Why Eunomia

Every publication makes a claim with its name before it makes one with its writing. Ours is borrowed from a figure who was already old when the Greeks began to argue about politics in writing: Eunomia, the goddess of good order.

The word is simple enough to take apart. Eu means good or well; nomos means law, custom, the settled way things are done. Eunomia is the condition of a community in which that settled way is a good one — where the rules are sound and, just as important, where people actually live by them.

A goddess with sisters

Eunomia does not appear alone. In Hesiod's Theogony, Zeus marries Themis — divine right, the order of things — and she bears the Horae: Eunomia, Dike and Eirene, good order, justice and peace.¹ The genealogy is itself an argument. Order, justice and peace are born together; none of them is secure without the others.

Pindar, writing in praise of Corinth, puts the three sisters at the city's foundations and calls them its safe support.² The image is architectural. Good order is not decoration added to a finished city. It is what the city stands on.

Good order is not decoration added to a finished city. It is what the city stands on.

Solon's warning

The most famous use of the word is political rather than mythological. Around the beginning of the sixth century BCE, the Athenian statesman Solon wrote a poem that later readers would call his Eunomia.³ Its argument is uncomfortable. Athens, he says, will not be destroyed by the gods, who protect it. It is endangered by its own citizens — by greed, by leaders who cannot restrain themselves, by the slow damage done when public trust is spent for private gain.

Against this he sets Eunomia. She "makes all things orderly and fitting," blunts excess and straightens crooked judgments. The poem does not treat good order as something that arrives once and stays. It is a practice that has to be renewed, and a responsibility that falls on the citizens themselves.

Why it matters here

That is the sense in which we use the name. This publication is about law, politics and society, and all three are, in the end, questions about order: who makes the rules, whether they are good ones, and whether the people bound by them can see how they work.

Those questions are too important to be left either to specialists writing for one another or to commentary written too quickly to be right. Eunomia exists for the space in between — for writing that is researched enough to be trusted and clear enough to be read.

We will not always agree with one another, and we do not expect readers to agree with us. What we promise is the discipline the name implies: to ask precisely, to show the evidence, and to correct ourselves in public when we are wrong.

Sources & notes

Hesiod, Theogony, lines 901–903. ↩
Pindar, Olympian Odes 13.6–8. ↩
Solon, fragment 4 (West), often titled Eunomia by modern editors. ↩