Which is a roundabout way of asking – why are you asking this question?

I think the “point in time” falls somewhere in the future, actually. What’s changed is that the state has taken over the role of kinship groups and other private associations. But an individual outside of the state system (without citizenship and not a recognized resident of any state) is still fair game. This argument has been made explicitly with regard to Guantanamo prisoners, and extends to Palestinians and other stateless groups. Hannah Arendt argues that stripping the Jews of citizenship and nationality was a critical first step in the Final Solution. And so on.

There is, obviously, a long term trend in history (one of those forms of “progress” whose existence has been disputed here) away from specific personal bases of solidarity to more universal ones, but it isn’t done yet.

Bush signed up for reserve (NG) part-time status outside the war zone. He then failed to satisfy the part-time obligation he had signed up for, but he was allowed to slide on that. It is perhaps true that if he had signed up for something quite different, and if he had satisfied that obligation, he would have been in a bit more than half as much danger as the typical US soldier in Vietnam (most of whom were not combat soldiers.)

Gagarin’s book on Drakon / Dracon claims dateable archeological evidence for Dracon’s homicide law.

It’s been a while since I’ve studied this, but this isn’t my understanding. The tradition in 4th C. Athens was that Drakon’s homicide law was the one law Solon alter or scrap. This may well be wrong—the 4th C. Athenians didn’t know much reliable about Drakon and Solon—but I can’t recall any reason to think that Solon formally opened up murder prosecutions to non-relatives. (Unless maybe you’re talking about apagoge? But I don’t think there’s any reason to attribute that to Solon, nor to think it was about empowering non-relatives to prosecute homicide.)

I think there’s no possibility of a definitive answer to the question. There’s essentially no evidence at all for the earlier periods (i.e, of actual practice, as opposed to [part of?] the text of the law, which is ambiguous on this point), and not much even in the 4th C. The two major possibilities, as I recall the state of the evidence, are either that a) Drakon’s law didn’t exclude prosecution by non-relatives (though it presumably anticipated prosecution by relatives as the norm, and perhaps meant to affirm some degree of duty to do so); or that b) Drakon’s law excluded prosecution by non-relatives, and that the exclusion persisted into the 4th C. The review linked in #7 is a pretty good account of the controversy. (I guess there’s a third possibility, that the introduction of apagoge at some point changed things. But I don’t think the change was radical, and I think the best understanding of apagoge was not as a prosecution for murder itself, but for going places a murderer isn’t supposed to go; I’m pretty sure there are only two attested cases, neither involving non-relative prosecution.)

But without any attested cases of a non-relative prosecuting a murder, we’re guessing. The closest things we have are Euthyphro and a speech of Demosthenes concerning the murder of a freed slave, both of which suggest that prosecution by a non-relative would be really, really odd, but not necessarily precluded on that basis. But certainly some scholars have concluded otherwise. (Again, the review linked above is useful on this.)

As an aside to an already too-long comment, there’s an argument (probably a minority argument, but, as I recall w/o recalling the details, plausible) that homicide-related miasma was a largely post-Drakonian issue, and never as central to Athenian homicide law as it was to, say, Athenian tragedy.

Before some relatively recent point in time, an individual not part of some kinship group and protected by no power was fair game for anyone. They were actually worse off than slaves, whose masters had a motive to protect them. Likewise anyone who was part of an enemy group—the entire populations of captured cities were sometimes massacred, in some cases routinely massacred, and being sold into slavery was a mercy (one seldom given to adult males). Even poor but honest Greeks of low status seem to have been poorly protected before Solon, though this at least was regarded as wrong.

Tandy’s “Warriors into Traders” describes the transformation of Greece around 800 BC from a relatively egalitarian tribal society into a hierarchal urban society dominated by rich traders. It’s worht a look. In Tandy’s book the Homeric poems are historically multi-leveled: an ancient legendary story from the Mycenaean era (before 1000 BC) is told as if it had taken during the Greek Dark Ages (down to ?800 BC?) in the service of the new aristocracy which arose after the Dark Ages (from 800 BC.) It pretended to be about the earliest period, described a world which actually was Dark Age Greece, but worked as the myth of a newly-arising hierarchal society. I’d love to hear a Hellenist’s critique of this book.

