The Origin of Judicial Litigation among the Greeks

Abstract

Students of the history of Greek procedure generally hold that public administration of justice originated in a prehistoric habit of settling disputes between individuals by voluntary waiving self-help and resorting to arbitration. This ancient custom is supposed to have been gradually developed into a system under which the parties were denied the right to seek realization of their claims by private force and compelled to submit their cases to authorities designated and empowered to try the claims and hand down binding judgments. Litigants are believed to have been forced by an ever increasing pressure of public opinion, as well as by the growing power of the rulers, to refrain from armed feud and blood-vengeance, and to seek the decision of the princes who by virtue of their social and personal preponderance were predestined to act as arbitrators. After the consolidation of the state, their jurisdiction, according to the prevailing theory, became a legal institution and passed, after the abolishment of the early monarchy, to the aristocratic city magistrates, and later, in the democracies, to the popular courts. As an intermediate stage, the existence of a system of ‘obligatory arbitration’, indirectly enforced by the public disapproval of those not complying with it, has been suggested for the type of society known from Hesiod's Works and Days.