Greek justice and Vicky Pryce

Every ancient Greek juror would have warmed to their descendant Vicky Pryce, when she admitted in court that she wanted revenge on her faithless husband. Revenge, in other words, did not just happen in Greek myth. It was a splendid reason for going to law.

In Plato’s Republic, ‘justice’ was defined as ‘rendering to every man what he was owed’, taken to mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. This was a principle of conduct said to have been ‘laid down’ and ‘prescribed’ by one orator, and so common that Xenophon could say that true manliness was to ‘excel friends in benefaction and enemies in harm’. It was endlessly touted as justification for a case in Greek courts.

As a result, upper-class society could wage feuds of provocation and retaliation in the courts for years. In about 340 BC, the wealthy politician Apollodoros opened a case against his rival Stephanos by stating that his family was demanding vengeance for the political harm Stephanos had done them over a long period of time. He clearly expected the jury of 501 Athenians-on-the-Sounion-omnibus to applaud him for it; where such feuding went down the generations, revenge would be a motive taken for granted by the courts.

To a Greek, revenge was simply a way of claiming the right to assert your interests against someone who had successfully asserted his in defiance of yours. Restoring that balance of rights would count as ‘justice’; but to do that to someone who had not treated you in that way would restore no balance, and count as ‘injustice’.

But while Greeks found revenge highly enjoyable, they also recognised that ignoring a wrong had its virtues. Thucydides commented that revenge could result in men repealing the laws of humanity, instead of remembering that they too might, at some time, need their protection.