Edwin Carawan (Missouri State University)
“If anyone commit hybris against a child or a man or woman, whether free or slave, or if he do anything paranomon to any of these, there shall be prosecution for hybris ...” (Aeschin. 1.15 ~ Dem. 21.47)
A decade ago Hans van Wees proposed a provocative theory about the law of hybris attributed to Solon: this was the legislation that introduced the graphē procedure itself, enabling third parties to prosecute in behalf of victims and take their case to the court of the people (as described in Ath. Pol. 9.1). Thus the graphē hybreōs was the first framing of “crimes against persons” as wrongs to the community. Van Wees’s theory has met with limited response: noted by Leão and Rhodes (2015) 48, and Carawan (2020) 92; dismissed by Canevaro and Harris (2019) 92. This paper takes up a question that is crucial to the theory but not yet carefully considered: what is meant by the second description of the crime as paranomon? Van Wees assumes that it might describe “anything illegal” (130), but that explanation proves problematic. For a better understanding of this parallel description, we begin with a review of what παρὰ νόμον (and compounds formed from it) should mean in Solon’s time, and then examine later arguments where hybris and paranomon are closely linked. The findings suggest how such a remedy would fit the Solonian program and thus lend support to the theory.
Canevaro and Harris argue that the text inserted in Dem. 21.47 is a forgery based on Aeschines’ paraphrase and there the paranomon clause was parenthetical. But another statute cited in Dem. 43.75 describes the relevant offense also as hybris or paranomon and that phrasing is likely to be reliable: this is the law for the archon to protect orphans, heiresses and widows; the same manuscript includes an excerpt from Drakon’s law (57). As Scafuro suggests (2006 and 2011: 174), the law against abuse of orphans et al. probably has an archaic “kernel” from which Solon may have modeled his description of the crime. In the archon’s jurisdiction, hybris or paranomon would include offenses within the extended family, where a kinsman or in-law assumed legitimate authority over the victim but then abused that power.
On the public stage similar abuse of authority is the theme of arguments linking hybris and paranomon in [Andokides] Against Alkibiades and Isokrates Against Lochites (from the 390s). Neither speech involves an actual graphē hybreōs but both make the claim that the offender could have been prosecuted under that statute, and thus the speakers declaim upon the nature of that offense. In these arguments paranomon is not simply violating statutory prohibitions but misusing law-given authority in acts of self-dealing that should rouse the wrath of the community. Demosthenes makes much the same charge of hybris against Androtion in a graphē paranomōn (or. 22). Such abuses of power were a notorious provocation to stasis (Fisher 2000), and Solon’s new jurisdiction for the heliaia would provide a bulwark against that threat.