Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interstate Arbitration in the Greek World, 337–90 B.C.Everett L. WheelerSheila L. Ager. Interstate Arbitration in the Greek World, 337–90 B.C.Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. xvii + 579 pp. Cloth, $70, £55 (foreign). (Hellenistic Culture and Society, 18)Sheila L. Ager's massive—and impressive—volume on Hellenistic interstate arbitration rides the new wave of scholarly interest in the politically fragmented but cosmopolitan Hellenistic period. Cosmopolitanism in many periods (including the present post–Cold War era) has fostered political internationalism—schemes of world government, federal unions, and mechanisms for peaceful resolution of interstate conflicts. Although the Hellenistic age enjoyed little respite from war, some scholars have hailed Greek arbitration as a model for modern imitation.A brief survey of previous scholarship on arbitration will place Ager's work in perspective. Concepts of law and internationalism dominated earlier work. Some believed that arbitration as judicial practice could be studied without distinguishing public from private or internal from interstate cases: e.g., E. Sonne, De arbitris externis, quos Graeci adhibuerunt ad lites et intestinas et [End Page 642] peregrinas componendas, quaestiones epigraphicae (1888); E. de Ruggiero, L'arbitrato pubblico in relazione col privato presso i Romani (1893); A. Steinwenter, Die Streitbeendigung durch Urteil, Schiedsspruch und Vergleich nach griechischem Recht (1925). For internationalists establishment of a permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 elicited a flood of scholarly interest: Greek arbitration now had contemporary relevance: e.g., W.Westermann, CJ 2 (1906–7) 197–211; L. Matthaei, CQ 2 (1908) 241–64; A. Raeder, L'arbitraire internationale chez les Hellenes (1912), published by the Nobel Institute; M. Tod, International Arbitration amongst the Greeks (1913); cf. his Sidelights on Greek History (1932) 39–68. Victor Bérard (always "Berard" in Ager) remained a voice of cynicism crying in the wilderness (De Arbitro inter Liberas Graecorum Civitates, 1894): Greeks resorted to arbitration after exhaustion in war or accepted a settlement only until a later opportunity for reopening the case arose. Study of interstate arbitration, dormant after Tod, revived with Luigi Piccirilli's corpus of Greek cases ca. 740–338 B.C.: Gli arbitrati interstatali greci (Pisa [not Florence, as Ager 578], 1973). Seven years later, A. J. Marshall reassessed Roman arbitrations in the East and accommodation of Greek practice (ANRW II.13 [1980] 626–61), on which E. S. Gruen expanded: The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (1984) 96–131.Certainly more cases of arbitration/mediation are now known. Ager's study includes 171 instances for 337–90 B.C., with an appendix of 40 cases from texts too fragmentary to judge their contents accurately or instances failing to meet her criteria for inclusion as arbitration/mediation. In comparison, Ruggiero assembled a Roman corpus of 65 cases (both public and private, 191 B.C.– A.D. 282/4); Raeder, 81 Greek cases (ca. 740–ca. 100 B.C.; Tod, 82 Greek cases (ca. 740–early first cent. B.C.); and Piccirilli, 61 Greek cases (ca. 740–338 B.C.), besides 19 cases from mythological sources. But numbers easily deceive (cf. Ager 19–20): new epigraphical discoveries alone would assure greater numbers. Moreover, whereas Ruggiero, Raeder, and Tod confined their catalogues to epigraphical texts, Piccirilli and Ager include literary testimonia and a broader definition of "arbitration":, a formal judicial procedure involving selection of third–party judges to evaluate publicly presented oral and written testimony; mediation (σύλλυσις), a third party's reconciliation of disputants; and, for Ager (xiv), even "voluntary compromise."Ager's volume, a revised dissertation (University of British Columbia), continues Piccirilli's corpus: thus its initial terminus is 337 B.C.; the concluding terminus, 90 B.C., is conceded to be arbitrary. The texts follow chronological order (as opposed to Tod's regional arrangement). Only interstate cases involving Greeks as either disputant or arbiter are included, and inconsistency for inclusion is confessed: not all cases are in her view historical (i.e., no. 93, Heraclea's attempted mediation between Rome and Antiochus III), and her generous definition of "arbitration" can involve subjectivity (e.g., no. 23 [Delphi]: dikastai in a very fragmentary text qualifies it as an arbitration document; cf...