Legal Authority

Most Athenian decrees were probably recorded on papyrus and deposited in the city archives, and, like the archives, were lost to time (Sickinger 1999). A small number were also inscribed on stone, thereby furnishing some documentary evidence for the nitty-gritty of politics at home and abroad.

Normative Legal Interpretation in Lysias

Severus Alexander, the final emperor of the Severan dynasty (and by many definitions the Principate), is largely unknown to us. The major historians of the Severan period ceased writing early in his reign, his architectural footprint is mostly lost, and the man himself—crowned as a child and killed before thirty—did not leave the grandiose pronouncements of Caracalla or the strange coinage of Elagabalus. This makes him hard to discuss.

Reliance on documents was long held to distinguish “modern” from “ancient” historiography (Momigliano 1950, Finley 1983). For Ginzburg, documents emphasize that history “[is] inevitably uncertain, discontinuous, lacunar, based only on fragments and ruins” (2012, 24). Yet these “fragments and ruins” have their own allure, as authentic, unmediated testimony through which the past can "speak directly" (Le Roy Ladurie 1975).

The manuscript of Andokides’ speech On the Mysteries (Burney 95) includes three decrees from 410–403 BCE: Patrokleides’, Teisamenos’ and Demophantos’ (§§77-9, 83-4, 96-8). For centuries scholars have found these documents reliable and often supposed that they derive from a collection of decrees made by Krateros the Macedonian (FGrH/BNJ 342). But in recent work their authenticity is much disputed: Canevaro and Harris (2012) have concluded that all three decrees are “forgeries,” fabricated (largely) from clues in the speeches.