HS24: Inheritance and Family in the Greek World

Our sources for reconstructing the Ancient Greek legal culture stretch over an imposing arch of fifteen centuries, from the 8th cent. BCE, the time of Homer and Hesiod, to the Arab conquests of the 7th cent. CE. Geographically, the Greek world had started to expand already in the 8th cent. BCE, through a creation of colonies that was particularly intense in the Islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, in Asia Minor – today’s Turkey – and in Sicily and southern Italy, so heavily colonised by Greeks that it came to be known by the Romans as Magna Graecia, ‘Great(er) Greece’. This expansion of the Greek world culminated with the conquests of Alexander the Great. After his death, the entire Eastern Mediterranean would remain for centuries Greek in culture and language: this did not change when the Hellenistic kingdoms founded after his death fell one after another under Roman control and became part of the Roman Empire. Together with the culture and the language, also the Greek legal tradition remained thus the dominant one in the Eastern Mediterranean until the Arab conquest.

It is this later Greek legal culture of the Hellenism and the Eastern Roman Empire that we know in greatest detail, thanks to thousands of papyri preserved for us in the arid sands of Egypt and in lesser measure in the Near East. The seminar will explore this material in the fields of the law of family and inheritance. Of all areas of the law, these are the most directly influenced by social mores and therefore the most charged with cultural particularities. A good field therefore to explore how the Greek legal tradition evolved through its integration in the wider Hellenistic and Roman world, exposed to increasing external influences: in Egypt with particular intensity to the native Egyptian tradition and later to the trappings of the Roman Administration. Even if not immune to such external influences, Greek legal culture was strong enough to survive even the universal enfranchisement as Roman citizens of the entire free population of the Empire in 212 CE. The seminar will also look to the more distant past and explore the roots of the Greek tradition of inheritance and family law in the famous codes of Gortyn, in the Athenian orators, and in the other documentary and literary sources that illustrate the World of the classical Greek poleis, where each city prided itself in its own legislation.

List of topics:

Topic 1: Inheritance Law under the Great Code of Gortyn

Topic 2: Inheriting "naturally": Intestate Succesion in Athens

Topic 3: The Heiress in Greek Law

Topic 4: The Widow in Greek Law

Topic 5: The Ancient Greek Testament

Topic 6: The Hellenistic Testament

Topic 7: The Patrimonial Standing of Wife and Children in Ancient Egyptian Law

Topic 8: Restrictions on Alienation under Family Law in the Papyri

Topic 9: Until Death Do Us Part: Inheritance Agreements in Marriage Contracts

Topic 10: An Unsolved Mystery: "Written" and "Unwritten" Marriages in Roman Egypt

Topic 11: Marriage and Family Law Practice after 212 CE    

Topic 12: Testamentary Law and Practice after 212 CE