Chapter 4 surveys a wide range of friendly and hostile interstate relations in ancient societies, where war was often the normal state of affairs. Notwithstanding the numerous conflicts, polities tried in the end, through alliances and diplomatic relations, to establish peaceful relations in view of political stability and economic prosperity. The chapter analyses hospitality rules regarding foreigners, treaties between polities and the establishment of diplomatic relations, which emerged as an international system in the ancient Near East during the mid-fourteenth century bce. An alternative to diplomacy in conflict management, typical of the Greek world, was arbitration and mediation with the help of a third party. In a final section, the chapter outlines how states, when diplomacy failed, started a war procedurally. In conclusion, the chapter argues that, in the absence of an international court, the enforcement of diplomatic rules and treaties was in many ancient societies ensured by the supranational authority of the gods.

This chapter maps out some key themes and questions for the volume as a whole. Studies of late Hellenistic Greek literature have tended to focus narrowly on individual texts and authors. The goal of this volume is to generate a set of new readings that do justice to the intertextual richness of the writings of this period. The introduction also aims to move beyond rigid accounts of the start and end-points of the ‘Hellenistic period', bringing late Hellenistic literature into dialogue with its later imperial equivalents in ways which draw attention to both the similarities and the differences between them.

This chapter explores how the experience of Roman power impacted Polybius’ image of the shape of the world under Roman rule. Developing further classical uses of the body as political metaphor, Polybius is the first author we know of to use the body to conceptualise the impact of Roman rule on the oikoumene. He thus foreshadows the metaphor of the corpus imperii, a core element of Roman concepts of their empire in the imperial period. This significant and innovative development was prompted, I argue, by Polybius’ experience of the nature of mid-Republican Roman power and its material representation in the cityscape of Rome. Crucial to this process is the interlinking of previously unconnected parts of the world through the expansion of Roman rule. Movement is key to this process and Polybius’ geographical ‘digression’ (3.36–9), which inscribes Hannibal’s march into a global perspective, illustrates this. Evoking archetypal representations of Roman order and control, such as milestones, itineraries and building inscriptions, Polybius’ text both exemplifies how large-scale movements interconnected different parts of the world in concrete and tangible ways and how those movements, even when initiated by Rome’s enemies, eventually resulted in the establishment of Roman power all over the inhabited world.