The influences of ancient Greece and Rome on modern Western civilization

¶ … Ancient Greece & Rome

The influence that ancient societies in Greece and Rome have had on modern Western society has been significant. This paper covers some of those ancient cultural influences on the laws and criminal procedures used today in Western civilization.

Greek Law -- Roman Law -- The History & Background

Before a society develops laws and approaches to criminal procedures it must first evolve from a group of cultures or societies into a state. The scholarly article, "Rise of the Modern (Idea of the) State," by Danie Strauss, explains that in ancient Greek political thinking, the "state" was to be the "all-inclusive whole of society" (Strauss, 2006, p. 184). Aristotle and Plato both believed that the way to achieve a perfect life in society was to be part of the state. In the state "justice is appreciated as a moral virtue," Strauss explains.

And since the state was supposed to "embrace society," Strauss continues, there could be no "meaningful distinction between state and society" (184). According to Aristotle, there was always a distinction between "natural law and positive law"; and Aristotle believed "justice, in a broad (moral) sense… embraces all virtues," including friendliness, courage, moderateness, and those virtues are part of the state.

Meantime as Roman law evolved it made what Strauss calls "significant contributions to the modern idea of the state" albeit early Roman law was "exclusive in the sense that it only made legal provision for the members of the Roman tribes" (184). It was only after the Roman Empire began to expand that the "exclusive ius civile was transformed into the ius gentium" that Roman law emerged strong enough to influence the modern state later in history.

Ius Civile -- according to A. Arthur Schiller's book Roman Law: Mechanisms of Development -- is that which can be found in ancient Roman "…statutes, plebiscites, resolutions of the Senate, decrees of the emperors," and those in authority who created laws (Schiller, 1978). Moreover, Ius Civile is law that people establish to guide the particular society; in this case the Roman people were under laws that the emperors decreed to be laws. Meanwhile ius gentium was a series of laws that originally related to foreign citizens, "primarily provincial subjects," according to Common Laws (http://common.laws.com).

In other words, ius gentium was a law that pertained to matters of war and peace, to diplomatic exchanges, to extradition and "…issues regarding natural boundaries" (Common Laws). In Strauss' scholarship, the author explains that ius gentium is "often mistakenly viewed as the starting point for international law," it was primarily intended to provide guidelines for the non-Roman citizens within the Roman Empire (p. 184).

Hence, Strauss believes that ius gentium should be viewed as the "starting point of modern common law (civil private law). A writer for the Center for Thomistic Studies claims that ius gentium eventually pertained to marriage and property. It had the "force of law beyond national and political boundaries," the Center's writer (dgboland) explains. When something is forbidden under ius gentium, it is forbidden because it is "contrary to reason" and because it "is wrong, not wrong simply because it is forbidden" -- hence it is seen by the Center for Thomistic Studies as "natural law rather than positive law."

On the subject of international law, J. Boone Bartholomees (with the Strategic Studies Institute) says that even though historians are correct to refer to the "laws" of ancient Greece and Rome as having great influence on modern western institutions, the same can't be said with reference to Greek and Roman understanding of international law. The Greeks and Romans did indeed have a "sophisticated system of laws" that provided a kind of "foundation for order and stability," Bartholomees explains on page 45 (Bartholomees, 2006, p. 45). The Greeks and Romans also understood how to develop a commercial system that ranged from Asia Minor to Britain, and "ringed the Mediterranean," Bartholomees continues.

However, neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans "…understood the concept of international law as we apply the term today," Bartholomees asserts. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and even Chinese did not -- as a matter of custom -- treat "outsiders as their equals in an international system of equals," the author insists on page 45. Indeed, the Greeks regarded non-Greeks as "uncivilized" and the Roman Empire did not "negotiate acquisitions, it simply took them," which has been well documented through the last several centuries.

Why did the Greeks and Romans in ancient times turn away from any application of international law -- which modern Western societies consider vital to peace and cooperation between states? They believed in "natural law" which they saw as a "higher law" and related to "all human endeavors" -- even actions of rulers and kings. This concept will be discussed further in this paper, under the application of ius gentium ("natural law").

Greek Law and Modern Jurisprudence

George Calhoun writes that the Greeks had a "nervous curiosity" that "impelled them to explore every bypath in the broad realm of philosophy and science" and hence Calhoun believes that the ancient Greeks were so also compelled to study law and to apply it to daily life in "greater measure than at any other time or in any other society of which we know" (Calhoun, 1923, p. 296). Because the Greeks enjoyed "conspicuous success in every other department of human activity" it is clear they did the same with law and its application to the state and to the citizens in the state. Laws should be "…just and beneficial and consistent with one another" and they should "…reduce disputes among your citizens to a minimum, while at the same time providing for the prompt adjustment of those that do arise" (Calhoun quoting Isocrates, 299).

