The Constitutional Law of Dreros - The Life And Death Of Democracy

The Constitutional Law of Dreros
Dreros, a small ancient city in eastern Crete, is perhaps best known among contemporary
classicists as the place where the earliest surviving Greek law on stone was carved. The
constitutional law is of great historical significance, if only because it provides
archaeological evidence of the existence within the classical Greek world of non-
Athenian experiments in government by assembly. Similar (if younger) evidence, for
instance from the ancient Greek cities of Chios and Locris, has been available for some
time, but typically the surviving inscriptions on bronze or stone from other Greek polities
have been neglected, partly because they have gone missing, or because they seem at first
sight to be so random and rare, which adds to their sense of unimportance, at least
compared with the impressive findings from the Athenian polis.
The Dreros inscription, carved on a block of grey schist at the temple of Apollo
Delphinius around 650-600 BCE, and said to be in the Dreros Museum, was reproduced
in L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece [Oxford 1961], plate 59, 1a. The
inscription reads: ‘The city has thus decided; when a man has been a kosmos, the same
man shall not be a kosmos again for ten years. If he does act as a kosmos, whatever
judgements he gives, he shall owe double, and he shall lose his rights to office, as long as
he lives, and whatever he does as kosmos shall be nothing. The swearers shall be the
kosmos and the damioi and the twenty of the city.’
During the course of research for The Life and Death of Democracy, every effort was
made to locate the original Dreros text. The search began in mid-2005. It revealed the
many barriers confronting scholars who try to propose fresh conjectures and search for
fresh evidence concerning the early roots of democracy. It turned out, contrary to L.H.
Jeffery and other scholars, that there is no museum in Dreros. We were initially led to
believe that all findings from the temple of Apollo Delphinius at Dreros were instead held
at the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion. And so, in November 2005, the focus of
our research shifted to that institution. Following letters and many telephone calls,
contact was made with the Head Curator, Vasso Marsellou. She was most supportive and
well understood the significance of our search for the block of grey schist, but after her
painstaking efforts we were forced to draw the conclusion that our prized research object
was neither on display in Herakleion, nor in the museum catalogues, nor in its storage
rooms.

Trapped in a blind alley, we decided to contact a young Australian classics scholar, Dr
David Pritchard, at the University of Queensland. In the spring of 2007 he helpfully
offered to send an email on our behalf to a vast database of classics scholars. Most of
them seemed familiar with the Dreros inscription and offers of help poured in from
different parts of the globe. We received various clues, ranging from advice that the
inscription had been looted or lost during WWII to the suggestion that it was stored in a
repository in Neapolis, a small town 2 kilometres from the archaeological site of Dreros.
The latter suggestion proved decisive. It came from Niki Ikonomaki, a PhD candidate at
the University of Rethymnon in Crete, who at the time was studying archaic Cretan
inscriptions. It transpired that the collection is operated by the Archaeological Museum of
Aghios Nikolaos, and that it had been closed to the public for some time. Following
Ikonomaki’s important leads (she kindly provided details of the exact location and
catalogue code of the inscription), we finally (in July 2007) came in contact with the
department responsible for its preservation, the 24 th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical
Antiquities (EPKA).
Navigating Greek bureaucracy was not easy, but with the kind help of the Ephorate’s
director Stavroula Apostolakou and, in her absence, her colleague Vasso Zografaki, we
succeeded in getting official permission from the Greek Ministry of Culture to have the
inscription photographed. But since this was the first time that such a request had been
made, and since we were based in London, we had to seek further assistance in arranging
the photo shoot. This time the archaeologist Maria Kyriakaki’s suggestions proved
valuable, since she put us in touch with Chronis Papanikolaou, the in–house specialist
photographer at the Institute for Aegean Prehistory Study Center for East Crete. He set
about arranging a visit to the closed collection unaware that he would locate the coveted
object lying awkwardly on the floor, with the inscription facing upwards. Given that the
block was physically impossible to move, and therefore difficult to photograph, Mr
Papanikolaou had to be creative: using a high stepladder and helped by a security guard,
he managed to do his job. The fruit of his labours finally reached our hands in July 2008,
three years after our search for the inscription had first begun. A copy of the original
photograph is reproduced above.
Maria Fotou
John Keane
September 2009