The Gortyn code was a legal code

Legal code

A legal code is a body of law written by a governmental body, such as a U.S. state, a Canadian Province or German Bundesland or a municipality...

 that was the codification of the civil law

Civil law (legal system)

Civil law is a legal system inspired by Roman law and whose primary feature is that laws are codified into collections, as compared to common law systems that gives great precedential weight to common law on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different...

 of the ancient Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 city-state

Polis

Polis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...

 of Gortyn

Gortyn

Gortyn, Gortys or Gortyna is a municipality and an archaeological site on the Mediterranean island of Crete, 45 km away from the modern capital Heraklion. The seat of the municipality is the village Agioi Deka...

 in southern Crete

Crete

Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...

.

History

Our sole source of knowledge of the code is the fragmentary boustrophedon

Boustrophedon

Boustrophedon , is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in...

 inscription on the circular walls of what might have been a bouleuterion

Bouleuterion

A bouleuterion was a building which housed the council of citizens in Ancient Greece. There are several extant remains of Bouleuterions around Greece and former Greek territories of ancient times....

 or other public civic building in the agora

Agora

The Agora was an open "place of assembly" in ancient Greek city-states. Early in Greek history , free-born male land-owners who were citizens would gather in the Agora for military duty or to hear statements of the ruling king or council. Later, the Agora also served as a marketplace where...

 of Gortyn. The original building was 100 feet in diameter

Diameter

In geometry, a diameter of a circle is any straight line segment that passes through the center of the circle and whose endpoints are on the circle. The diameters are the longest chords of the circle...

, the 12 columns of text which survive are 30 feet in length and 5 feet in height and contain some 600 lines of text. In addition, some further broken texts survive; the so-called second text. It is the longest extant ancient Greek inscription except for the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda

Diogenes of Oenoanda

Diogenes of Oenoanda was an Epicurean Greek from the 2nd century AD who carved a summary of the philosophy of Epicurus onto a portico wall in the ancient city of Oenoanda in Lycia . The surviving fragments of the wall, which originally extended about 80 meters, form an important source of...

. Evidence suggests it is the work of a single sculptor. The inscription has been dated to the first half of the 5th century BCE.

The first fragment of the code was discovered in the 1850s. Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 archaeologist Federico Halbherr

Federico Halbherr

Federico Halbherr was an Italian archaeologist and epigrapher, known for his excavations of Crete.-Life:...

 found a further four columns of the text while excavating a site near a local mill in 1884. Since this was evidently part of a larger text he, Ernst Fabricius

Ernst Fabricius

Ernst Christian Andreas Martin Fabricius was a German historian, archaeologist and classical scholar...

, and a team obtained permission to excavate the rest of the site, revealing 8 more text columns whose stones had been reused as part of the foundations of a Roman Odeion from the 1st century BCE. The wall bearing the Code has now been partially reconstructed.

The Great Code is written in the Dorian

Doric Greek

Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...

 dialect and is one of a number of legal inscriptions found scattered across Crete, though curiously very few non-legal texts from ancient Crete survive. The Dorian language was the pervasive among Crete cities such as Knossos, Lyttos, Axos and various other areas of central Crete. The Code stands with a tradition of Cretan law which taken as a totality represents the only substantial corpus of Greek law from antiquity found outside Athens. The whole corpus of Cretan law may be divided into three broad categories: the earliest (I. Cret. IV 1-40., ca. 600 BCE to ca. 525 BCE) was inscribed on the steps and walls of the temple of Apollo Pythios, the next a sequence including the Great Code written on the walls in or near the agora between ca. 525 and 400 BCE (I. Cret. IV 41-140), followed by the laws (I. Cret. IV 141-159) which contain Ionian characters and so are dated to the 4th century.

