“Now let Earth be my witness and the broad heaven above, and the down flowing water of the Styx…” (Homer, Mas XV, 36-37): Greek oath-rituals

The aim of this paper is to analyse the ritual of Greek oaths as well as the semantics of the oath-formula itself. Therefore, my emphasis lies on the religious, rather than the legal aspects of Greek oaths. My purpose is to examine the oath as an instrument of ritual communication, rather than trace a history of the oath and its development in ancient Greece, a subject on which there is already a vast literature. The most commonly used Greek word to signify an oath is ὅρϰος, which was already..