’For if one was to set men of all nations to make a choice of the best laws out of all the laws there are, each one upon consideration would choose those of his own country:  so far do men go in thinking their own laws the best.  Therefore it is not likely that any but a madman would cast ridicule on such things.  And that all men do think thus about their laws may be shown by many proofs, and above all by this story.  For when Darius was king he called to him the Greeks who were at his court and asked them, ’How much money would you take to eat your fathers when they die?’ And they answered that they would not do this at any price.  After this Darius called the men of an Indian tribe called the Kallatiai, who eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, who were told by an interpreter what was said, ’How much money would you take to burn with fire your fathers when they die?’ And they cried with a great voice that he should speak no such blasphemy.  Thus it is that men think, and I hold that Pindar spoke rightly in his poem when he said that law was king over all.’[23]

There you have law, king over men and gods, but a capricious monarch commanding here this, there that.

This capricious arbitrary aspect of law was a thing which much impressed the Greeks.  They contrasted the varying, artificial arrangements made by mankind with the constancy and simplicity of nature.  We speak of nature and convention; they contrasted things that are by nature with things that are by law.  It was a contrast that bore fruit later on.

Now law, whose arbitrariness and variety so much impressed the Greeks was the law not so much of this place or that, as of this or that community and its members.  This is a conception quite different from that of the modern world.  We may paraphrase ‘English law’ by saying the law of England, because it is the law which will be applied (with, it may be, some exceptions or modifications) by the English courts to all persons, be they English or aliens, who come before them.  But Athenian law is not in this sense the law of Athens, nor, to begin with, is Roman law the law of Rome.  What we find is a law of Athenian or Roman citizens.  The stranger to the city is a stranger to its law.  As a matter of principle he is without rights by that law.  His life is not protected by the blood-feud which his family can pursue, or by the compensation with which it may be bought off.  His marriage with a citizen will be no marriage, or at best a sort of half marriage.  He can acquire no land within the city’s territory, and what goods he brings with him are pretty much at the mercy of the first taker.

Such, at any rate, is the theory of the ‘law of citizens’.