Ancient Greek law was the product of a people who were "…endowed with peculiar intellectual ability and critical power," Calhoun explains on page 305. The ancient Greeks were "influenced by a strong feeling of racial unity, intent upon the solution of new problems and the adjustment of new relationships they had themselves created" (Calhoun, 305).

What impresses a student of Greek law, Calhoun writes (306), is its "…intrinsic excellence and the essentially modern character revealed by its congruity with present tendencies in Anglo-American theory and practice." If an ancient Athenian was somehow resurrected and walked around alive in 1923 (the year Calhoun published this article) he would be "scandalized to see" a state legislator, working right up to the final hours of the legislative session, "sitting up all night to pass a hotch-potch of hundreds of statutes," most of which will be tossed into "executive waste baskets," Calhoun asserts (309). And those laws that don't go into the wastebasket will simply "increase the burdens of our courts" (Calhoun, 309).

What components of Greek law are seen to be influential vis-a-vis contemporary Western societies? On page 309 Calhoun alludes to the civil procedures that -- not precisely the same as are used today by many courts in Western society -- are indeed still in use. In Greece, a plaintiff would serve -- in front of witnesses -- a summons detailing the contention of the server. A copy of it was also "formally presented to an examining magistrate" and the magistrate could accept or he could reject the summons. Also, the magistrate could suggest how the summons could be made more compelling and workable in the instance that the case had been presented.

However if the examining magistrate accepted the summons the person accused (the defendant) was asked by the magistrate to plead (guilty or not guilty). The accused could also eschew pleading guilty or not guilty and could simply present an answer that might "traverse the allegations of the complaint" or he could offer another matter in defense of his position (Calhoun, 309). Like judges today, the ancient Greek magistrate could dismiss complaints or special pleadings, but his ability to reject or accept the plaintiff's complaint was "limited to such issues of fact as could be decided without taking testimony," Calhoun continues (309). The magistrate's ability to dismiss also pertained to questions of law that did not involve "interpretation," Calhoun explained (309).

However, if the litigant believed that the authority granted to the magistrate was being misused, and that he was not given a fair hearing, he could be given "…recourse to a special form of pleading which would bring the question before a popular court" (Calhoun, 309). This would be like a modern situation where the plaintiff did not agree with a lower court's decision, he could then appeal and have the case moved to a higher court for determination. In ancient Greece, the litigant could go to a higher examining magistrate, and if that magistrate accepted the pleadings, Calhoun goes on, the magistrate would receive "court fees" and would thereafter hold a preliminary hearing (309). Again, this is very similar to the procedure followed in modern Western judicial affairs.

If needed, there could be several preliminary hearings, and once the case was ready to go to trial, the magistrate could set the date, send it to a "popular court" and the trial would last only a "single day" -- quite different, on the other hand, from many of the trials in the United States and the UK, for example. At any stage in the proceedings, "judgment could be entered by default, but it could also be set aside "…except in the case of perjury established by judgment of court" (Calhoun, 309-10). The incidents mentioned above pertain to civil law only, and reflect the intelligence of the ancient Greeks when it was obvious that trivial cases could be handled in "cheap and speedy" kind of justice (Calhoun, 310).

In the case of criminal law in ancient Athens, it also has similarities with modern Western law strategies and procedures. It was what Calhoun calls "logical, coherent," and it entailed a complete "body of statutory law, enforced by the processes very similar" to those described in the paragraphs above (310). Seven centuries before Christ, in ancient Greece, the Council of the Areopagus created a "customary criminal jurisdiction of nearly as advanced a type as that exercised much later in Rome," Calhoun explains (310). However this form of justice did not provide complete punishment for wrongdoing "against" individuals, the author continues.

And so in the beginning of the sixth century Solon introduced a "…simple, flexible and effective criminal process" that was capable of being relevant to -- and used in -- crimes "…of every description" (Calhoun, 310). This advancement in the criminal justice system in ancient Greece (in the 5th century B.C.) was "…far more orderly and scientific than that of Rome," Calhoun asserts (310). This law was called the Attic law, and Calhoun calls it a law that was not "entrusted to a trained professional class," but on the contrary, it was given for its administration to "a very large number of citizens of mature years, who, by reason of their constant preoccupation with legislative and judicial problems, cannot properly be stigmatized as laymen" (311).