deed

Would kings, dictators and statesmen have used Wills in the ancient Greek world to assure successions, pass down estates and document their last wishes? ‘All will be well but in case anything should happen, I make these dispositions’; thus began typical Greek Wills in the age of Alexander the Great, and so opened the Wills of both Aristotle and Theophrastus, legends of the Lyceum in Athens and contemporaries of the campaigning Macedonian king. These were not the hastily penned bequests of men dying unexpectedly, but highlighted a judicious respect for mortality in a legal system that recognized trusts, inheritances and estate planning. A product of the Peripatetic School, Aristotle’s diatheke (Greek: διαθηκη), more literally a ‘covenant’ denoting a formal and