Policing Major Crimes in Classical Athens: Eisangelia and other Public Procedures

This essay examines the policing of major crimes in Classical Athens. In 1975 Mogens Herman Hansen published a study of eisangelia, in which he listed one-hundred and thirty cases of eisangelia to the Assembly and four- teen cases of eisangelia to the Council. This essay shows that the procedure called eisangelia used in the cases For Euxenippus and Against Leocrates was a public procedure against those who aimed at tyranny, who betrayed the armed forces, or speakers who did not give their best advice after taking gift and was initiated by bringing a plaint before magistrate. The penalty was death, and there was no penalty for the accuser who did not gain one-fifth of the votes. The information about the procedure in the lexica is contradictory and mostly unreliable. Sections 2- 6 show that most of the trials labelled ‘eisangelia to the Assembly’ were actually trials in the Assembly initiated by a decree, denunciations (menyseis) to the Assembly, trials from the euthynai of officials, or cases in which there is not sufficient evidence to determine the procedure. Section 7 collects the few securely attested examples of ei- sangelia to the court for serious crimes and shows that there are none before 370 BCE. Section 8 reviews all the evidence for eisangelia to the Council against the contemporary sources and shows that only four cases fall into this category. Section 9 shows that there was no shift in sovereignty from the Assembly to the courts around 400 BCE, but that democracy and the rule of law went hand in had in both the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE. The article includes a list of all the cases analyzed by Hansen with a new classification.