Divided Power in Ancient Greece

Alberto Esu is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Zurich. He studied in Italy and the UK, completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He was Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Mannheim from 2019 to 2022 and Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham in 2022-23. He works on Greek institutional, legal, and socio-political history in the Classical and Hellenistic periods.

• PrefaceAbbreviations1: IntroductionPart I: Divided Power and Delegation2: Divided Power in Athenian Decree-Making3: Divided Power in Mytilene and Megalopolis: Delegation Practice beyond AthensPart II: Divided Power and Control of Legality4: Divided Power and Eunomia: Deliberative Procedures in Ancient Sparta5: Divided Power in the Athenian Assembly: Adeia and Fifth-Century Deliberative Ideology6: Divided Power and Judicial Review: Graph=e Paranom=on in the Decision-Making of the Greek Poleis7: EpilogueBibliographyIndex

Esu focuses on two main issues of divided power: on the one hand, the delegation of power between various decision-making bodies; and, on the other, the institutions of legal control that checked the outcomes of decision-making bodies. Given the nature of the evidence, Esu relies to a significant extent on classical Athens; however, the value of the book is that it uses the evidence not in order to write an Athenocentric account, but to extend the approach to other classical andHellenistic Greek communities which offer relevant evidence: I found particularly illuminating the detailed discussions of Mytilene, Megalopolis, and Sparta.