Risk and Responsibility

The Digest of Roman Law compiled during the reign of Justinian is a fascinating resource for reasons that go well beyond the law itself. This paper focuses on how one professional group – physicians – used and abused the letter of the law. Building on the work of Below and, more recently, Israelowich, this paper focuses on the ethical lines drawn by Imperial law and the ways that Romans tried to work around those lines for power and profit (Below 1953; Israelowich 2015).

Discussions of Greek land leases often maintain a distinction between public and private properties, rarely bringing the two into dialogue with one another. Yet, the leasing of orphan estates and corporately-owned property had much more in common with that of public land than of individually-owned private property: while the latter is typified by social disparity between lessee and lessor, the former are intra-elite phenomena.

My paper explores the ability of Hellenistic communities to assess and take risks in times of crisis. The underlying argument is that, although they may have lacked modern mathematical formalism, decision-making bodies were perfectly capable of probabilistic thought. I will look at literary evidence to draw attention to how decision-makers calculated chances of success at critical moments, particularly in a context of conflict. Risky situations produced significant psychological pressures.

In the Homeric world, murderers go on the run. Such is the case for many fugitives that appear in the Iliad and Odyssey, e.g. Tlepolemus (Il. 2.661-70), Patroclus (Il. 23.83-90), and Theoclymenus (Od. 15.222-55). The recurring murder-and-flight motif, however, does more than reference a common and recognized practice of the late Bronze and Archaic age (Gagarin 1981); it also provides context for the unfolding drama of the Iliad (Schlunk 1976 and Heiden 1998) and Odyssey.