Jesse James

This book offers the most comprehensive account of ancient Greek international law published in English in a century, while exploring the social and psychological factors that made international law effective in the Greek world. It makes three main contributions. First, it justifies the very act of taking ancient Greek international law as an historical subject. Second, it provides an updated history of select elements of that law. And third, it interprets those elements by means of legal sociology and social psychology, while also considering the insights offered by fields such as legal philosophy, law and economics, and New Institutional Economics. Along the way the book reinterprets phenomena as diverse as the Thessalian League, oaths, and international religious festivals. Combining the findings of recent scholarship on Greek history, identity, and social networks, novel readings of documentary and literary sources, and lessons from sociology and psychology, it shows how the webs of identity binding the Greek world together affected both the rules of international law and their effectiveness at guiding legal and economic behavior. A central claim is that international social identities spurred the growth of ethical and social motives and compliance with normative rules in Greek international relations just as within cities. This study thus complicates and enriches a line of scholarly inquiry that focuses on the roles of formal institutions, structural features, and economic rationalism to explain aspects of Greek international society. It also offers a model for how to apply the findings of legal sociology to understanding the history of international law.

It is widely agreed that Thucydides’ Melian dialogue presents the Athenian invasion of Melos, and the Athenian justification, in a negative light. Attention tends to focus on the immorality of‘the rule of the stronger’ that the Athenians present in the dialogue. This essay argues that another feature of the dialogue triggering negative judgements of the Athenians is their criticism of the Melians’ resistance: it is voiced by the Athenians themselves and therefore provokes in readers a‘speaker- relative’ normative judgement of the Athenians. Philosophers have explored how our normative judgements about statements often depend on the speaker. Because the Athenians have deliberately put the Melians into their perilous situation, and because part of Athenian self-mythology was heroic resistance against overwhelming numbers in the Persian Wars, Athenian criticism of the Melians is hypocritical and applies an asymmetrical ethics to the Athenians and the Melians. Reaction against these features of the dialogue exacerbates the moral abhorrence of the Athenians felt by many readers. Hence I disagree with Bosworth’s view of the dialogue as primarily critical of the Melians. Instead we see Thucydides here condemning not only the Athenian imperial project but also the rhetoric used to defend and sustain it.