δίκη

δίκη (dike, "DEE-kay") lives near the center of Greek moral and legal argument in this corpus: 1,022 occurrences across 97 works. The weight is unmistakable — Plato's Laws alone holds 196, nearly four times its nearest rival in the record, and around it cluster Herodotus's Histories (50), Plato's Gorgias (48), Thucydides' History (47), Aeschylus's Eumenides (38), and Plotinus's Enneads (31). The word is at home where Greeks stage trials, weigh wrongs, and argue what is owed — the courtroom and the philosopher's dialogue both.

Its meanings fan out along that seam. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) reaches back to the oldest layer, "custom, usage, way," quoting the Odyssean formula αὕτη δίκη ἐστὶ βροτῶν (autē dikē esti brotōn, "this is the way of mortals," Od. 11.218) — δίκη as simply how a thing is normally done. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) spreads the fuller range: "custom, right, judgement, justice, lawsuit, trial, punishment." Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–1972) gives the German counterpart — "Weise, Sitte, Recht" (way, custom, right) — and, citing Benveniste, glosses it as a formule normative, a "normative formula," the binding rule.

On origins the record is convergent. In Beekes's view δίκη goes back to the root *deik- ("to show") — justice as what is pointed out, the way shown. Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–1980) and Frisk are both recorded as treating the word. Chantraine notes the Homeric compound δικασπόλος (dikaspolos, "judge," one who renders sentences, Il. 1.238), and Beekes records the derivative δίκαιος (dikaios, "just, lawful").

The recorded surfaces run from Aeschylus's Agamemnon, where the accusative δίκην (dikēn) recurs, to the New Testament, where the word surfaces in Acts 28.4 and 2 Thessalonians 1.3.

If one word means both the custom already followed and the punishment still to fall, where does the showing become the sentence?