Though all the texts are fragmentary they show evidence of a continuous amendment of the law, it has been possible to trace the development of the law from Archaic proscriptions onwards, notably the diminishing rights of women and the increasing rights of slaves

Slavery in Ancient Greece

Slavery was common practice and an integral component of ancient Greece throughout its rich history, as it was in other societies of the time including ancient Israel and early Christian societies. It is estimated that in Athens, the majority of citizens owned at least one slave...

, and also allows us to infer some aspects of public law

Public law

Public law is a theory of law governing the relationship between individuals and the state. Under this theory, constitutional law, administrative law and criminal law are sub-divisions of public law...

. The high importance of the Great Code in illuminating pre-Hellenistic law and society has led some classicists in poeticising moments to refer to it as the "Queen of inscriptions" - Mommsen, however, used the same phrase for the Monumentum Ancyranum

Monumentum Ancyranum

The name Monumentum Ancyranum refers to the Temple of Augustus and Rome in Ancyra , or to the inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a text recounting the deeds of the first Roman emperor Augustus, the most intact copy of which is preserved on the walls of this temple.The temple was built between 25...

.

Content

The code deals with such matters as disputed ownership of slaves, rape and adultery, the rights of a wife when divorced or a widow, the custody of children born after divorce, inheritance, sale and mortgaging of property, ransom, children of mixed (slave, free and foreign) marriages, and adoption. The code makes legal distinctions between different social classes. Free, serf, slave, and foreigner social statuses are recognized within the document.

Bringing Suit

The Gortyn Code provides a measure of protection for individuals prior to trial. Persons bringing suit are prohibited from seizing and detaining the accused before trial. Violations are punishable by fines, which vary depending on the status of the detained individual.

Rape and Adultery

Rape under the Gortyn code is punished with fines. The fine is largely determined by the difference in social status between the victim and the accused. A free man convicted of raping a serf or a slave would receive the lowest fine; a slave convicted of raping a free man or female would warrant the highest fine.

Adultery is punished similarly to rape under the code, but also takes into consideration the location of the crime. The code dictates higher fines for adultery committed within the household of the female's father, husband, or brother, as opposed to another location. These fines are levied against the male involved in the adultery, not the female. The code does not provide for the punishment of the female.

Divorce and Marriage Rights

The Gortyn law code grants a modicum of property rights to women in the case of divorce. Divorced women are entitled to any property that they brought to the marriage, as well as half of the joint income, if derived from her property. The code also provides for a portion of the household property. The code stipulates that any children conceived before the divorce, but born after the divorce, fall under the custody of the father. If the father does not accept the child, it reverts to the mother.

Property Rights and Inheritance

The Gortyn law code devotes a great deal of attention to the allocation and management of property. Although the husband manages the majority of the family property, the wife's property is still delineated. If the wife dies, the husband becomes the trustee to her property and may take no action on it without the consent of her children. In the case of remarriage, the first wife's property immediately comes into her children's possession. If the wife dies childless, her property reverts to her blood relatives.

If the husband dies with children, the property is held in trust by the wife for the children. If the children are of age upon their father's death, the property is divided between the children, with males receiving all of the land. In the event that the husband dies without any children, the wife is compelled to remarry.

Adopted children receive all the inheritance rights of natural children and are considered legitimate heirs in all cases. Women are not allowed to adopt children.

Sources

• M. Guarducci. Inscriptiones Creticae, 1935-1950.
• R. F. Willetts. The Law Code of Gortyn, 1967.
• Michael Gagarin, David J. Cohen (eds). Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law, 2005.
• J. Whitley. "Cretan Laws and Cretan Literacy". Am. J. Archaeol, 101(4), 1997.
• Ilias Arnaoutoglou. Ancient Greek Laws, 1998.
• M. Harris, Lene Rubinstein (eds). The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece, 2004.
• Michael Gagarin. Writing Greek Law, 2008.

External links

• The Law Code of Gortyn (Crete), c. 450 BCE from Ancient History Sourcebook
• PHI 200508 The Packard Humanities Institute (full Greek text after Willetts 1967).
• Codificiation, tradition and innovation in the law code of Gortyn