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