1-1B. Prephilosophic Ubiquity of Ancestral Nomos; Religious Character of Nomos

Law or nomos retained this character for the city even to the end of the Classical period, and was understood to have an all-pervading power to determine daily life and thought; and even during the convulsions of the Peloponnesian War, with its murderous civil strife between factions, it was understood--at least for the purposes of lip service--that nomos as an original constitutive act was something that lay quite outside the self- interest of parties, let alone that of the individual--a permanent “convention” constitutive of the citizen as such, and therefore outside the vagaries of day-to-day political let alone economic interests.