The Greek guide to swearing an oath

A lawyer who wished to serve on a jury but was no Christian was given permission to swear his oath in the name of a local river. He saw it as “his god,” as people did in the past, when the association between nature and divinity was widely taken for granted.

Consider, for example, the ancient Greek understanding of the natural world. The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC), often drawing on Hittite and Babylonian myths, provided the West with its first account of how the world was made. First there was khaos, he said (that meant, “emptiness, void,” cf. “chasm”). Then there appeared Earth, Underworld and Eros (without which nothing could be generated), Night and Day. Earth bore Heaven, Mountains, their Nymphs, and Sea; and then bedded with Heaven, bearing Kronos, first of a range of often monstrous god(desse)s. Hesiod named some 300 of them, with Zeus eventually fighting his way to emerge as top god. Unlike in Genesis, therefore, a single god did not produce nature; nature produced a multitude of gods. Hesiod tells us that the goddess Tethys produced twenty-five rivers. Each had its patron god, and woe betide anyone annoying him.

Night itself also bore twenty-nine abstractions, some rather disagreeable, including Death, Lies, Old Age, Resentment, Bloodshed and Starvation, ending with Oath, “most harmful to men when anyone intentionally swears false.” Lawyer, beware! Having sworn an oath to be guided solely by fairness and the evidence, he has invoked a power greater than himself to ensure that he stays true to his word. In the ancient world, that meant, if you violated your word, you would be subject to a curse implicit in the act of swearing, especially if at the same time you had been in contact with some sacred object — in the lawyer’s case, his finger in a glass of water taken from his river. What shape that curse took would, of course, be up to the god.

Since pagan gods are unpredictable and take no prisoners, better to err on the safe side, just in case, and stay clear of the river for a while.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2024 World edition.