284 MAECUS N. TOD, M.A., ON INTERNATIONAL 



each side : finally, the verdict pronounced by the court is stated 

 in full, together with the number of votes given, 584 for the 

 Messenians and 16 for the Spartans. I have entered somewhat 

 fully into this example because it gives what I cannot but 

 regard as a typical illustration of the characteristic differences 

 between the literary and the epigraphical evidence. 



Let us turn for a few minutes, then, especially to this latter 

 class, and try to gain a clearer view of the methods of Greek 

 international arbitration. 



In its tield it differed but little from that of modern times. 

 A recent writer has attempted to classify the questions 

 susceptible of arbitral settlement on a review of the cases so 

 decided in the last century, and divides them into five groups : 

 boundary disputes, pecuniary claims arising from the unlawful 

 seizure of property, claims for damage by destruction of life and 

 property, disputed possession of territory, including disputed 

 water-rights, such as fishing, and, lastly, the interpretation of 

 treaties. All these classes are represented in the ancient 

 Oreek records, though frontier and territorial disputes are by 

 far the commonest, and seem to have been regarded in ancient 

 times as the normal differences between states. Again and 

 again the arbitrators are asked to assign some piece of land to 

 one or other of two contiguous states which claimed it, or to 

 determine the precise boundary-line between the territories of 

 two neighbouring cities. Greece is a narrow land, where states 

 are closely crowded together, and the cultivable soil is so 

 limited in area that even a comparatively few acres might 

 make a considerable difference to the welfare of a community : 

 sometimes, moreover, the land in dispute was of great 

 importance owing to the fact that it contained some temple or 

 harbour, some perennial spring or some position of strategic 

 value. Monetary disputes play a secondary, but by no means 

 negligible, part in the records before us. In such cases the 

 arbitrators might have to determine the liability of a state, as 

 when the Spartans refused to pay a fine to which the Achaean 

 League had sentenced them, or the Lepreates discontinued the 

 payment of an annual rent due to Elis, or the state of Cos 

 claimed from Calymna the repayment of a loan made to it by 

 two Coan citizens ; or the task of the court might be to assess 

 damages and to award due and proper compensation to some 

 state which had suffered at the hands of a neighbour. Some- 

 times, again, the dispute is not so definite as this, and the 

 arbitrators are authorized to settle a number of outstanding 

 differences between the two states whose mutual relations have 



