This book aims to explore the ‘distinctive operation of rhetoric around homicide’ (p. 1) in the courts of classical Athens. In six clearly structured chapters P. sets out to analyse homicide in Athenian society by examining, on the one hand, the relationship between ‘ideology’ and practice, and, on the other, the role of context – social, religious and judicial – in shaping the orators’ arguments in homicide cases. The introduction presents an overview of the legislation and procedures regulating homicide cases, along with a brief discussion of the sources and of P.'s approach to them. The main texts considered are the speeches of the Attic orators, especially those directly related to homicide (Antiph. 1, 5, 6 and Lys. 1 and 13). Chapter 2 is concerned with the Athenian ideology of homicide, that is, shared perceptions and beliefs about homicide as they emerge from the Athenians’ attitude towards Draco's law and the five homicide courts. This attitude is analysed primarily through forensic speeches, with Dem. 23 as a case study, but also through remarks in Aristotle and Plutarch. In Chapter 3 P. focuses on the religious aspects of the crime, especially pollution, and analyses how the orators discuss them (or not) in the extant speeches. Chapter 4 examines the operation of the relevance rule in the different courts, while Chapter 5 investigates both the notions of intent and motive of the killer in committing the crime and the motivation(s) of the prosecutor in bringing charges for homicide. A concise and clear conclusion summarises the main arguments of the book.

One of the main aspects of significance of P.'s work is certainly the attention paid to the relationship between the contents of the speeches and their contexts of delivery, in terms both of cultural climate and of physical space. When we read the speeches of the Attic orators, which represent only an infinitesimal part of the intense forensic activity of classical Athens, this important cultural and spatial background is often difficult to keep in mind. But this background, as P. rightly points out, was a crucial element of ‘the Athenian courtroom experience’ (as it is, I would add, of any courtroom experience). In the case of homicide trials, for instance, religious concerns about pollution were apparent both in the basileus’ proclamation that barred the defendant from specific places and in the very judicial setting of the trials, which were tried in the open air to avoid contamination from the alleged killer. Noticing this, P. plausibly argues that the relative paucity of references to pollution in the extant homicide speeches, far from signifying a decline in anxiety over pollution during the fourth century bce, can be explained as a result of the specificities of the procedure: it was not necessary for litigants to dwell at length on pollution in the speech when the performative context itself rendered the link to pollution extremely clear.

P., however, sometimes tends to stretch her conclusions on these specificities further than the sources allow. Although she is right in positing that being inside the homicide courts ‘would have created a physical, visual rhetoric of pollution’ (p. 59), the evidence does not really show as stark a difference between the references to pollution made in the homicide courts and those made in the dikastic courts as P. would like to make out. For instance, P. herself notes that during a trial held at the Palladion (Antiph. 6.39–40, 45–6), the defendant brings out the issue of pollution when mentioning how his accusers comfortably spent time with him in places covered by the basileus’ ban as if they themselves believed that he was not polluted. The argument is strikingly similar to the one we find at Dem. 21.114–15 and 117–20 (quoted by P.), a graphê hybreôs heard in a dikastic court: both speeches mention civic and religious activities, along with the issue of touching and being under the same roof with an alleged killer.

Similarly, P.'s argument that ‘the relevance rule can reasonably be said to be a defining factor only in the homicide courts, and not in the dikastic courts’ (p. 110) is contradicted by the evidence. It is well known that homicide courts, and especially the Areopagus, are represented in our sources as being particularly serious in upholding standards of relevance, but this does not automatically mean that other courts were not meant to abide by those standards and largely disregarded such issues. Concerning the expectation of relevance in the Athenian dikastic courts, P. mentions only two sources: Ath. Pol. 67.1, stating that litigants in dikastic courts swore an oath to keep to the point, and ‘a statement in the judge's oath as reported in Demosthenes 24’ (presumably Dem. 24.151 or 189), referring to the judges’ duty to cast their vote only about the matter at hand. Treating these as the only pieces of evidence, she concludes that the expectation of relevance ‘does not have a significant presence in the sources’ (p. 90). This, however, is not the case: E.M. Harris, The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens (2013), pp. 353–6, lists more than 100 references and allusions to the judicial oath in the extant speeches, 15 of which specifically mention the clause about voting in accordance with the charge in the indictment. Moreover, litigants in regular courts do assert that they could mention additional elements but will not, because it is not admissible to go beyond the point at issue (e.g. Dem. 54.44, Lys. 9.1), showing, first, that a serious concern for relevance was indeed manifest in dikastic courts as well and, second, that introducing irrelevant material was, at the very least, a waste of time and ultimately went against the litigant's best interests in any Athenian court. P.'s statement that ‘Every existing mention of the [relevance] rule in the dikastic courts presents it as a matter of strict procedure in the homicide courts’ (pp. 105–6) is simply incorrect, although it is certainly true that the Areopagus is often presented as a model of correct behaviour with regard to this rule. Additionally, P. claims that ‘it is difficult to identify what was irrelevant’ in an Athenian court, and that ‘it is more probable that the judges would have identified irrelevant material as they encountered it’ (p. 91), but she is perhaps too ready to dismiss as ‘unorthodox’ (p. 112 n. 14) what she presents as Thür's idea that relevance was determined by the contents of engklêma or written plaint (G. Thür, Dike 11 [2008], 51–73). This view has been formulated and explained more prominently by Harris, ‘The Plaint in Athenian Law and Legal Procedure’, in M. Faraguna (ed.), Archives and Archival Documents in Ancient Societies (2013), pp. 143–62, and accepted by, among others, M. Faraguna, ‘Archives, Documents, and Legal Practices in the Greek Polis’, in E.M. Harris and M. Canevaro (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law (2015); and C. Kremmydas, ‘Anakrisis and the Framing of Strategies of Argumentation in Athenian Public Trials’, in C. Carey, I. Giannadaki, B. Griffith-Williams (edd.), Use and Abuse of the Law in the Athenian Courts (2018), pp. 110–31 (none of these present in P.'s bibliography). Finally, it is worth noting that what P. identifies as ‘the rhetorical manipulation of intent’ (p. 119), especially in cases of trauma ek pronoias, is not something idiosyncratically Athenian, but is in fact the natural result of the so-called ‘open texture’ of the law, a feature common to any legal system, ancient and modern, that allows litigants to propose different interpretations of the same statute (cf. N. MacCormick, Rhetoric and the Rule of Law [2005] passim; Harris [2013], pp. 175–245).

Aside from these problems, P.'s book is interesting and thought-provoking, and will certainly be a useful tool for scholars of Athenian society, oratory and law. Nevertheless, readers may want to integrate P.'s rhetorical approach with one that also emphasises how the statutory requirements for the charge at issue shaped the rhetorical arguments used by litigants in forensic oratory.