117.2

Ever since Ruschenbusch published his seminal study of the laws of Solon, the near universal assumption in scholarship has been that the Solonian ‘amnesty law’, quoted by Plutarch, is a genuine document. Yet, scholars have found no convincing route around the problem identified by Plutarch, that the law as cited cannot combine with the silence of Draco about the Areopagus. This paper argues that the text which Plutarch quoted at Sol. 19.3, Solon’s ‘amnesty law’, was authentic, but for none of the reasons conventionally given. A fresh consideration of the law on homicide will lead to the conclusion that its original purpose was to limit the power of the magistrate to inflict punishment, and to protect the rights of the killer by taking account of extenuating circumstances such as involuntary or lawful killing. Draco did not need to refer to the Areopagus because, by unwritten tradition, this was the court before which all homicide cases had previously been tried, without possibility of appeal. The first written law on homicide transferred jurisdiction from the Areopagus to other courts in the event of extenuating circumstances, such as justifiable or invol-untary killing, which explains Draco’s silence.

Xenophon’s narrative of the Thirty occupies a place of special prominence in Xenophon’s Hellenica. It is a prologue to the failure of Spartan hegemony and the disordered state of the post-Peloponnesian War world, but it is also a paradigmatic account of a corrupt regime, serving to concentrate diverse trajectories of Xenophon’s political thought upon a single historical crux. This article consists of two parts. The first reviews the threads of Xenophon’s political thought independently of the Hellenica, focusing on Xenophon’s other works to demonstrate his general views. The second part explains how Xenophon puts all these ideas on stage through a retelling of the story of one of the most corrupt regimes in history.

This article contributes to the conversation about women’s roles as bene-factors in the Roman Empire through detailed analysis of the types of benefactions made by women in Hispania as well as in-depth studies of five exceptional women. While a number of other surveys on women’s public roles have been conducted, many of them re-volve around the same small cluster of exemplary women such as Eumachia in Pompeii. This contribution refocuses the study of Roman women with a wider scope, permitting us to ask questions about the social dynamics and institutions that supported the practice of benefaction.