How do you help people understand the law? For Ancient Greeks, it was making a song and dance about it. Many archaic lawgivers captured imaginations by composing laws to be sung, making them easy to remember. One of the first lectures in the 2024-25 academic year at Gresham College will explain more about the institution of legal rules in Greek antiquity Gresham College Professor of Rhetoric, Melissa Lane will give the lecture entitled Singing the Laws: Ancient Greek Lawgivers in History and Legend. Professor Lane says: “I’ve always been fascinated by the resonance of these figures of the great lawgivers from Greek history and legend. Some were possibly legendary, like Lycurgus of Sparta. Others were unquestionably historical, such as Solon of Athens. One of the things that really interests me is that these figures are not the inventors of law as such. The Greeks knew that there were laws that had evolved before these great lawgivers came along. But they celebrated these figures as having pulled together a set of laws for a given society, usually at a kind of moment of crisis and social factionalisation, creating new cultural identities that those societies could identify with going forward.”