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Ontology · version 1.0

Legal Bodies in Classical Athens

The people and institutions that presided over or judged legal proceedings in Classical Athens.

Ancient Athenian kleroterion, a stone allotment device used to select citizens for public duties Athens · civic selection
Kleroterion in the Ancient Agora Museum, Athens. Photograph by Sharon Mollerus, CC BY 2.0.

Explore the ontology's sixteen legal bodies and the institutional roles recorded for each one.

Anatomy of legal authority

Map of legal Athens
Historical locationContextual map, not RDF coordinates
Membership distribution

Fixed membership of legal bodies

A scientific dot plot of the values recorded in the ontology. The main panel preserves the complete 0–500 scale; the detail panel resolves institutions between 1 and 51 members.

Bodies with variable or unspecified membership, Assembly, Council, Council of the Areopagus, Law courts and Magistrate, are not assigned invented values.

Archaeological evidence
Bronze pinakia identification tablets used in Athenian civic selection
Bronze pinakia, Ancient Agora Museum · George E. Koronaios · CC BY-SA 4.0
Archaeological remains of the Square Peristyle law court in the Ancient Agora
Square Peristyle law court, Ancient Agora · George E. Koronaios · CC BY-SA 4.0
The Areopagus hill viewed from the Acropolis of Athens
Areopagus from the Acropolis · George E. Koronaios · CC BY 4.0
Dataset Info
16Concepts
35Terms
166Individuals
1,581Axioms

Overview

A legal body here is an individual or group who either presides over or judges a legal proceeding. The ontology defines the bodies of the Athenian courts under that definition, drawing on the oratorical corpus and the Pseudo-Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia.

It is the smallest dataset in the collection and the direct counterpart to the Ancient Greek Oratory Ontology: that one models the proceedings, this one models who heard them. In practice they are best queried together.

Scope
Period coveredc. 419 – 323 BCE
RegionClassical Athens
Modelled asOntology
LanguagesEnglish, Ancient Greek
Built withTedi ontoTerminology Editor. See TEDI documentation
SourcesCorpus of Attic oratory; the Pseudo-Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia; David D. Phillips, The Law of Ancient Athens
Access the data

Query it through the SPARQL endpoint using this named graph:

https://triplestore.talos-ai4ssh.uoc.gr:8890/datasets/Legal-Bodies-Classical-Athens-v1

Ways in

The .otb file opens in TEDI; the .rdf file opens in Protégé, and can be visualised with WebVOWL.

Example queries

What are the terms in Ancient Greek and their definitions?

Every concept is denoted by one or more terms, and each term carries a language tag. Filtering on grc returns the Ancient Greek terms with their definitions.

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
        PREFIX otv: <http://www.ontologia.fr/OTB/otv#>
        SELECT ?termName ?def
        WHERE {
          ?subject rdf:type otv:Concept.
          ?subject otv:denotedByTerm ?term.
          ?term    otv:termName       ?termName.
          ?term    otv:termDefinition ?def.
          ?term    otv:language       ?lg.
          FILTER (?lg = "grc")
        }
        ORDER BY ?termName

Swap the language code to change which terms come back: en for English, el for Modern Greek. Removing the filter returns every term in every language, so the same concept appears once per language.

Size & structure
Concepts16
Terms35
Axioms1,581
Classes30
Individuals166
Object properties13
Subclass axioms80
Citation & licence

Cite as

Milio, R., Papadopoulou, M., & Roche, C. (2024).
Ontology of Legal Bodies in Classical Athens v.1.0 (Version V1.0) [Dataset].
Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13386671

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13386671

Licence

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Funding

European Commission, TALOS AI4SSH, grant agreement 101087269.

Credits

Rachel MilioData curator
ORCID 0009-0000-0420-4711
Maria PapadopoulouSupervisor
ORCID 0000-0001-6451-8712
Christophe RocheSupervisor
ORCID 0000-0002-0756-0559

Department of Philology, University of Crete

Image sources & licences

Images are resized for display; some views use CSS cropping. Original files and pre-existing edits are documented at the source links.