Dispute Resolution and State Formation in Early Greece: From Homer to Solon

Between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, small and roughly egalitarian Greek settlements gave way to a dense ecology of poleis (city-states) whose legal and political order was, by pre-modern standards, remarkably impersonal. What drove that transformation? Dispute Resolution and State Formation in Early Greece identifies a neglected mechanism: the payoff of the arbitrator. In a world with almost no institutional apparatus, communities urgently needed effective dispute settlements-and whoever could supply them acquired political power. Public dispute resolution became a resource that elites competed for and, where possible, monopolized. Drawing on Homer, Hesiod, the Theognidea, Herodotus, the earliest inscriptions, and Solon's poetry and reform, and using new institutional economics and rational choice theory, Foivos Karachalios traces a trajectory from the Homeric meson (public gathering) to the Solonian heliaia (Athenian court). Archaic tyranny is reinterpreted as an unstable equilibrium in the competition for the arbitrator's role. The Athenian case shows how that competition was finally curtailed by institutions that made compliance impersonal and enforcement communal-the beginning of an open-access legal order.