This volume is a collection of twelve essays by the late Raymond Westbrook, each discussing some aspect of Ancient Near Eastern influence on early Greek and Roman law. Eleven of the essays have previously been published elsewhere and all twelve are illustrative of what we may call the Westbrook hypothesis.

Westbrook’s central thesis can be expressed as follows: there existed in the Ancient Near East (ANE) a common legal tradition, beginning as early as the third millennium BC and continuing until the first, which influenced the early laws of Greece and Rome. Westbrook believed that Mesopotamian legal codes were a single genre of jurisprudence, not legislative in nature but constituting collections of earlier royal judgments from which general legal principles were distilled, over an extended period, in order to flesh out the theory surrounding the practice of law. In this way a comprehensive legal system based on precedent was built up and then communicated to future jurists. Westbrook saw evidence for this common tradition in the recurrence of the same or similar rules in disparate legal systems and in discussions of similar legal problems found in the various extant law codes of the ANE.

Based on apparent commonalities in the law codes of Greece and Rome and those of the ANE, Westbrook reasoned that the different systems all developed from a single shared source that could only be the scribal schools of Mesopotamia. Transmission between the thinkers of early Rome and the intellectual tradition of the ANE was mediated by the Phoenicians as “direct bearers of ancient Near Eastern culture” (p. 87). So it was not law that the Greeks and Romans borrowed from Mesopotamia but the legal and intellectual skills needed to create law.

Needless to say, Westbrook’s thesis remains heterodox and controversial and not simply because of what the editors call “the all-too-common failing of classicists, the tendency to imagine the culture of Greece as springing full-blown as if from the head of Zeus, acknowledging no other parentage”, a failing that led to a “violent – almost literally so” reaction to Westbrook’s first unveiling of his work on the Twelve Tables (p.x). Those familiar with the Westbrook hypothesis will have wished that Westbrook had had the opportunity to compile a monograph in which his theories could be laid out at length and in detail. That was not to be, and this collection must suffice to fill the gap.