ABSTRACT
Greek history is full of petty disputes about small strips of land: in 351, Demosthenes (xv .17) was to list 'wars about partition of land or boundaries' among the dissensions which make democracies go to war against each other. Such wars (he rather absurdly implies, but his argument requires it) are of small account compared with wars against oligarchies, which are commonly fought with one's freedom or very political existence as the issue. Disputes about bits ofland could be of very long duration: the prize must go to a dispute between Samos and Priene which began in the eighth century, was the immediate cause of the Samian revolt from Athens in 440, and was fmally settled by the Roman Senate in 135 BC, after Lysimachus, one of the successors of
Alexander, and the hellenistic state of Rhodes had both tried their hand at arbitration or adjudication. 2 It is usual to explain such disputes, among mainland Greel' states at
least, by reference to the small size of the territories of the Greek poleis, never well enough off for good land, and each with its own alluvial plain hemmed in by mountains. All of this certainly encouraged Greek particularism - it is not for nothing that the peninsula gave its name to the concept of 'balkanization'. But it hardly explains why, say, Miletus in Asia Minor, with its rich hinterland/ or the west Greek states (like Sybaris and Kroton in Italy, who hated each other) with their large, fertile agricultural holdings, should have behaved exactly like the more cramped Greeks of the homeland. Perhaps, like the idea of the polis itself, echthos for a near neighbour was something the Greeks took with them when they emigrated. On the level of practical politics, the principle that my neighbour's
enemy is my friend explains much about Greek history in the ftfth century. For instance, the Corinthians had been for several centuries friendly towards the Athenians, because of a common dislike of Megara, the state which separated them geographically. Thus we shall see (p. 38) that Corinth, shortly before the Persian Wars, made Athens a loan of twenty ships. This loan was for Athens' use against the island state of Aigina, and is a further illustration of the principles governing neighbourly hostility: Corinth and Athens were united in phtlwnos against Aigina as long as the latter was the most powerful sea-state in the Saronic Gulf. Trouble - the so-called 'First Peloponnesian War'- began between Corinth and Athens only in the late 460s, by which time the independence of both Megara and Aigina, subjected to Athens in 457, was precarious. That is, good relations between Corinth and Athens depended on shared hostility towards the minor states which lay in between, by land or sea. When those minor states ceased to exist, or were annexed by one side or the other, the neighbour's neighbour became just a neighbour, and an enemy instead of a friend. This feeling, that the polis next door was another world, explains
the failure of the Greeks to develop a common legal system; there is no such thing as 'Greek law'. 4 A fifth-century inscription makes the point clearly: Oianthea and Chaleion, two towns in Lokris (central Greece) some six miles apart, agreed what rules should apply in cases ofunjust seizure. The treaty provides that citizens of the one state who reside more than a month in the other shall be subject to the legal
procedure of the host state. That is, a journey of six miles meant that different jurisdictions would prevail (Tod 34 = Fornara 87). Sim ilarly, citizens of fifth-century Knossos on Krete were not allowed to possess land at Tylissos, a place also, as it happens, just six miles distant (ML 42 = Fornara 89). The principle that foreign nationals might not possess land was therefore by no means confined to Athens. It means, incidentally, that the large-scale possession of overseas properties by individual rich Athenians in the time of the empire (p. 30) was legally indefensible,5 as well as merely unpopular for more obvious reasons with the allies. The great classical instance of phtlwnos was between Athens and
Sparta. Their rivalry, after the Persian Wars, was permanent. As late as the 350s Demosthenes, in his speech for the Megalopolitans (Dem. xvi) could appeal to the Athenian instinct to keep Sparta weak -although Sparta's capacity to do damage anywhere had ended with her loss of Messenia more than a decade before. (Attitudes were frequently slow to adjust to changed reality: even Polybius, as we shall see, p. 169, could praise Philip II of Macedon for his invasion of the Peloponnese in 338, because 'by humbling Sparta, he allowed the Peloponnese to breathe again': xviii.l4. Equally anachronistic, as applied to Sparta in the time of Philip-but equally indicative of the enduring phtlwnos felt towards her.) But how far the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, however permanent it may have been, dominated everyday life and thinking (in either place) is not clear. Thucydides, in his introduction to the main Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC, says that Spartan fear of Athenian power was not spoken of openly at Athens, and he must have meant something by this, although he goes straight on to make a speaker from Corcyra openly allude to exactly that fear (i.23; i.33). Perhaps the tension was overt only at certain moments and in certain theatres. In any case, normality of relations even between enemies might persist, in some departments oflife, to a degree surprising to modern eyes. A good example is the way in which Corinth, as a recent scientific study of the composition of Greek coinage reveals, got one-third of the silver for her coins from the Athenian mines at Laurion in south Attica throughout the fifth century till431, although Athens and Corinth fought a protracted war in the middle decades of that century (the First Peloponnesian War). 6 This is chiefly to be explained by the absence in Greek war and diplomacy - at least before the Athenian decrees passed in the 430s against Megara (p. 91)- of the notion of economic sanctions.
