Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece

Abbreviations
1 What is an oath?
2 Oath and curse
	2.1 Horkos and Erinyes: oath as a curse
	2.2 Explicit self-curse and oath-taking
	2.3 The explicit self-curse in Greek drama
	2.4 The explicit self-curse in law-court speeches
3 Oaths in traditional myth
4 Friendship and enmity, trust and suspicion
	4.1 Oaths between warriors in epic and tragedy
	4.2 Oaths in business
5 The language of oaths
	5.1 How oaths are expressed
	5.2 The “Sophoclean” oath
5.3 “Of cabbages and kings”: the Eideshort phenomenon
6 Ways to give oaths extra sanctity
	6.1 Sanctifying witnesses and significant locations
	6.2 Oath-sacrifices
	6.3 Gestures, libations, and unusual sanctifying features
	6.4 Multiple sanctifying features
7 Oaths, gender and status
	7.1 Women and oaths
	7.2 Servile swearing
	7.3 The oaths of the gods
8 Oaths and characterization: two Homeric case studies
	8.1 Achilles
	8.2 Odysseus
9 Oratory and rhetoric (A.H. Sommerstein)
10 “Artful dodging”, or the sidestepping of oaths (A.J. Bayliss except as stated)
	10.1 The difficulty of proving an oath false: the case of Euripides’ Cyclops
	10.2 The concept of sidestepping
	10.3 “The art of Autolycus”: extremely careful wording to conceal the truth
	10.4 The “Thracian pretence”
	10.5 Capturing the commander
	10.6 Other careful or dubious interpretation of wording: agreements that end sieges
	10.7 Substitution
	10.8 False foundations
	10.9 Dodging the “blank-cheque” oath
	10.10 What does this evidence tell us about Greek attitudes to sidestepped oaths?
	10.11 Conclusions
11 The binding power of oaths
	11.1 Were oaths always totally binding?
	11.2 The oaths of lovers
	11.3 The tongue and the mind: responses to Euripides, Hippolytus 612
12 Responses to perjury
	12.1 Divine responses
	12.2 Human responses
13 The informal oath
	13.1 How informal oaths are used
Appendix: swearing by Hera
	13.2 How binding were informal oaths? The case of Aristophanes’ Clouds
13a Swearing oaths in the authorial person
	13a.1 The orators
	13a.2 Pindar and other poets
	13a.3 Xenophon
	13a.4 Three more authorial oaths in prose texts
	13a.5 Conclusions
14 The Hippocratic Oath
15 The decline of the oath?
Bibliography
Index locorum
Subject index