Law, order, and democracy. The legal sphere of women in ancient Athens

Abstract or Introduction

Around the 5th century BC, the people of ancient Athens pioneered the concept of demokratia, a system of self-governance that means power to the people in its original sense. Different from previous regimes, the establishment of democracy guaranteed direct political and legal access for free Athenian citizens despite wealth, property, or power relations.

Nevertheless, there is fierce controversy concerning the question of how democratic the Attic legal system was for the female population. Critics claim among others the arbitrariness of judgments and the lack of legal education of most of Athens’s population who were neither in the position to make proper decisions in court nor to revise verdicts, in addition to gender inequality in regard to the access to Athens’s law system. Most strikingly is that previous work in this field focused predominantly on the scope of men within the justice system, while written pieces concerning female voices barely exist. Ultimately, this urges us to ask whether the Athenian justice system provided legal access for women and how they have been legally prosecuted at the time.