Neither magistrate nor priest ? Law-makers between civic normativity and ritual practices in archaic and classical Greece

Abstract

From Cretan mnemonics to Athenian exegetes, the Greek cities of the ^6th and^5th centuries frequently entrusted the preservation of their laws to one or more persons charged with verbalizing them on various occasions. The status of these speech experts is difficult to assess : they oscillated between magistrate, " paid worker " or public slave. In a recurrent but rarely noticed way, the task of saying the law of the city is, moreover, backed up by functions of supervision and execution of certain rites. Is it necessary to demonstrate religious authority or competence in order to declare the civic norm ? By considering these two facets of the same mission together, we propose to study a type of civic agent identified here by the mission of " performer " of the norm.