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Start the survey of the legal theory of the evolution of legal philosophy with the Greeks. It is because their philosophical penetration of national and social phenomena.
And the way the Greeks’thinker posed and discussed the basic problems of life in philosophical terminology
and explored various possible approaches to their solution
may claim enduring validity. Through the epic works of Homer and the poetry of Hesiod, we know the legal conception of the archaic
age of the Greeks. Law at that time was regarded as issuing
from the god s and known to mankind through the revelation of
the divine will. “Zeus gave law to mankind as his greatest present.” Hesiod pointed out. To him law was an order of
peace founded on fairness, obliging men to refrain from
violence and to submit their disputes to an arbiter.

A famous scene in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone depicts
a situation where a religious duty came into irreconcilable
conflict with the command of a secular ruler.
When the king called her to account, she pleaded
that in burying her brother she had broken Creon’s law,
but not the unwritten law:

“Not of today or yesterday they are,
But live eternal: (none can date their birth)
Not I would fear the wrath of any man
(And brave God’s vengeance) for defying these.”

In this dramatic work, we find one of the earliest illustrations of a problem which is the conflict between two orders of law,
both of which seek to claim the exclusive allegiance of man.
An incisive change in Greek philosophy and thought took place in the fifth century B.C. Philosophy became divorced from religion and the ancient, traditional forms of life were subjected to searching criticism. Law came to be regarded not as an unchanging command of
a divine being, but as a purely human invention, born of expediency and alterable at will.
The thinkers who performed this “transvaluation of values”
were called the Sophists. Protagoras, one of Sophists, denied that man could have any knowledge about the existence or nonexistence of the gods and asserted that man as individual was the measure of
all things; “being” to him was nothing but subjectively colored appearance.