The Diplomacy of Ancient Greece: A Short Introduction

By G.R. Berridge

Employed against a warlike background, the diplomatic methods of the ancient Greeks are thought by some to have been useless but by others to have been the most advanced seen prior to modern times. This book works to its own view by looking at the conditions that produced this diplomacy, the personnel it

• Language: English
• Publisher: DiploFoundation
• Release date: Dec 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798987005200

G.R. Berridge

Professor G.R. Berridge is Emeritus Professor of International Politics at the University of Leicester, where he was the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Diplomacy. For many years, he was General Editor of the Macmillan series, Studies in Diplomacy, and Associate Editor (with responsibility for twentieth-century diplomatists) of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is the author of numerous books on diplomacy, including the best-selling textbook, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, which has been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese. His most recent books include Embassies in Armed Conflict, the third edition (with L. Lloyd) of The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy, and A Diplomatic Whistleblower in the Victorian Era. Professor Berridge has been an external examiner at various British universities, including Birmingham, Durham, and London (School of Oriental and African Studies).

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Invitations to Diplomacy

This series was launched by DiploFoundation in 2018. It aims to provide authors with the opportunity to publish introductory works on any important diplomatic subject, and to make them as accessible as possible in terms of style, cost and electronic format.

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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN DICTIONARY OF DIPLOMACY (with Lorna Lloyd), Third Edition

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN DIPLOMACY AND OTHER ESSAYS

DIPLOMACY: Theory and Practice, Sixth Edition

BRITISH DIPLOMACY IN TURKEY, 1583 TO THE PRESENT:

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TILKIDOM AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE:

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GERALD FITZMAURICE (1865-1939), CHIEF DRAGOMAN OF THE BRITISH

EMBASSY IN TURKEY

DIPLOMATIC CLASSICS: Selected texts from Commynes to Vattel

DIPLOMATIC THEORY FROM MACHIAVELLI TO KISSINGER

(with Maurice Keens-Soper and T. G. Otte)

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS: States, Power and Conflict since 1945, Third Edition

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RETURN TO THE UN: UN Diplomacy in Regional Conflicts

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The Diplomacy of Ancient Greece

A Short Introduction

G. R. Berridge

Emeritus Professor of International Politics,

University of Leicester, UK

and

Senior Fellow, DiploFoundation

© G. R. Berridge 2018

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

The author asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by: Viktor Mijatovic (DiploFoundation)

ISBN: 979-8-9870052-0-0

Published by: Diplo US (2022)

For Hannah

Preface

This brief introduction to the diplomacy of ancient Greece was originally drafted as a chapter for a book that many years ago I planned to write with John W. Young; we proposed to call this ‘A History of Diplomacy’. Unfortunately, because of more urgent priorities we both came to realise that we lacked the time to complete it. But it seemed a shame simply to cast aside the chapter I had written, the more so since the only other general treatment of its subject, Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (1975) by Sir Frank Adcock and D. J. Mosley, while quite accessible and still immensely valuable, has a rather awkward structure and no maps; furthermore, much valuable work on the subject, not least on proxeny by William Mack, has been produced since their book was published over 40 years ago. When, therefore, the opportunity to publish my draft on the ISSUU platform presented itself, I jumped at it. At first I thought simply to refresh it here and there and provide some illustrations, but as I came to grips with the subject once more I discovered many weaknesses in my draft. As a result, I have revised it extensively and produced a work double its original length.

I am not an ancient historian, although I have published one piece on the diplomacy of the ancient Near East: ‘Amarna diplomacy: a fully-fledged diplomatic system?’, in R. Cohen and R. Westbrook (eds), Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000). Nor do I read Greek. There is in consequence no original research in this book. I have certainly gone back to translations of some of the most important primary sources, notably Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Diodorus the Sicilian, Isocrates, and the speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines. But this book is essentially a work of synthesis of existing scholarship designed for the student of diplomacy with no prior knowledge of the subject, as well as for the general reader.

To avoid over-cluttering the pages, as a rule I have restricted the footnotes to parenthetical notes not worthy of highlighting in a box, and to sources for quotations and statements that might otherwise raise an eyebrow. The list of references at the end of each chapter is designed not just as a guide to further reading but also to indicate on which works I have relied most heavily. The ‘References’ in the endmatter provides a complete list of works on which I have drawn.

There have been 11 translations of Thucydides’ indispensable history of the Peloponnesian War, which by most accounts is virtually untranslatable. I have used my old copy of the Rex Warner translation, first published by Penguin Books in 1954. However, I recommend as the most accessible version for students the Landmark reprint of Richard Crawley’s 1866 translation, edited by Robert Strassler (see Liz Crawley’s piece in The Oxonian Review, available here). For those who prefer to read online, the same translation is used in the excellent Perseus Digital Library (in which where available I also cite translations of other important ancient texts). Where I cite Thucydides in the footnotes, I use the page numbers from the Penguin edition but, to ease their discovery in the Crawley translations or any others, I add in square brackets the conventional referencing for such works, e.g. ‘pp. 113-14 [2.29.1]’, the latter meaning Book 2, Chapter 29, Section 1.

The maps in this book are all reproduced from the ‘Atlas of Greece’, a part of the Wikimedia Commons Atlas of the World’, available here.

The focus of this book is almost entirely on what modern scholars call the ‘Classical’ period of ancient Greek history, which corresponds roughly to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE (Before the Common Era). Except where otherwise indicated, dates in the text are BCE.

I am grateful to John W. Young for his encouraging remarks on an early draft, and to Hannah Slavik and Mina Mudric of DiploFoundation for supporting the launch of the book on this platform.

G. R. B., Leicester, December 2018

List of boxes

Box 1.1 Demosthenes, 384-3229

Box 1.2 Aeschines, 389-3149

Box 1.3 Nicias, c. 470-414/1316

Box 1.4 Corinth: centre of trade – and foreign intelligence18

Box 2.1 Personal friendship and private negotiations23

Box 3.1 The Delphic Amphictyony31

Box 3.2 The Decree of Aristoteles, 37734

Box 3.3 The Melitaea-Narthakion arbitration, ca. 143: a multistate tribunal36

List of maps

Greek dialects: geographical distribution during the Classical period2

The Greek states at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, 4318

The Peloponnesian War12

The main sanctuaries of Classical Greece30

The Delian League (‘Athenian Empire’) in 43133

Introduction

War is often said to have been the hallmark of the relations between the cities of ancient Greece but diplomacy had more than a walk-on part. This is because, as in the Italian peninsula in the late fifteenth century AD, a minimum recognition of common interests