Imagine if you will that you are walking through the neighborhood in the early evening, just as folks are finishing their dinner. Suddenly, you see a man in disguise climbing though the window of a nearby house with an empty sack in his clutches. What do you do? Whip out my cell phone, you would say, and call 9-1-1, of course! But wait. The catch is that you are a citizen in ancient Athens in the fourth century before the Common Era. This condition suddenly poses a much different problem. Do you call the police? Is there any kind of police in the first place? Would you scream and try to get everybody’s attention? Would you try to stop the perpetrator yourself? The reality of the matter is that in Athens, crimes such as these were dealt with for the most part by the person against whom the crime was committed. In this case, as an innocent bystander, you would be obligated to actively witness the crime as it was happening, as well as get others to witness it with you. The plight of the owner of the soon-to-be taken property is even worse. He is responsible for every part of the process, from figuring out who the perpetrator was to persecuting him in court to exacting the punishment charged by the court. Fortunately, in many cases the government of the Athenian city-state did in fact have a role in intervening during the process. They were responsible for widows and orphans that suffered injustices and would conduct most of the legal procedures on their behalf, and also apprehend suspects when the litigator himself was physically unable to do so. In cases of large public offenses, the boule would even undertake the legal process without a private litigator if they deemed the case important enough for the security of the nation. Finally, Athens had a force of around 300 Scythian slaves which they employed as a kind of formal police force at public events to protect attendees. Despite this, the government’s intervention was indeed very little compared to the highly structured and involved police and justice system that we are used to in modern times, laying the brunt of the work onto the individual who has been offended in some way. What this implies for Athens is that the only way one could win and follow through most legal cases is to have a large social network. Reliable people are needed to act as a witness during the event of the crime, they are needed to aid in gathering information and doing detective work, they are needed to testify in court and they are even needed to carry out the court’s ruling. For this reason, the Athenian prosecution system in the 4th century BC was an important factor contributing to the perpetuation of Athens as a face-to-face society that required everybody to know everybody else, which serves as another window into the Greek mentality of individualism and democracy, and their unparallelled value for political and civic participation from every citizen. In the following paragraphs I will elaborate on the persecution process for the litigator, on the involvement of the government, and on the involvement of bystanders and community members and their importance to the process.
As mentioned before, the litigant alone is responsible for presenting his case to the jury, including the investigation, apprehention and prosecution of the miscreant. Even in the case of investigation, he was required to do at least four different tasks that were all serious and difficult, “Being required to seek out relevant laws and decrees; to solicit witnesses; to employ the skills of a detective, if a special search was needed; and to issue a public challenge to his opponent to give or receive slaves for torture,” (Hunter, 1994:130 ). As far as laws and decrees were concerned, this was, especially at first, only available on written plaques located in different areas around the city which had to be found and carefully recited, because stating a law that does not exist was an offense punishable by death. To this end, it would be very reasonable for the litigator to find a group of acquaintances (who all needed to be literate) to aid him in the search for the relevant laws. (Hunter, 1994:131). The search for witnesses was of a similar vein, and included all the neighbors of the person whom the crime had been committed against who are often called upon by the victim or other bystanders to witness the scene of the crime as it happens.
Once all the information was put together for the lawsuit to be able to succeed, the next job of the litigant was to find the actual defendant and bring him to court. Since this requires the use of force if the defendant failed to show up after a formal summons had been made, it is a very clear example of just how much responsibility was put on the person trying to prosecute. If and when the suspect was spotted by the person trying to make an arrest, both parties would immediately call out to the bystanders (which, as usual, always happened to be around), and try to convince them of their own story and why they are in the right. Then usually the bystanders would help to intervene to stop the suspect or to prevent the apprehender if they felt that the person being chased was actually in the right. So because Athens didn’t have an official police force like in modern times, the citizens needed to have friends and family that they could depend on to help them take the place of this institution in times of need. (Hunter, 1994:139) This is a crucial analysis of the Athenian point of view on civic duty, because although we know that they expected their citizens to participate in the politics of Athens and to vote, this kind of participation, which could be classified as manual labor and putting one’s life at risk, was also viewed as a required duty of being a good citizen. If you were a bystander in Athens and saw the robber sneaking into your neighbor’s house and you did nothing but walk the other way, it would be a shameful shirking of political duty on your part.
