The Roman Empire was rooted in violent acts. The spread of Roman control over the provinces was a lengthy process, but one that fundamentally changed the nature of political relationships. Settlers extruded from Italy. Large amounts of wealth changed hands. Land tenure was reconfigured. The population was divided first into provinces, then into assize districts. Subject populations were registered, counted, and taxed. The process put immense amounts of strain on the internal structures of communities. Roman governors were tasked with administering this new political landscape, where their position was tenuous. They distrusted new local elites who, along with Roman settlers, were prone to take advantage of local people. These same people were also responsible for tax collection, which, along with keeping the peace, was the governor’s ultimate responsibility. This systemic tension opened a space for provincial legalism.

The bibliography on ancient Greek democracy is vast, although recent trends suggest it may have peaked, at least for now. What follows is necessarily selective. When it comes to overviews of ancient Greek politics and society, for scope, ambition, vivacity, and theoretical sophistication, it is difficult to top de Ste. Croix 1981, a towering life’s work. Everyone should read it, even if only to disagree with it. In a similar vein is Cartledge 2018, focused on democracy specifically. It reaches different conclusions from the ones offered here, in particular regarding the Hellenistic period, but is forceful and engaging. Meier 1990 remains excellent on Greek politics in general. Davies 1993 and O’Neil 1995 are overviews of ancient Greek democracy concentrating on the Classical period. Ma 2024 appeared only after the present manuscript was completed. While I have not been able to incorporate references to this impressive achievement throughout the text, the reader should be aware that it is one of the strongest arguments yet for seeing genuinely democratic practices down through the period of the high Empire (second century ce and beyond).

The Introduction justifies a new history of ancient Greek democracies based on the proliferation of new archaeological discoveries, advances in scholarship, and the need for an up-to-date synthesis. Democracy was not limited to Classical Athens (480–323 BCE) but spread throughout the Greek world over the fourth through second centuries BCE. Ancient Greek democracies represent a phenomenon specific to the historical and cultural context of the ancient Mediterranean, but they still have much to teach us today.

What can a premodern narrative of legal change teach us? This brief epilogue raises the more complex question of the totalizing ambitions of states that operate from the assumption that law is a specialized practice, rather than something that emerges from daily life. The existence of a black-letter law urges states towards legislation as legal utopianism: the attempt to remake subjects in an optimal fashion and to exclude those they find problematic. This tendency towards utopianism - a form of state magic - is present in both late antique and modern contexts. Understanding the roots of it urges us towards humility with respect to our own projects of legal transformation.

This chapter discusses relative clauses in some theoretical detail. It begins by establishing a working definition of relative clauses appropriate for the purposes of the book, providing an overview of the different semantic and syntactic types. It then moves on to the way in which these clauses are analysed within Minimalist linguistic theory, weighing up the Head-External, Head-Raising and Matching analyses; this is followed by a more detailed look at the left periphery as a vital part of this structure. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which these formal approaches have been applied to ancient Indo-European languages, isolating the points of identity and divergence between them. These establish the relevant points of comparison, which inform the reconstructive program pursued in subsequent chapters.

This chapter describes the rapid spread of democracy in the later fifth and earlier fourth centuries BCE. The reader imagines the life cycle of a democratic citizen in Classical Athens, from birth in the deme to political participation in mid-life to arbitration work in old age, with detours into the court system, festivals, the Athenian Funeral Oration, and ostracism. Comparative evidence is introduced from fourth-century BCE Argos. The Athenian monumental building projects of the period of the high empire (Parthenon, Propylaea, Erectheion, etc.) receive their own subsection, with a focus on democratic art. The reader is introduced properly to oligarchic institutions and ideology, which almost managed to reverse democratic gains for good in this period. The chapter ends with a discussion of the stasis or civil strife that broke out between democrats and oligarchs in so many Greek poleis.

This chapter takes up a series of popular folktales about radical inequality (Aesop, Gevia ben Psisa/ben Qosem) to argue that provincial communities become increasingly interested in reframing quotidian interactions as legal interactions. Legal dialogue came to be imagined as a register of discourse capable of controlling powerful people. Interestingly, however, all of these stories feature a protagonist somehow marked as physically deformed or otherwise grotesque: Aesop was the ugliest slave imaginable, Geviah a hunchback. The very bizarreness of these characters offers a standing challenge to normative understandings of power: in each case, it is the most degraded members of society who manage to wield legal logos to control their superiors, society’s notional elites.

This chapter analyses the left periphery of PIE with specific reference to the interaction between pragmatic fronting (topicalisation and focalisation) and clitic placement (Wackernagel’s law). This constitutes a mapping out of the CP layer in PIE, which forms a crucial part of relative clause structure, and lays the groundwork for analysing the precise syntactic behaviour of the relative pronoun, *REL.

Early Christianity, and the Pauline letters specifically, was concerned with questions of legality and its transcendence. In a process analogous to that described in the previous chapter, the flesh of Christ holds out the possibility of transcending the law itself, and remaking oneself and one’s community in the wake of the historical disruptions of the first century BC/AD. Communities throughout the empire, intrigued by the possibility of taking on new and different laws or, by contrast, freeing themselves from all laws, saw in the possibility of Christianity the opportunity for transformation. For Paul, real law is not concerned about materiality, but transcendence. There are important and underexplored commonalities between Paul’s interpretive moves and those of the sophists of the following chapter. The key body, however, is not the body of the orator, but the perfect body of Christ, which deserves to be imitated.