Division of Law: Greek Society's Slaves vs. Free People - Essay Sample

Introduction

Greek society was mainly broken up between the slaves and the free people. Slaves were mainly used by free people as servants and also laborers with no legal rights. In most of the cases, the slaves happened to be prisoners of war or bought from the foreigners who were the slave traders. Therefore in trying to delineate the boundaries of the law in any society strictly, there is a need for a useful division between the rules which makes up the bit of the social order in the society and also the procedures which mainly serves in redressing the rules' violation which generally helps in dispute resolution. In the traditional terms in Greek society, these are mainly substantive and also procedural law. In most of the discussions, it is primarily centered on the question concerning rules and recently most influential and also persuasive answers. The difference between the primary rules which mainly imposes on the regulations and the secondary rules which control the creation and even operation of the primary rules. The rules of the recognition in the Greek society makes the most important secondary rules which reveal the essence of the primary rules that is how to know which of the society's rules are laws. It may be arbitrary to restrict the term law to the societies having written statutes. Many of the scholars, as well as the anthropologists, have been probably unhappy with the implication that any primitive societies may not be having any law and hence have decided to use the term to bring up some of the aspects of the preliterate societies.

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Instead of identifying the rules which mainly correspond to the normal laws, most of the anthropologists have resorted to the rule enforcement idea by society. Hence the law field needed to be regarded as a coterminous with that ordered legal sanctions. According to Pantelidou (1996), some of the societies lack written or even oral codes, therefore, setting aside the legal rules from all of the others.

Therefore the Greek law, which is best known as the law of Athens, involves the legal systems of the ancient Greeks. Greek law is mainly important to the Canadian common law's development. Draco created the firsts set of the official laws for the ancient Greeks in 621BC. Therefore the set of laws came to be referred to as the Draconian constitution. Solon later came to repeal all of the laws in about the 6th century exempting the homicide law(Pantelidou, 1996). The main essence of these laws was mainly to allow people to elect their leaders in addition to paving the way for the creation of the other laws with the democracy's hands. The creation of the Greek laws was essential since they help in bringing a solution to unnecessary bloodshed. Therefore without the laws, people would always taking chances of effecting revenge.

In relation to various current research works, some of the scholars have focused on the law in conjunction with social control as well as the dispute settlement. The analysis of the Homeric trials emphasizes the critical significance of settling an issue by agreeing upon a suitable procedure for determining it. What emerges is that the law and control of the legal procedure in both of the classical and archaic Greece which is not only closely linked to the political power but only take on their full meaning in the whole political context. The political power is revealed to be competitive and agonistic, like so much of public life in classical Greece. In ancient Greek, the aspect of religion was mainly a personal role and also present in all areas (Humphreys, 2013). It revolved around the myths which explained the origin of human beings and gave the gods the human face. The temple dominated city festivals and urban landscapes. Besides, the artistic competitions and the national sporting were frequent, and hence religion was never far from the ancient Greek minds.

Most of the people in Greek society had a varying degree of religious belief. In contrast, some of them have been skeptics, but the Greek society could just function as it did since some of the fundamentals were generally accepted throughout the society: the gods existed and hence could influence the affairs of humans and therefore welcomed and responded to the acts of worship as well as piety. The sanctuary was where, on extraordinary events, religion took on a progressively formal tone. Divine beings were revered at consecrated locales and sanctuaries in all significant Greek people group during services completed by ministers and their specialists. From the start, holy regions were just an essential special stepped area in an assigned zone; however, after some time, large sanctuaries were worked out of appreciation for specific divine beings. These sanctuaries typically housed a religious sculpture of the god being regarded; two renowned models are the gigantic sculpture of Athena in the Parthenon of Athens and the sculpture of Zeus at Olympia.

In the field of anthropology, several theories have been put in place by several authors, which can apply to the Greek law society. These include evolutionism, the historical particularism, diffusionism cultural ecology, and the neo evolutionism. In this case, the theory of cultural ecology and neo evolutionism is depicted to be predominant in society. In theory, the main theorist was Leslie White, whereby he tried to identify the factors like the technology as well as energy use, which makes up the main causes of the cultural evolution and change. In his relation, cultural change is mainly dependent on the per capita use of energy. In Greek society, it can be seen that people could use their energy plus plants and animal energy. In their modern societies, people have been using diverse energy sources, and this led to a huge transformation in terms of culture.

