-called Little Code (4.41, probably before 450), which treats damages done to and by animals, runaway slaves, and indentured servants; parts of seven columns of this text survive, and originally there must have been more. In addition, four (incomplete) columns of text survive on 4.75, traces of three columns can be seen on 4.77, and several other inscriptions originally had at least two columns of text.

The Great Code is a unique document, and its laws cover a far broader range of subjects than any other Greek legal inscription. Because of this, it will be treated separately in the next chapter, where we will also explore some of the similarities and differences between it and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. But even leaving aside the Great Code, Gortyn is exceptional in the quantity and diversity of inscribed legislation in the fifth century. In this chapter I examine a selection of fifth-century inscriptions from Gortyn (4.4.41–140), paying particular attention to features of style and organization.

Thus far our study of writing in Greek law has focused largely on the texts of laws, these being practically the only legal texts that were written in the archaic period and fifth-century Gortyn. When we turn to law in classical Athens, however, we find evidence of many more kinds of written documents. Much of the evidence for these comes not from inscriptions but from speeches written for actual trials ca. 420–322. This evidence is in some ways more problematic than a collection of statutes like the Gortyn Code, but the speeches not only provide information about written texts in Athenian law; they also shed light on the actual operation of law in classical Athens, and they inform us about attitudes toward writing and written texts at this time.

Before the fifth century, the only written texts in Athenian law besides the laws themselves were the written indictments in cases prosecuted by means of the graphē procedure (Chapter Five). During the course of the fifth and fourth centuries, however, written texts are increasingly present in judicial procedure. In fact, the amount of writing in general, as well as the number of people who knew how to read and write, increased steadily. We cannot speak of mass literacy, but literacy went “far beyond the circle of the wealthy” (W. Harris 1989: 114). For the fifth century Harris suggests that about 10 percent of the total population was literate, but others would put the figure much higher.

The end of the civil wars, the advent of the pax Augusta, and the transformation of mainland Greece into the Roman province of Achaea marked an important turning point in the history of the Greeks. Occasional disturbances are documented in certain areas until the Flavian age, but by and large peace enforced by Roman domination became a fact of life. With the loss of political independence, the military role of the polis, which had survived, if in an increasingly curtailed fashion, in the face of the rise of the Hellenistic monarchies and of the Roman conquest, finally came to an end. Even though poleis remained alive as political communities, in various relationships of dependence on Rome but with their own functioning political institutions, one of the main raisons d'être of the polis had disappeared, and with it the main characteristic of the Greek world, internecine conflict. In the first centuries of the Roman Empire, being Athenian, Spartan, Theban, or Messenian could not mean what it used to. Attachment to the patris became just one layer in a tiered identity, at the top of which a unified Hellenic identity, based on shared cultural practices and underpinned by the assumption of a shared genealogy, became increasingly important. In parallel to this process, the ruling elites of Greece, consolidated and stabilized by the Roman domination, came to constitute one of the pools from which the imperial elite was recruited.

Thanks to the fourth book of Pausanias' Description of Greece, there is virtually no event or complex of events in archaic Greek history for which the evidence of the ancient literary sources can be said to approach, in terms of comprehensiveness and level of detail, that for the Spartan conquest of Messenia. This is slightly embarrassing. Ephorus said that narratives of the most distant past are the more credible the less detailed they are (FgrHist 70 F 9), and a modern reader would concur, albeit with some qualification. However, Pausanias' narrative of the First Messenian War, which he dated to the second quarter of the eighth century, takes some twenty-four pages of Greek. It may help us absorb the implications of this fact if we recall that Pausanias was farther away in time from that war than we are from John Lackland and the battle of Bouvines. Of course, he certainly had recourse to the work of earlier authors, but the fact that his narrative is more than four times longer than all the remaining evidence for that war does not encourage optimism.

In a nutshell, this peculiar situation is at the root of all problems that affect the reconstruction of an archaic history of Messenia, not to mention Sparta.

