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In this interesting study, John Grainger, an independent scholar of enormous productivity, argues that it is possible to discern a set of accepted diplomatic practices which were generally followed...

Ancient Greek city-states existed in a world that was essentially bereft of international law. This lack of international law had profound effects on international relations. The anarchic environment encouraged the development of heavily militarized and diplomatically aggressive societies. The prevalence of such societies, combined with the absence of any overarching authority over them, made wars between polities common. Faced with a conflict of interest with another polity, every government independently decided what constituted justice for itself, and—in the absence of international law--all governments had to be ready to use violence or the threat of violence to enforce that view of justice. Hellenic intellectuals—most famously Thucydides, but including Aristotle and Demosthenes--reacted to the anarchy by hypothesizing that interstate relations were determined above all by relations of power. Thucydides expressed this view of power-politics in international life most clearly in what is called the Melian Dialogue (Thuc. 5.84-116). This essay also emphasizes Thucydides’ analysis of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (1.23), and underlines the nature of what he considered “the truest cause” (1.23.6) of that devastating conflict, demonstrating that the shift in the balance of power (ibid.) expressed itself in the specific “quarrels and disputes” of 1.23.5, so that there is no contradiction between the two Thucydidean explanations.

Interstate politics in the ancient Mediterranean was for centuries what political scientists term a multipolar anarchy - a world consisting of a plurality of independent states all contending with each other for survival and hegemony. The most successful of these was, of course, Rome. But did the tremendous victories of 196 and 188 BC over the Antigonid monarchy and then the Seleucid monarchy - which followed the defeat in 201 of the Carthaginian Republic in the West - mean that Rome established an empire in the eastern Mediterranean? That the Roman Republic established an empire in the Greek East from 188 BC is asserted by some scholars.1 I will argue differently here. The emergence of Rome as a true imperial metropole was haphazard and long-delayed. After the defeat of Carthage, Macedon and the Seleucids, Rome by 188 had certainly achieved what political scientists term 'unipolarity': in the Mediterranean state-system of states, the preponderance of power was now in the hands of a single entity.2 But does the emergence of even greater inter-state asymmetry of power equal the establishment of an 'empire'? This is the complicated question I will address.The modern study of empire began as the study of legal structures of administration, and if one restricts oneself to legal structures of administration there are no ambiguities: either you are in the empire, administered directly by the metropole, or you are not.3 In our period, the Roman Republic had such a formal-legal empire, with provinces ruled directly by Roman governors and garrisoned by Roman troops. But these were only in the West: the provinces of Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica, Nearer Spain and Further Spain. These provinces had emerged as by-products of Rome's wars with Carthage, and were originally created primarily for Strategie reasons, as a way to deprive a (temporarily) defeated enemy of valuable resources and bases of operations.4 But in the Greek world east of the Adriatic, such formal Roman rule did not exist in 188 BC. And it did not emerge for another half-century. From a legal-administrative perspective, the answer in the East to our question is clearly: No.5But many modem scholars do not limit the term 'empire' to a situation of formal-legal apparatus of rule and administration. They underline instead a broader definition of empire: the 'effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society'.6 This is the theory of 'informal empire'. The theory is found in most detail in the work of Michael Doyle.7 Examination of Doyle's schema will help us to concept- ualise and categorise the political situation that existed in the Greek East after 188 bc. Such examination is necessary, because there are real dangers of misunderstanding when one leaps to use the term 'empire' as if it means simple gross inequality of power.Doyle argues that any situation that is less than one state's effective political control over a subordinate state's internal as well as its external policies, a control that can be achieved (to be sure) either through formal or informal means, is not empire but something less. When a metropole controls continuously the foreign relations of weaker neighbours, but not their internal structures or politics, Doyle describes this as 'hegemony'. When a metropole desires neither to interfere in weaker states' internal structures or politics nor to control continuously their foreign relations, but merely to establish certain limits on those foreign relations, Doyle describes this less oppressive situation as a 'sphere of influence'. He emphasizes that proper political analysis requires one to distinguish each of these situations not only from empire, but also from each other; they are not the same.8 But in historical reality it is not as easy as in political science theory to distinguish each of these stations along the spectrum of increasing subordination - that is, to separate historically a situation of 'sphere of influence' from one of 'hegemony' from one of (informal) 'empire'. …

Claude Eilers, ed. Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Roman World. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. vi. 254. €99.00, US$157.00; Philip De Souza and John France, eds. War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval Histo...

In her response to our article, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni replaces balance-of-power theory (threat of hegemony begets balancing, which produces a tendency of international systems toward equilibria of power) with a complex congeries of competing and contingent conjectures about when states might balance. While these are certainly part of the extensive literature on the balance of power, lumping them together and calling them a `theory' invites a comedy of errors rather than an empirical test. The `ado' in our article was a novel empirical test of a theory that has been central to centuries of IR theorizing. As our review of the evidence confirms, this theory can indeed be evaluated in ancient and non-European international systems, and it is wrong: international systems do not tend toward equilibria of power, and balancing is relatively unimportant in explaining the equilibria that do occur. We end up agreeing with the gist of Sangiovanni's response: there is no empirically valid systemic balance-of-power theory, and it is time to turn to contingent middle-range hypotheses about balancing behavior.

This essay reviews a new biography of Agnes Smedley, a radical American writer and journalist who secretly worked for the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party on various endeavors, including espionage. When Smedley was accused in the late 1940s of having been a Soviet spy, she staunchly denied the allegations and depicted herself as an innocent victim of a McCarthyite smear. Ruth Price, the author of the new biography, initially expected to find that Smedley had indeed been unjustly accused of spying for the Soviet Union. But as Price sifted through newly available materials from Russia and China, she made the disconcerting discovery that Smedley had in fact eagerly served as an agent of influence and spy for the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists. This case illustrates some of the complexities that arise when assessing why certain Western intellectuals and government officials decided to become spies for the Soviet Union.

The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems.

PETER HEATHER. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 572. $40.00 (us); BRYAN WARD-PERKINS. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vi, 239. $28.00 (US). Reviewed by Jeanne Rutenburg and Arthur M. Eckstein

GEORGE CAWKWELL. The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 316. $195.00 (CDN). Reviewed by Arthur M. Eckstein