Prologue

Between the sixth and fifth centuries bc, during what is understood to be a transitional period, the polis of Athens was rendered first under the rule of an aristocracy and later under a democracy in which the dēmos held a famously decisive role. Meanwhile, the wider use of written ‘laws’ perhaps challenged the understanding of the transmission and use of traditions, as well as the relation between ‘law’ (in a wider sense) and the ancestral ‘customs’ and worship rites. Nómos appears to be used, during the fifth century bc, to describe ‘laws’ that are inscribed (though not exclusively) and that still receive their authority from the gods, but now also, crucially, through binding conventions and contingent rules. This shift is also inferred from the way in which the term used for ‘(divinely) established ordinances’ or ‘laws’, thesmos, is thought to have been overtaken by nómos as the more frequently used term to denote ‘legislation’ (and its more collective endorsement). Furthermore, within the auspices of this development we can posit the – in many respects crucial – opposition between phusis and nómos that, perhaps, ‘begins’ with the pre-Socratic philosophers and reaches its highest point in the Sophists, the Socratics and the Cynics, as well as, arguably, beyond them. Yet nómos, as it will be seen, never becomes, exclusively, a designation of ‘law’, let alone of ‘written law’, in the tragedians. The persistent multi-layeredness of the word nómos (as well as of the eventual ‘juridical’ senses of the word) will be traced through an examination of its particular uses in the tragedian poets who traverse this period of so-called transition. The tragedians, it ought to be remembered, do not resolve such (falsely conceived as strictly bipolar) debates, but instead strike a questioning tragic attitude, inter alia, towards and within phusis and nómos.