The Materials for a Study of Greek Law' W HEN the humanists of the Renaissance, fired with new enthusiasms, addressed themselves to the task of collecting and interpreting the remains of ancient Greek literature, they found that much of the best had survived the appalling destruction and more appalling neglect of the Middle Ages. There were, it is true, irreparable losses, gaps they could never hope to see filled, but most departments of human thought were represented by the work of some great master. By the time the task of recovery and restoration was well under way, it was possible to study and evaluate from worthy specimens the achievements of ancient Hellas in epic and dramatic poetry, in history, in political and forensic eloquence, in philosophy, in mathematics and the natural sciences, and to some extent in the study of politics. 2 Even the devotee of art and architecture found first and last a surprising amount of material in scattered relics which had survived here and there to keep alive the ancient Greek conception of the beautiful. But the student of law and of legal history was not so fortunate; where others found both the means and the incentive to their researches, he was confronted by a void; in all ext~nt writings of the Hellenes there was no authoritative treatise upon law and no systematic collection of Greek laws, nothing in any way comparable to the great Corpus Juris or to any of its parts. 3 With the circumstances that brought about this situation and its inevitable consequences we are not now immediately concerned. It will suffice to say that the determining factor in the complete disappearance of the ancient Greek legal texts was probably the pronounced vocational trend of legal studies throughout the Roman world. The texts of classic Greek authors most likely to be pre
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