Finally we come to the last part of the litigant’s job, that of prosecuting the miscreant whom he already worked so hard to apprehend. But he would have no reprieve here either, for “the citizen who was responsible for the arrest of a criminal … exercised the functions of both prosecuting attorney and complaining witness when the trial took place,” (Bonner 1927:46). There were no reliable forms of professional lawyers or any other such amenities that we are used to in courts to-day, and both the prosecutor and defendant had to use their full knowledge, oral skills and all the evidence they were able to come up with personally in the trial, and to present their own case. The only case in which there was an exception to this is if either man found a representative to speak for them under exceptional circumstances, and also the families of the two parties were allowed to say a few words after the cases for each side were presented. (Bonner, 1927:55). At last, when the verdict is reached, we come to the matter of the penalty. In public suits (those against the state), Athenian officials carried out the penalty themselves (even this not always, for in the case of a fee the prosecutor would be expected to do this privately as well). In private suits, on the other hand, the responsibility for carrying out the penalty was, again, entirely the responsibility of the litigant. If the defendant did not do what the verdict had stated in the time period allowed, the litigant was expected to force him to do this, i.e. appear at his place of residence and take whatever property he owed to the litigant, etc. If this still did not work (a dangerous prospect to be sure―if one uses force and doesn’t succeed this could surely imply having been overpowered and even killed), then finally the state would step in to make the defendant a state debtor and some official would then bring extra force to coerce the miscreant into compliance. But throughout this process we see that Athens relies incredibly on its individual citizens to carry out the repressive tasks of policing wrongdoers. From investigating the case, to bringing the defendant to court, to making his case and winning it, and finally to carrying out the punishment deemed appropriate by the court (who also, by the way, consisted of voluntary citizens), the responsibility overwhelmingly lies in the hands of the litigant himself. This reveals a great deal about the value Athenians had for individuality and public duty, not merely because it had these expectations for the harried litigant in the first place, but also because it repeatedly entrusted the security of the polis to such private individuals. Consider that with the exception of the few public cases in which the government does play a role in prosecuting the defense (and even then not fully), the only protection from evildoers against future misconduct to the rest of the public was the victim of the latest crime committed by this person. This level of expectation is astounding, and could even be considered careless because the duty of the government is to protect the citizens. Nevertheless, the Greeks faithfully carried out their duty and participated politically as their expectations dictated, keeping their streets safe.
There is another important aspect gleaned from discussion of this legal process which has been touched upon but not yet been fully brought to light, and that is the aid from the rest of the community. In almost every step of the process we saw a large window of opportunity for this phenomenon to present itself. While gathering information on laws and doing detective work for the case, having no formal venues to turn to, the litigant needed to ask his community to aid him with this task if he wanted to get everything done in a reasonable amount of time. Apprehending the criminal was an especially important point to involve the help of community members, as we have seen, most importantly because unlike an organized police force, which would apprehend the person whom there were charges against almost without question, the community could choosewhom to help based on their previous knowledge of the individuals or what they hear during the attempt at catching the defendant itself. The implications of this mean that the bigger and more positive your reputation is among your community, the more likely you are to glean the help of your community in catching your enemy, and the more likely you are in making progress with your entire case. And lastly, although the community deliberately has little capacity to change the outcome of the actual trial, they once again become necessary to exact the punishment provided that the court ruled in the litigant’s favor. Since, again, there is no formal authority that would consider aiding the litigant from the start, if he had somehow miraculously gotten this far in the prosecution process without the aid of any community members, the defendant would have much less to fear of one man attempting to confiscate his personal property than a man and a large posse of neighbors behind him.
Thus, almost paradoxically, the set-up of the ancient Athenian system of prosecuting a defendant perpetuated both individualism and a tightly-knit community. Private initiative was the one major driving force behind the entire legal process from the scene of the crime to the final resolution of the conflict. But at the same time, it would be impossible for one man to accomplish any of these tasks with any notable degree of success were it not for the community behind him that helped to overpower resistance and greatly reduce the amount of time for preparation in every step, all by personal virtue and completely voluntarily. It becomes clear that the Athenian government, though in most likelihood unconsciously, uses this individualistic system of dealing with miscreants to accomplish a twofold purpose: first, to maintain the knowledge base of its citizens, contributing to the preservation of an efficient and well-informed democratic system of government by putting most responsibility for carrying out policing and prosecution into the citizens’ hands, and second to halt the deterioration of community that we so often bemoan in the real world dead in its tracks by putting such a strong emphasis on the necessity of a supportive community to accomplish any legal procedure.
What can we glean from this lesson? While these methods are indeed rather extreme from the perspective of modern nations, the most important value that Athens has shown us is that putting responsibility into the hands of citizens leads to very important positive outcomes. In the modern world, there are no concessions to the citizen to carry out civic duty to the extent that they are given in ancient Athens. In fact, most of the actions described above would be prohibited today. But perhaps if we allowed our citizens to take a bigger role in the process of persecution as they did in Athens, our citizens would also begin to educate themselves with increased vigor. As for the necessity of community aid, I would argue that ancient Athens has provided us with a sufficient basis to conclude that if we were to call an organized police force and justice system as the higher level of security, then there is not only a tradeoff between security and individualism as many authors have argued in sociological texts, but even community ties are affected by an overwhelming obsession of government control over public safety.Thus, as the duties of social control are delegated more and more to the government, we must be aware that we may be hurting ourselves in more than one way.
Bibliography
Hunter, Virginia J. Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic lawsuits, 420-320 B. C.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Bonner, Robert J. Lawyrs and Litigants in Ancient Athens: The Genesis of the legal Profession. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1927.
Cohen, David. “Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens,” The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005
Gagarin, Michael. Early Greek Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
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