Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also (...) whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interpretation of an important historical document:IGXII, 5, 608, a victory list from Iulis on ancient Keos. Since its discovery in 1883 it has always been described as a chronologically ordered official victory list of Kean athletes who have won at each of the major games. The surviving portion contains one complete list prefixed by the words ‘these won at Nemea’, and preceded by fourteen other names, which must, following the usual order, belong to Isthmian victors. Since (...) the two lists together name two athletes for whom Bakchylides wrote victory songs, Argeios and Lachon, it has long been used as a means of dating the first pair of poems, as well as the victories mentioned on the inscription not celebrated by Bakchylides. More recently, it has been used to fix the death of that poet to just after 452, in spite of a clear reference to him in Eusebios'Chronicleunder the year 431. It is the contention of this paper that this unique victory list has been misclassified and misinterpreted. It is not a chronologically ordered official victory list; it is rather an honorific victory list in which the entries are arranged by decreasing order of importance. This interpretation, and its various repercussions, destroys many of the currently accepted views about the dating of Bakchylides. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to undermine the pillars on which Egyptian chronology has been built, in particular the view “that the Egyptians had monitored the heliacal risings of Sirius [Sothis] for millennia, and in such a way that we can date the various pharaohs and dynasties of even three or four thousand years ago by means of the ‘Sothic dates’ that they sometimes seem to provide” . For the most part, the book is a reevaluation of key calendar‐associated sources (...) , but in the final chapters the author proposes a radical revision of the chronology of ancient Egypt. On the basis of a new analysis of the lunar dates in the El‐Lahun papyri, he shifts the Twelfth Dynasty, and by implication the whole Middle Kingdom , by some fifteen centuries to the period immediately preceding the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 b.c.In doing so, Lynn Rose follows in the footsteps of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose unproven theory of a near‐collision between Earth and Venus in the seventh century b.c. he fully accepts. In his opinion, all documents referring to a year of 365 or 365¼ days or lunar months of 29½ days must therefore be younger than this supposed catastrophe. The evidence presented to support these and other assumptions is unconvincing. Moreover, his overall approach is methodologically rather questionable. Convinced as he is of the superiority of astronomical evidence that must be considered decisive, Rose has little or no regard for historical, iconographic, and archaeological sources. And when he does refer to such material, it is only to dismiss it outright as suspect , anachronistic , or even censored . He also fails to take into account the evolution of script over a period of fifteen centuries, when he proposes to shift the El‐Lahun papyri, written in the so‐called hieratic script, from the nineteenth to the fourth century b.c.Despite all these flaws, some parts of Sun, Moon, and Sothis deserve to be taken into consideration. This is especially true of the reassessment of the 25‐year lunar cycle in the opening chapters, by far the best part of the book. Also interesting and useful are Rose's system to retrocalculate the dates of heliacal risings of Sirius and his discussion of the true length of the Sothic cycle. His findings in this respect should be compared with those of other scholars who have recently worked on the subject . Unfortunately, Rose himself ignores much of the recent work, not only on the heliacal risings of Sirius but also on the Egyptian calendar in general.Finally, I have the impression that the author has a somewhat anachronistic idea of how ancient calendars and cycles functioned in practice. He believes in their rigid application and thinks that the ancients took a similar approach to these devices. In this respect, he should have remembered the words of one of the authors mentioned in his bibliography, E. J. Bickerman, who wrote, precisely with regard to the Egyptian calendar and Sothic dating: “A calendar is a tool which cannot be justified by either logic or astronomy”. (shrink)

[Heft 1] Dikaiarchos.--[Heft 2] Aristoxenos.--[Heft 3] Klearchos.--[Heft 4] Demetrios von Phaleron.--[Heft 5] Straton von Lampsakos.--[Heft 6] Lykon und Ariston von Keos.--[Heft 7] Herakleides Pontikos.--[Heft 8] Eudemos von Rhodos.--[Heft 9] Phainias von Eresos. Chamaileon. Praxiphanes.--[Heft 10] Hieronymos von Rhodos.

In den platonischen Werken scheint die historische Figur des Sokrates besonders im Frühwerk omnipräsent. Die Dialogfigur Sokrates führt bei Platon die Auseinandersetzung mit den Sophisten. Einzelne Figuren der Sophistik, darunter Protagoras von Abdera, Gorgias von Leontinoi und Prodikos von Keos spielen dabei eine besonders prominente Rolle. Hinzu kommen als Vertreter der Sophistik u. a. Kallikles, Thrasymachos, Hippias, Kritias, Antiphon. Vor allem die frühe platonische Ethik steht ganz im Zeichen der Auseinandersetzung mit dem sophistischen Angriff auf die konventionelle Moralvorstellung sowie mit (...) dem Anspruch der Sophisten, Tugenden lehren zu können. (shrink)

Three famous sophists are referred to together in the Apology of Sokrates as still practising their enviably lucrative itinerant profession in 399 B.C. (not, by implication, in Athens): Gorgias of Leontinoi, Prodikos of Keos and Hippias of Elis. The last of these was the least well known to the Athenian demos, having practised mainly in Dorian cities. There is no extant reference to him in Old Comedy, but we can assume that he was sufficiently famous - especially for his fees (...) (possibly the highest charged by any sophist) - to justify his inclusion as the third of this 'triad'; cf. the triad Protagoras - Hippias - Prodikos in the Protagoras, considered further below. Gorgias was by now a grand old man of about ninety (with more than a decade of active life still ahead of him), the last survivor of the first generation of fee-taking educators, associated first and foremost in the popular mind with the suspect arts of political and forensic persuasion. Prodikos and Hippias were probably in their sixties. (shrink)