Press release: And now for a sing-a-long ... how Greeks shared legal information through song

15 September 2024

How do you help people understand the law? For Ancient Greeks, it was making a song and dance about it.  

Many archaic lawgivers captured imaginations by composing laws to be sung, making them easy to remember.  

One of the first lectures in the 2024-25 academic year at Gresham College will explain more about the institution of legal rules in Greek antiquity.  

Gresham College Professor of Rhetoric, Melissa Lane will give the lecture entitled Singing the Laws: Ancient Greek Lawgivers in History and Legend.  

Professor Lane said: "I’ve always been fascinated by the resonance of these figures of the great lawgivers from Greek history and legend. Some were possibly legendary, like Lycurgus of Sparta. Others were unquestionably historical, such as Solon of Athens.  

“One of the things that really interests me is that these figures are not the inventors of law as such.  

“The Greeks knew that there were laws that had evolved before these great lawgivers came along. But they celebrated these figures as having pulled together a set of laws for a given society, usually at a kind of moment of crisis and social factionalisation, creating new cultural identities that those societies could identify with going forward.” 

Professor Lane says the influence of these cultures can be seen across political history including events such as the French Revolution. 

“What it is to be a Spartan, what it is to be an Athenian, is really defined by adherence to these ancestral laws, and then these figures have been incredibly important in the later kind of political history of many societies and cultures,” she says.  

“If you go to many courthouses around the world, you will see sculptures or pictures of Solon and Lycurgus, as well as other Greek lawgivers like Zaleucus and Charondas. 

“I really want to introduce people to the wide range of history and legend that surrounds these figures and set up some questions about why did the Greeks think they were so important? What were these figures doing in the way that ancient Greeks saw themselves, and why have they continued to capture our imagination in so many centuries later.” 

The lecture will be given at Gresham College’s base in Barnard’s Inn Hall, Holborn, on Thursday, 26 September. 

Starting at 6pm, entry is free, and it is also broadcast online. It will last an hour.  

Gresham College is London’s oldest higher education institution. Founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, it has been delivering free public lectures for over 427 years from a lineage of leading professors and experts in their field who have included Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Iannis Xenakis and Sir Roger Penrose.  

In-person places can be booked online via Gresham College’s website.

Notes to Editors 

Pictures available on request 

For more information about this story or to arrange an interview with a Gresham Professor please contact: Phil Creighton press@gresham.ac.uk  

About Gresham College 
Gresham College has been providing free, educational lectures - at the university level - since 1597 when Sir Thomas Gresham founded the college to bring Renaissance Learning to Londoners. Our history includes some of the luminaries of the scientific revolution including Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren and connects us to the founding of the Royal Society. 

Today we carry on Sir Thomas's vision. The College aims to stimulate intellectual curiosity and to champion academic rigour, professional expertise and freedom of expression. www.gresham.ac.uk 

Gresham College is a registered charity number 1039962 and relies on donations to help us encourage people's love of learning for many years to come. For more details or to make a gift, visit our website. 

About the Lawgivers in Political Imaginations lecture series at Gresham College 
These lectures explore cross-cultural political imaginations of the figure of the lawgiver – a figure whose rhetorical invocation is central to politics from the ancient Near East and Mediterranean to the French Revolution and the philosophy of Nietzsche.  

Through the lens of the lawgiver, the lectures will delve into the relationship between ethical formation and law (written or unwritten); the shaping of cultural identity; and different ways in which divine and human authority have been understood in the giving of laws.