Out of Athens

168 PHOENIX but the greater roles of magistrates and the codification of their practices that transform the Roman legal process. Beyond the Twelve tables, the responsa of early jurists, the interpretations of pontifices, the actiones formulated by praetors, and finally the formulary system, which all found their way into Roman law, all complicated questions of law beyond the comprehension of lay people. England after the Norman invasion, with the imposition of Common Law and judicial writs, offers a similar picture. In Athens, however, a large set of written laws was legislated in ordinary language by and for ordinary people. Alexander’s spread of hellenism did not extend from the use of the Greek language to law. Although legal systems in cities in Greece continued to use writing in limited ways as they had in the classical period, hellenistic Egypt made little use of written legislation but large use of documents in litigation. It would be tempting to argue against Gagarin that the simplicity and accessibility of Athens’ legal system was more a product of its democracy than of its use of written law, but Gortyn was an oligarchy and reveals many of the same traits as Athenian law. Even in an oligarchy, however, the judicial role rotated and magistrates were creatures of the law rather than creators of it. Gagarin’s is not likely to be the last word on this subject, but he has opened it up in very interesting new ways. In the Preface he mentions that he and Paula Perlman are preparing a full edition of the laws of Crete; that will undoubtedly assist further study. Simon Fraser University David C. Mirhady Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks. By Page duBois. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2010. On the first page of Page duBois’s compelling Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks we find the following sentences: In the current circumstances of globalization and postcoloniality, it seems ever more imperative to attend to the ways in which traditional disciplines in the humanities, based as they are on nationalisms or on élite culture, no longer reflect the state of scholarship in the human sciences or the state of the world of readers. Classics is a striking example of these difficulties. Indeed. Though it contains a strong—and, thankfully, waxing—minority of progressive scholars, the constellation of disciplines normally called “Classics” is, most of the time, one of the more conservative in the contemporary academy, and this is true whether the measure of “conservativeness” is scholarly methodology or cultural politics. To be sure, plenty of classicists hold opinions to the left of centre when it comes to the size or responsibilities of government, the importance of trade unions, the value of universal health care; but none of that stops the field as a whole from enforcing an attachment to methodologies that haven’t changed since the death of Wilamowitz, or from tolerating a belief that “the Classics” stand for something like the ideals of western civilization when the rest of the academy is busily disabusing students and the general public of the value of precisely these categories, that is, the categories of “the ideal” and “western civilization.” DuBois has written a book about antiquity that is much the antipode of this conservative strain in classical studies. In this tight and fast-paced sequence of essays there is no focus on Athens or Rome, no celebration or emulation of empire or ideology, no BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 169 exploration of the role of the individual in history or art, and no triumph of humanitas over the forces of barbarism. Instead, there are explorations of the emphatically impure geographical dissemination of the name, image, and legend of Spartacus; of Sappho as an eddy in which Asian and African confluences can be followed; of tattoos; of tragedy’s interrogation and ultimate upending of any model of coherent citizen subjectivity; of the seething plurality called “Alexandria”; of utopia; of what crosses the body of Jesus; of Oedipus; and of “high” theory’s engagement with classical themes, authors, and figures. Nothing ever happens in one place; once duBois has settled on a theme she typically finds it first far from Greece

Democracy · Greeks · Legal history · Legislation · Oligarchy · Political science · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Conflict of Laws and Jurisdiction · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture