ARBITEATION IN THE GREEK WORLD. 



283 



setting and perspective. Each stone has a story of its own to 

 tell, or maybe but a mutilated frngment of such story ; they are 

 isolated pages torn at random from the tale of national and 

 civic and private life. Once more, they are often fragmentary 

 and sometimes almost or quite unintelligible. A stone may be 

 broken and part of it may have been irrevocably lost, it may 

 have been exposed to the weather for generations or even 

 centuries and its contents may be impossible to decipher : 

 frequently the date can only be determined within a century 

 by the character of the writing or the general features of the 

 historical situation indicated by its content, while in other 

 cases such essential points as the name of one, or even of both, 

 of the contending states cannot be discovered. 



Yet, in spite of these disadvantages, it is not too much to say 

 that but for the inscriptions we should hardly have any idea of 

 the method and procedure of arbitral enquiries in ancient Greece. 

 For the literary sources very rarely tell us anything but the 

 particulars which are essential from the historian's point of 

 view, — the names of the states involved in the dispute, the 

 nature of their difference, the individual or state invoked to 

 arbitrate between them, and the effect of the av/ard. The 

 inscriptions, on the contrary, are precise and detailed to a 

 degree which is never equalled, very rarely even approached, by 

 the literary histories, and from them we learn not merely the 

 cause, the fact and the result of arbitration, but also its method 

 and its spirit. Let me illustrate this statement by a single 

 example. In one instance, and in one alone, so far as I know, 

 the same arbitral case is recorded both by an historian and also 

 by an inscription. Tacitus (Annals, iv, 43) tells us that the 

 dispute between Sparta and Messene, to which I have already 

 alluded, was referred to the Milesian state, which decided in 

 favour of the Messenians. This is all he tells us. Turn now to 

 the Milesian record of this same occurrence, inscribed upon 

 stone at Olympia : it tells us of the meeting of the assembly, 

 convened in the theatre, the exact date on which this took 

 place, the sortition from the whole body of citizens of a court 

 of 600, " the largest permitted by law." The task before this 

 tribunal was to consider the dispute between the Lacedaemonians 

 and the Messenians, to discover which state was in possession 

 of the territory in question when L. Mummius was in the 

 province and to assign it to that state, as directed by a letter 

 from the Eoman praetor Q. Calpurnius Piso and a senatorial 

 resolution. The names of the advocates are next recorded and 

 the maximum time allowed for the first and second speeches on 



