Ti esti nomos? In the Platonic dialogue Minos, Socrates belittles the suggestion that nomos simply means the things held to be the case (ta nomizomena), as if speech, logos, would mean the things said (ta legomena) and sight, opsis, the things seen (ta horōmena; Pl. [Min.] 313b8–c3). Nomos, surely, is not just what we make of it. Yet Socrates struggles with the fact that nomos, like logos, always seems to appear in a particular form: I speak English, not speech. Nomoi, just like tongues, constantly change across time and space. Socrates needs to know what is fixed and the same in them, since that is why they all can be referred to as nomoi.
Niklas Rempe’s Nomoi: Soziale Normen und Gesetze der griechischen Welt bis 450 v. Chr promises a solution to this predicament. His book offers a semantic study of the word nomos from Homer to 450 BCE and charts the vagaries of the term and its derivatives by a close reading of seventy-one passages. The result is a comprehensive overview of the extant material, in which both diachronous and synchronous developments are singled out for special attention. In Rempe’s hands, nomos becomes something like a Lévi-Straussian floating signifier: unstable, without a permanent meaning, and subject to discursive treatments that push it in various directions, according to circumstance (p. 311). Nomos was, in fact, largely what the Greeks made of it.
Four chapters cover nomos in Homer and especially Hesiod (ten instances, 31pp.); nomos between 680 and 590 BCE (ten instances, 53pp.); nomos between 590 and 475 BCE (twenty-nine instances, 121pp.); nomos between 475 and 450 BCE (nineteen instances, 73pp.). The first three chapters cover all loci for nomos; chapter four, on account of a sharp increase in available source material, a selection.
There is some unevenness to this book. The first chapter of necessity draws almost wholly on Hesiod, situates nomos in a web of terms it does not fully discuss (including themis and dikē), and defines nomoi as ‘specific and formal rules of conduct’ whose collective authority is divinely buttressed. Correctly performing such rules is called eunomia; incorrectly doing so dysnomia. This is the original meaning (ursprünglich, p. 24) of nomos; in an attempt to provide a stable starting-point, this use is excluded by Rempe from the push-and-pull of societal argumentation over the meaning of nomos. (Yet it is not clear to this reader why, say, Hesiod might not have already been vying with unknown others over the meaning of nomos.) From this point on, nomos will gradually expand its semantic capacity but without ever fully losing older meanings to which later generations, armed with their own concerns, will constantly return.
The second chapter treats many more authorial voices (Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, the Homeric Hymns, and Solon) and nomos immediately expands its semantic range. Rempe clocks not only continuities but also a provincialization of what were, before, allegedly panhellenic rules of conduct (alternatively, this reader might suggest that Hesiod’s Ascra is already enmeshed in such local-cum-panhellenic dynamics). Local flashpoints of dysnomia—still the action of ignoring specific rules of conduct—point to a crisis of traditional nomoi in archaic Greece and are addressed via the new instrument of written legislation (which, according to Rempe, is to be distinguished from the concept of nomos).[1]
The third chapter (590 to 475 BCE) is still more sprawling, covers a dozen authors, and tracks how nomos and its derivatives are increasingly utilized in local contexts of the polis—derivatives like eunomia (opposed to dysnomia) and isonomia (opposed to tyranny) are now enlisted for intra-elite struggles over influence and power. Nomos itself, meanwhile, is sometimes emptied of the specific rules it harbored in earlier times and, readied for politics, can function as an abstraction. (Perhaps the nearest contemporary analogy is that of the word constitution, and of the word (un)constitutional). The relative character of nomoi—the fact that they change across time and space—also made the concept vulnerable to criticism, especially at the hands of the Presocratics. This, in turn, sparked attempts to salvage the concept (in the process some authors come to divinize Nomos).
The final chapter (475 to 450 BCE) traces a process that began shortly before 475 BCE: the approximation of nomoi and written laws of the polis. The two can be equated in the second quarter of the 5th century, the result of a process in which the differences between nomos and other terms are gradually erased. Yet alongside nomoi as ‘written laws’, nomoi could still refer to ‘orally transmitted rules of conduct’ and the frequent clashes of the two meanings were mined theatrically (by Aeschylus) and politically (by Ephialtes).
The choice of subject-matter is excellent. Book-length treatments on a single, ubiquitous concept such as nomos are a rare commodity in ancient Greek history. Rempe is to be commended for a project that is so straightforwardly diachronic and focused on tracing one idea across genres and epochs; on the whole, Rempe carefully navigates centuries of historical context and handles conscientiously the exigencies of various types of source-material, ranging from lyric poetry to Presocratic fragments to epigraphic evidence. Anyone interested in the concept of nomos will want to consult this book.
The execution of the project, however, raises some questions. It is interesting, in the history of concepts, to learn what certain concepts mean at which point in time and in which contexts. Rempe does a fine job in this respect. But the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte in which Rempe allusively inserts his project (cf. p. 15n19, 23n60, 24n61–62) has always been interested in concepts not in and of themselves, but as they shed light on social history. The avowed goal of the most ambitious project in the history of concepts, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe-lexicon (1972-1997) spearheaded by Reinhart Koselleck, was to understand the advent of modernity by mapping how new concepts appeared, and old ones changed their meaning, to make sense of a new world.[2] Such an explicit coupling of semantics and realia, of dogmata and pragmata (as Koselleck called it), also structured the last monograph-length treatment of nomos, Martin Ostwald’s Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy (1969). His (contentious) claim was that the advent of democracy in Athens coincided with an abrupt change in terminology: no longer thesmos (prescriptions imposed on a people from above) but nomos (prescriptions voluntarily submitted to by the collective). Anticipating this method by some five decades, and no less contentious, was Louis Gernet’s argument, developed in his 1917 Recherches, that ‘the birth of the individual from the collective’ could be tracked in the shifting semantics of Greek legal and moral terminology.
