Death on a road (Dem. 23.53)

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Date

2016-01-01

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Repository Usage Stats

319
views
465
downloads

Abstract

Scholarly consensus holds that a law quoted in Demosthenes (23.53) permitted one to kill a highway robber who had lain in ambush and attacked one on a road. But the relevant phrase says nothing explicit about ambush. Modern interpretation derives from Harpocration and other ancient authorities. It is argued here that they were mistaken and that the phrase referred to those who inadvertently killed a fellow traveler while overtaking on a road.' The new interpretation may offer another way to think about the encounter between Oedipus and Laius.

Department

Description

Provenance

Subjects

Citation

Scholars@Duke

Sosin

Joshua D. Sosin

Associate Professor of Classical Studies

Pronouns: he/him.

One of the things that I like best about Classics is the wide range of intellectual opportunities it offers. As an undergraduate I was interested in early Christianity and Latin love elegy, which are about as far from my current work as you can get! But our discipline is built for roaming and many of its earliest practitioners would not fit neatly into the boxes that we use today.

The 'traditional' part of my work lies at what I like to call the intersection of law, economics, and religion. Under that broad rubric I have written on currency standards and exchange, ancient charitable foundations, funding of eponymous festivals, grain supply, land leasing, taxation and tax shelter, diplomacy, and other subjects. I have long tended to pursue these subjects with a special focus on their representation in documentary sources (inscriptions, papyri, and coins). But lately, I've grown increasingly interested in Athenian law and so not only in the orators but also in the lexicographic, encyclopedic, and scholiastic traditions that preserve such a wealth of information on the subject (see Harpokration On Line). I have been especially drawn to what the law has to say about personal status (citizens, enslaved people, freedpersons, metics, non-citizens).

I am also part of the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3), which is embedded in the Libraries. We developed and maintain papyri.info. We are working on a variety of projects to do with crowd-curation of papyrological and epigraphic texts (text, translation, metadata, commentary, bibliography, and images), geo-spatial data, prosopographical information, medieval manuscript witnesses and apparatus criticus data, image recognition and text-image alignment, and more. 

When I am not on the clock I am often on my bike (er, bikes), on pavement, on dirt, around town, in the middle of nowhere, for a few minutes, for a few days (punk still in the earbuds [first 6 sec.]; for ramblings on how punk, cycling, and classics are somehow the same experience for me listen to Mirror of Antiquity ep.5). Maybe it's that same freedom to roam that draws me.


Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.