In modern courts, evidence about the defendant's character is often considered admissible. For instance, under the Criminal Justice Act of the United Kingdom enacted in 2003, judges have ‘the power to let juries hear about a defendant's previous convictions and other misconduct where relevant to the case’. In this study, A. draws attention to the use of character evidence in ancient Athenian courts: his aim is to prove that ‘extensive reference to character evidence was received by the court as relevant to the legal case and served its quest for truth by assisting it to uncover the exact facts of a legal case’ (p. 4). According to A., this use of character evidence played a role in achieving the rule of law in Classical Athens. These aims are good, but A. gets off on the wrong foot by calling character evidence ‘non-legal’ or ‘extra-legal’ evidence, which makes little sense. If this evidence was considered relevant to the legal charge, then it is legally relevant and therefore hardly ‘non-legal’ evidence. Next, he creates more confusion by failing to indicate how an Athenian court determined what was relevant to the charge and what was not and never explains how the plaint (engklema) ensured that the court would vote only about whether the defendant had violated the substantive rule in a written statute. A. also claims that the Athenians attempted to achieve the rule of law, but had a conception of this idea that differed from modern conceptions, yet he never defines what he means by ‘the rule of law’ and mistranslates the Greek word dikastes as ‘juror’.
In the first chapter A. attempts to trace ‘The Archaic Origins of Character Evidence’ and observes that several means of persuasion employed in Attic forensic oratory can be found in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. This is hardly an original point, but A. goes further and claims that ‘rhetoric in Homer already had rules of substance and procedure’ comparable to those of Classical Athens (p. 30) such as ‘keeping to the point’ (p. 28), but the similarities A. finds are superficial at best, and the significant differences (written plaint, secret ballot, formal procedures for legislation, selection of judges, public archives) are passed over in silence. His discussion of the story of Deioces in Herodotus fails to place it in the context of Greek stereotypes of barbarian tyranny and misses the ideological distortions (p. 41). Like M. Gagarin, A. asserts that ‘ancestral legal norms’ were ‘overwhelmingly procedural’ (pp. 42–3), but if he had read the laws in R. Koerner's Inschriftliche Gesetzestexte der frühen griechischen Polis (1993), he would have seen that this view is untenable.
Chapter 2 reviews some basic aspects of the Athenian legal system but contains several questionable assertions about the ‘amateur’ nature of the courts. A. (pp. 65–7) misrepresents the conclusions of C. Carey's essay ‘Offence and Procedure in Athenian Law’ in E.M. Harris and L. Rubinstein (edd.), The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece (2004), who shows that Dem. 22.25–7 is not a reliable description of the legal system. A. claims that the courts have ‘unlimited discretion in reaching a verdict’, which is not true because the judges could only accept or reject the plaint; they could not do anything they wished. A. is wrong to believe that the Areopagus had a stricter standard of relevance (pp. 68–9). Much of the evidence A. views as ‘extra-legal’ evidence is actually quite the opposite. This is especially true in the procedures for the dokimasia of officials (one misses a reference to the valuable study of C. Feyel, Δοκιμασία: la place et le rôle de l'examen préliminaire dans les institutions des cités grecques [2009]) and that of rhetores (Aeschin. 1.28–32), for which the laws made character legally relevant. On the other hand, A. claims that in the diadikasiai about inheritance, character evidence predominates (p. 79), but this is not true: litigants in the speeches of Isaeus call many witnesses to prove their claims. Like several other scholars, A. rightly rejects A. Lanni's view that the courts were incapable of applying rules in a consistent fashion (pp. 88–9).
Chapter 3 examines ‘Greek Ideas of Character’ starting with Hesiod and summarises the views of the Sophists (pp. 106–10), Plato (pp. 110–15) and Aristotle (pp. 115–18), none of whom, however, appears to have had any influence on arguments in court. Athenian litigants generally view characters as fixed and unchanging and assume that people act in the same way in private and public (pp. 118–23), but pace A. Aeschines 1.37 is not relevant to a belief in change of character. Punishment was considered an effective deterrent which shaped behaviour (pp. 128–9). A. misrepresents the penalty for frivolous prosecution, which was the loss of the right to bring any public charge, not just one kind of case (p. 129).
Chapter 4 studies ‘Methods of Providing Evidence from Character in Athenian Courts’, including evidence from past actions (pp. 141–6), reputation and associates (pp. 146–9), delivery and presentation (pp. 149–53) and choice of words and style (pp. 153–8) although the last two topics do not seem directly relevant to character.
Chapter 5 turns to ‘Greek Perceptions of “Personality” Applied in the Athenian Courts’ and contains some good observations. A. notes that the courts ‘were not asked to give their verdicts on litigants’ characters but litigants’ characters illuminated the facts of the legal case as these were specified in the indictment’ (pp. 175–6). He correctly rejects the agonistic approach of D. Cohen by observing that litigants demonstrate that their motivations conform to the cooperative values of the community (p. 181) and rightly sees that the ‘substantive orientation of Athenian laws … assisted the deeper internalisation of ethical norms’ (p. 185). A. follows my view that the performance of liturgies did not lead the courts to forget their oath to follow the laws (pp. 188–92). On the other hand, he seriously misrepresents my view about the role of liturgies in legal arguments by ignoring my analysis in The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens (2013), pp. 127–36 and 387–401, where I show how public service is often relevant to the legal charge and give a list of all passages where such service is mentioned, something one cannot find in this book.
Instead of listing all the works cited in one bibliography, A. gives a separate bibliography for each chapter, which leads to much repetition. He often cites an entire book when only a few pages are relevant to his point (e.g. the reference to A.C. Scafuro 1997 on p. 164 n. 88) or cites the wrong item (on p. 194 n. 29 A. cites E.M. Harris 2007 for a point made in Harris 2013).
Despite its many errors, this book makes the valuable points that evidence about character was often important to proving the legal charges and that its use in the courts in no way undermined Athenian attempts to implement the rule of law.