After 401, the Messenians disappeared again from mainland Greece for three decades. They reappeared as a consequence of that enormously momentous event, the defeat of the Spartans at Leuktra in 371 bc. In the fall of 370/69, Epaminondas led a huge expeditionary corps formed by the army of the Boeotian League and its allies, and the armies of Argos, Elis and Arcadia, in the first invasion of Laconia since the return of the Heraclids. Although vastly outnumbering the Spartans, the army was unable to take Sparta itself, and after ravaging the countryside between Sparta and the sea Epaminondas led his troops north along the Eurotas Valley and then marched out of Laconia into Messenia. The most direct way from Sparta to the Pamisos Valley led, then as now, across the Taygetos by way of the Langadha Pass. However, given the size of the army and the time of the year, it is likely that Epaminondas retraced his way back towards the Alpheios basin and marched into Messenia by way of its natural entrance, the Derveni Pass. The sources do not mention any resistance met by Epaminondas, and it is hardly thinkable that there could have been any. The allied army must have reached Mount Ithome undisturbed.

After the disappearance of their predecessors sometime during the archaic period, the fifth century saw the return of the Messenians to the political landscape of Greece. Unexpectedly, however, they did not reappear at first in the area they were most closely associated with, the southwestern Peloponnese. Instead, the first polity that called itself “the Messenians” arose in Sicily, on the site of the ancient Chalcidian colony of Zankle, which was founded anew around 490 BC by the tyrant of Rhegion Anaxilaos and called Messene. The name of the new colony reflected the fact that the tyrant considered himself to be of Messenian descent. Participation of Messenians coming directly from the Peloponnese to the foundation of Sicilian Messene is controversial and ultimately unlikely, but almost a century later for a short while a large contingent of Messenians from Naupaktos was indeed settled in the city, whence it went on to found the city of Tyndaris, on the northeastern coast of Sicily. In spite of their name and traditions of origin, the nature of the relationship of the Western Messenians to the Messenians of the Peloponnese turns out to be unclear and possibly ambivalent, and a scrutiny of the little we know about the Messenian diaspora on the Strait of Messina may shed interesting light on the development of the Messenian identity as a whole.

Diverse and controversial as it is, the evidence discussed in this book converges in delineating a consistent picture of the Messenian identity and makes it possible to reconstruct a reasonably intelligible trajectory for its historical development over the centuries. It is now time to draw the threads together, summarizing briefly in an integrated way the conclusions formulated in the chapters of the book. This will be done first in the form of comparing traditional narratives of the history of the Messenians with what would result from the arguments presented here. Then two rather peculiar monuments will offer starting points for discussions of the structural aspects of the Messenian identity.

STORIES OF THE MESSENIAN IDENTITY

According to Pausanias, the only ancient author who offers a comprehensive account of it, the history of the Messenians could be summarized as follows. Messenia had existed as a unified kingdom ever since queen Messene and her husband Polykaon migrated to the region from the Argolid and Laconia respectively. Various short-lived dynasties ruled Messenia, until the Heraclid Kresphontes conquered it with his army of Dorians, establishing a dynastic line that was destined to occupy the throne until the conquest of the region by the Spartans. In the second half of the eighth century, the First Messenian War brought the whole of Messenia under Spartan control.

From the scrutiny of the literary evidence on Messenia from the return of the Heraclids to the Spartan conquest conducted in the previous two chapters, two broad conclusions should result in a reasonably uncontroversial way. The first and positive one is that such evidence sheds interesting light on the struggles for the Messenian past – in fact, for the Messenian present – that took place from the moment when, in the second quarter of the fifth century, Spartan domination of the land west of the Taygetos started being called into question. The second and negative one is that it will never be possible to reconstruct the history of Messenia from the eighth century to the sixth in any detail and with any degree of confidence based on the literary evidence. No matter how many details of Pausanias' early history of Messenia derive ultimately from oral traditions handed down for centuries among the inhabitants of Messenia, the amount of observable deformation is such that it is simply impossible, in the absence of contemporary evidence, to isolate supposedly genuine bits from the flow of the story.

A different but related question is what sort of ethnic identity and collective memory we should expect among the inhabitants of Messenia under Spartan rule – a legitimate and extremely interesting question, but one that has often been approached from a rather unhelpful angle.