In regard to the laws at issue, the Draconian laws (if such actually existed and were codified in written form in the late 6th c, since there is some question in this regard) and the reforms introduced by Solon (a bit later, perhaps as much or as little as ten year later) were controversial as the law changed and came into question in the next several centuries especially as the Sophists appeared on the scene in the late 5th c. Thag is certainly correct in his take on Plato’s dialogue, although I hesitate to impute intention as much as he or she seems to do. What we might infer about the legal situation pre-Solon or often even after Solon is colored by what we have inherited from the later writers. The tragedies do point up many of the ethical and political dilemmas (to respond to John Emerson) , but it is not just the issue of revenge and the problems for members of one’s family to exact revenge or prod a system or prosecute an individual for an injustice. This is not the case in the Ajax or Philoctetes to name jsts two. Antiphone’s Tetralogies might shed some light on the terms of debate (mid-4th c).

To some extent that I am unable to specify more clearly at the moment I am at a loss to address how exactly this ties in with the question of miasma or pollution. In my earlier comments, I did not make clear that for the Greeks of this period (6th-4th works problematizing this) as far as we seem to know miasma attached to an individual and perhaps to his/her family as well as the progeny and the society (city) at large, since it was believed it might incur the wrath of one or more of the gods and bring down plagues and other devastation on a city (witness Oedipus, perhaps the most famous example of this but there are also Agamemnon and many others). When disasters struck, augurs or oracles or priests were consulted to seek the reason, and often exile of the offending party as well as possible demolition of the party’s property were ordered by whomever was in power—in the 7th to 6th century I have no clear idea who this might have been in Athens. To cut to the chase, or mine anyway, for the Greeks of this period miasma or pollution was largely a moral and religious or political issue; they believed the gods would punish them if they did not carry out justice in divine eyes. In today’s world the toxic waste and pollution are known to be threats to health; we know we will all pay a price for it and the question is who is to pay how much.

Sorry for being prolix, and I do not intend to patronize if you find this comment patronizing. Please let me know if this comment is too long; I do not comment often on sites, but I found this piece irresistible.

As an aside to John Emerson, guest friendship did and does exist in strong forms in Greece—this from an American who has lived and taught in Greece on and off (mostly on) for 30 years. It is there in Homer and here today.

came to the following conclusion, which is pretty useless without the details, but will at least suggest a line of thought:

if you look at the details of Athenian law, it looks like it would have been a pretty tough call.

More than that: if you look at the details, it looks as though Plato wrote this precisely so that it would be a pretty tough call.

More than that: if you look at the details, it looks as though Plato wrote this with such exquisite attention to making it a tough call, that he must have wanted to foreground for us the very fact that it was a tough call. (“for us” at least in the sense of “for his contemporaries, or any audience properly apprised of the details”).

To the extent that this is a correct reading of the facts and the law, I conclude the following:

Plato constructed his hypothetical at least in part for the purpose of showing us that it’s precisely the tough cases that reveal the need for a deeper, non-conventional analysis of the ethical issues. Euthyphro’s religion won’t tell you, and Athenian law won’t tell you, whether Euthyphro really should or should not prosecute his father. Easy cases don’t give rise to philosophy; hard cases do.
(Whether philosophy actually does any better on them is a different question; Socrates and Plato at least thought it could, if done right.)

Temples also served as protectors, and pilgrims were also often protected.

But the bottom line is that strangers were fair game unless shown otherwise. It wasn’t even lawlessness—many societies, including Athens, were unashamedly predatory. Furthermore, with a political shift the defeated party’s protectees were usually plundered. (For example, this happened to the Shah’s clients when he went down.)

Black-Michaud’s “Cohesive Force” is a great comparative study of vendetta, feud, etc. as sources of order in stateless societies.

Glotz’s “Solidarity of the Family in Ancient Greece” (in French) makes the point that the nub of the problem in tragedy is often that vengeance is not possible because the killer (father, son, brother, uncle, cousin) is the victim’s next-of-kin, and thus would normally be the avenger. (With husband and wife, the blood kin of the victim take vengeance on the murderer and his kin). These are also the cases which lead to curses and plagues, when the gods avenge what men do not.

This review might also be of use.

A provocative issue for your students!

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1997/97.04.17.html