Writing Authority – Elite Competition and Written Law in Early Greece Hawke

Writing AuthorityElite Competition and Written Law in Early Greece\nAuthor(s): Jason Hawke\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Northern Illinois University Press\nISBN-13: 9780875804385, 978-0875804385\nSynopsis\nIn Writing Authority, Hawke argues that the rapidly changing political and economic landscape of early Greece prompted elites to begin committing laws to written form. The emergence of the polis and its institutions, the demographic growth of Greece, the development of market forces, and the commoditization of wealth all presented new challenges and difficulties for the Greeks of the eighth and seventh centuries [url] Hawke contends that no one felt the attendant anxieties of these changes more acutely than the leading members of early Greek communitiesthey confronted regulating their intense competition for status and power in an environment where traditional sources of authority, such as Homeric epic, offered no ready solutions f.