Abstract
After having analyzed the uses of thesmos and nomos in archaic poetry, the inscriptions of the 6th- 5th centuries (and even the very beginning of the 4th) in which these terms appear are the subject of the present lesson. It appears that thesmos refers to a set of arrangements made collectively on a given theme and put down in writing. When an epigraphic text refers to itself as thesmos, it evokes the provisions it brings together in the instant of their institution and concretization in writing, as Solon declared of his work, in a testimony of an obviously quite different style. As for the semantic field of nomos, it continues to designate the " ways of being and doing " collectively assumed, i.e. socially normalized and, therefore, normative usages. When an epigraphic text refers to itself as nomos, it bears witness to the written dimension that became attached to the term from the5th century BC onwards. However, the well-documented example of Athenian reflection on written and unwritten laws in the second half of the century (from Sophocles'Antigone to the orator Andocides' plea On the Mysteries ) attests that nomos will long continue to designate both the customary dimension - and oral - of a community's " ways of being and doing ", and the written institution of " laws ", just as thesmos meant in the earliest uses of the term in surviving documentation.