Rempe’s Nomoi neither advances such a thesis nor dialectically stakes out a position within this field of scholarship. As a result, it lacks focus. To be sure, Rempe is acutely aware of the possibilities of linking semantic to historical change with the purpose of shedding light on the latter (p. 23, 28). But because he does not home in on any specific epoch, he cannot but cursorily connect nomos to generic historical changes, treating centuries of Greek history in broad strokes (e.g., pp. 35-47, 87-106, 201-228) and rarely enlisting the dogmata of nomos to explain the pragmata of Greek history, instead of the other way around. In part, this is a function of the book’s structure: dating and contextualization of sources (2.1; 3.1; 4.1; 5.1) is discussed separately from the source-material itself (2.2; 3.2; 4.2; 5.2), which is in turn hived off from the analysis of the source-material within a broader historical perspective (2.3; 3.3; 4.3–4; 5.3). The result is perhaps an orderly structure, but also one which prohibits the immediate operationalization of concept in context, and vice versa.
Other aspects remain undertheorized, too. Rempe’s excellent methodological emphasis on the use of nomos—“the meaning of a word is in its use,” he quotes Wittgenstein—could have been productively linked to the germane concerns of the Cambridge School of intellectual history (absent in this book) and so have been used to argue in more general terms against the static approaches of his predecessors in the (Greek legal) history of concepts.[3] As much as I might agree, the call for more Greek conceptual history (p. 310) rings somewhat hollow in the absence of sustained engagement with the scholarly field.
Within chapters Rempe could also have better utilized the tools made available by the discipline of Begriffsgeschichte. In his book, virtually no attention is given to words other than nomos. Yet such an approach risks ignoring a central way in which the concept is used. One recurrent feature of nomos and its derivatives is its tendency to form conceptual pairs with oppositional ideas (e.g., eunomia and hybris; isonomia and tyranny; or Ostwald’s nomos and thesmos). In such pairs, one term is positive and discursively ascribed to the self or one’s ingroup; the other term is pejorative and ascribed to the other. Reinhart Koselleck called such pairs asymmetrical counterconcepts, and used them to uncover various forms of social, political or cultural domination. Here, too, a focus on how both terms of the pair are weaponized in texts might have yielded a richer sense of the agendas shoring up debates over the concept of nomos.
The book ends by encouraging other scholars to study the concept of nomos beyond 450 BCE. Throughout, one gets the sense of reading a kind of prehistory of nomos—before Sophocles’ Antigone, before the nomos/physis-debate, and before the fourth-century philosophical concern with the proper constitution of a polis. But if so, why even cover the material of a period already covered by Ostwald (who included more sources, but in lesser detail)? According to Rempe, the endpoint of 450 BCE was chosen, first, because the rapid proliferation of sources would preclude a detailed study of nomos, and second, because the assimilation of nomos to ‘written law’ marks a watershed in the development of the term; the starting point (Homer) allows Rempe to cover nomos from when it is first attested in Greek culture. Such choices are defensible. Yet upon finishing the book, I came out with the sense that nomos was just getting started. Without a strong thesis to orient readers, it is not easy to see why we should stop here.
Whatever questions one might ask about this book’s own ‘rules of conduct’, it is to be praised particularly for seeing uses of nomos as active attempts to shape its semantics, rather than as reflections of a static meaning nomos harbors independently of what authors want to do with it. (Ostwald, by contrast, was concerned with finding a ‘basic concept’ or a ‘root idea’ of nomos). This is an important conclusion. Among the many struggles within a given society, one will be about words. The winner is whoever turns a crucial concept to their advantage. Rempe’s book is effective in driving home the lesson—though the upshot is that an indeterminate multiplicity of uses of nomos replaces a ‘basic meaning’.
The Minos, after a long and laborious back-and-forth between Socrates and his interlocutor, ends abruptly: we have learned a lot, but not what the meaning of nomos is. Niklas Rempe takes us on a similar trajectory, detailing the fate of nomos across time and space but ultimately refusing to translate the term. He calls nomos “difficult to grasp in its entirety.” There is a sense of Platonic aporia here, too. But whereas Socrates castigates himself and his audience for this shameful inability to define nomos, Rempe views the polysemy of nomos as itself meaningful and indeed a sign of the changing times in ancient Greece. The price of change, in society and scholarship alike, is discussion over what is right—Rempe’s Nomoi will no doubt itself be subject to that same fate.
Notes
[1] For criticism of this argument, see the review by Alberto Maffi: https://www.sehepunkte.de/2025/09/39702.html
[2] The lexicon entries in which nomos is discussed (e.g., s.v. Gesetz) are not cited by Rempe.
[3] Wittgenstein’s dictum played a central role in Skinner’s seminal “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3-53, esp. 37.