Doing Justice to Others 27the Greeks were acutely aware of the existence of “the Greek nation— the
community of blood and language, temples and ritual; our common way of
life.” Th is sense of solidarity extended to the legal realm, too, in the form
of a belief in what was sometimes called “the common law of all Hellas”—
referring to standards of conduct that were acknowledged throughout the
whole Greek world. Th e most concrete manifestations of this unity were
the periodic intercity gatherings in the form of the great athletic games, of
which the most famous, in honor of Zeus, took place at Olympus.
As in China, movement of individuals between states was fairly common.
Th is is evident from the development of a regular practice of proxenoi, which
approximates to later consular repre sen ta tion. In the typical arrangement,
a city would make a grant of proxeny to a resident (and citizen) of another
city. Th e grantee was thereby entrusted with the task of rendering various
ser vices to citizens of the granting state when they were in the territory of
the grantee. Duties would include assisting in business dealings, providing le-
gal repre sen ta tion, supplying food and lodging, and various other ser vices.
Th e fellow feeling of the Greeks for one another was strikingly evident in
the manner in which they regarded war between Greeks as fundamentally
diff erent from war against non- Greeks, or “barbarians.” (Th at expression
came from the most obvious feature of these outsiders: their non- Greek
speech, which was regarded as mere nonsense, or “bar- bar” in the style of
baby ta l k.) In t he opinion of Plato, only confl ict against the barbarians should
be regarded as true war. Greeks, he believed, were “natural friends,” so that
armed confl icts should be regarded as civil strife rather than as true war. In
such inter- Greek confl icts, Plato maintained that the “private anger of the
state” should not be allowed to destroy “the common interest of Hellas.”
He posited that the force employed should be “of a gentle kind” and that the
belligerents should regard themselves as “agents of correction, not enemies.”
Th is view of war as a pro cess of correcting the errors of one’s opponents
constitutes the germ of what would later become just- war doctrine in Eu ro-
pe an thought. In such a confl ict, the purpose of the violence is not to con-
quer or enslave the opposing side, but merely to compel it to “make amends”
for its past errors.
As in the case of preimperial China, it cannot be pretended that these
noble sentiments held anything like a consistent sway over the actual prac-
tices of the Greek states. Th ucydides, in his history of the epic Peloponnesian