Concerning the Greek law, it was developed under the stewardship of Professor Konstantinos Kerameus. The law presents the Greek legal system, the substance of each part of its civil public as well as the penal law and the procedure. This is essential since Greece society is in the common market and also the council of Europe and since the common and the continental law systems owe their development to the Roman-Byzantine tradition. Therefore, such laws were mainly influenced by the tradition and, in turn, the modern Greek law and legal system were influenced by German, French and Swiss paradigms so that we can see the full circle (Papachrestou, 2004). The Greek law mainly covers all the critical issues in the legal system, including the structure and the administrative law, the distribution of the state powers, the major state organs as well as its administration and also the judicial reviews which acts as a means of giving regulations to the public administration. Also, the Greek law incorporates the protection of human rights, the general principles of the civil law, the law of obligations, the family law, among other essential laws to govern the society.

In the historical development of the Greek law, the legal system of the Greeks from the mysts classical mythology, it is not only the legal philosophy but also the comparative law which base their origins in the works of the Theophrastus, Plato, and Aristotle legal philosophers who are mainly concerned with the ideal of justice, the sources as well as the function of law (Triantaphyllopoulos, 1996). The Greek law always has been a basis of the continental civil law as well as for the canon, thus influencing continental Europe and America. This is because of the early Greek control of the area from where the law began, where the power of the Greek philosophy, the influence which the law and philosophy had on the Roman law. Concerning the constitutional and the administrative law, it is proclaimed that the generally accepted rules of the international law and the international treaties from their ratification with the statute and also from their coming into force under the various conditions, there needs to be an integral part of the Greek domestic law and shall prevail over any contrary statutory provision. "Thus, general principles of international law and ratified international treaties rank above legislation and below the Constitution "(Harris, 2006). The judicial system is independent and has got powers of reviewing the constitutionality of legislation. The Greek law system has the civil, criminal, administrative, and the special supreme court, which is meant to hear the unconstitutional legislation as well as determining the existence and the application of the general international law principles. The judicial courts may deny the parliamentary acts the application while unconstitutional administrative acts and instruments may be declared null by the administrative court.

Besides, in Greek law, the general principles of civil law are very essential. This law entails the rules on the law of persons, legal rights, jurisdical acts in general with the inclusion of the formation of the contracts, mistake, the pre-contractual liability, the canons of the interpretation of contracts and the unconscionability, representation and procuration, statute of limitations, as well as twenty-nine articles on private international law (Humphreys, 2013). With the law of obligations in the Greek law society, it includes the general and the special part. In the general section, one can find the provisions on the requirements and particularly on contracts, by virtue of its space.

Confinements, this section is very outlined. It presents the structure and fundamental hypothesis behind the Greek framework, however, perforce, does not address the genuinely calculated contrasts between the Greek framework and the Anglo-American methodology. The section is hypothetical, formalistic, and structure arranged. The initial segment, fourteen pages long, covers all the rudiments of considerable criminal law, from a continental, conceptualist point of view, including its general standards, nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege, the structure of the criminal offense (actus reus, lawlessness (banishment and no legitimization or reason, mental culpability). The other chapters mainly deal with particular types of contracts. For instance, donations, sales, leases, mandates, labor contracts, contracts for services, loans, partnerships, deposits, warranties, etc.

In relation to the ethical dimensions of the Greek societies, Greek ethics have always had a kind of renaissance in the previous decades. The Greek authors have been concerned about providing an account of the good life for man what is usually called eudemonia, happiness - as opposed to focusing narrowly on the right or good action. This wide scope led the society to treat seriously and also without philistine prejudices, the question of morality and motives, or even the reasons for the desire to be good. The Greek philosophers have always tended to be concerned with the virtues of the characters, the traits that explain or underlie a disposition to act in the right way more than with the right action principle (Papachrestou, 2004). This is an advantage to society for two crucial reasons ( Hatzis, 2001). First, it could indicate that the evaluations of the people as distinct from the actions must be based on their character's considerations, even the activities can be difficult to be understood or even evaluated without any regard to the agent's motives, and the motives have got more concerning the character as opposed to the theoretical justifications. Secondly, it seems that in the case is to have some of the beneficial effects, then preaching the rules of morality would somehow be an unpromising way of trying to achieve in relation to the Greek society. "As Aristotle said perhaps most clearly, what people are apt to do...