30 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)A major contribution made by the Greeks in the fi eld of international re-
lations was the practice of settling disputes between states by means of
arbitration. An early example occurred in the seventh century bc, when an
arbitration took place between Andros and Chalcis, and another between
Athens and Mytilene. In the sixth century bc, we know of a dispute be-
tween Athens and Megara over the island of Salamis, which was resolved
by arbitration. Later in that century, according to Herodotus, the duty to
arbitrate disputes in place of resorting to war was imposed onto the cities of
Ionia by their Persian overlords in Sardis, who issued an instruction to this
eff ect to the assembled representatives of the Ionian states. In the period
400– 340 bc, six or seven arbitrations took place, with a considerable picking
up of the pace aft er that. In the third century bc, there were at least twenty-
one instances, and some forty to fi ft y in the century following.
As impressive as this Greek arbitration record was, its relation to interna-
tional law, in anything like our sense of the word, was somewhat tangential.
Th ere does not seem to have been anything like a detailed code of interna-
tional law that was applied in these cases. Th e arbitrators appear to have
rendered their decisions simply on the basis of what seemed to them at the
time to be the equitable thing to do. “[A]n arbitrator goes by the equity of a
case, a judge by the strict law,” explained Aristotle, “and arbitration was in-
vented with the express purpose of securing full power for equity.” Th is
point is refl ected in the very word “arbitration,” which comes from the Latin
arbitrio, meaning free will. (It is also cognate with the En glish word “arbi-
trary.”) So if by international law is meant merely a general sense of fairness
and impartiality, then modern international lawyers can justly claim the
Greek arbitration practice as a historical milestone. But if a more demand-
ing defi nition is sought— such as an actual transnational set of rules to be
applied relatively infl exibly— then we must still look to the future.
Th e Greeks produced less than the Chinese did in the way of general theo-
retical writing on international relations. But there is some evidence of sup-
port for a general idea that justice should be the governing factor in relations
between the states. Th e most eloquent pre sen ta tion of the case for this was
by the Athenian po liti cal writer Isocrates in an oration “On the Peace,” writ-
ten in 355 bc. Th e immediate problem at hand was how Athens should react
to a revolt against it by four member states of the confederacy that it domi-
nated. Isocrates argued that Athens’s own interest would be best served if it