The first historical manifestation of international society was in grace. It comprised a large number of city states. Geographically located at the lower Balkan peninsula the Adriatic and the Aegean seas.
They had a common language, ancestry, religion and way of life which distinguished them from those of their neighbours whom they called barbarians. That is those who did not speak Greek or Latin. Sparta, Corinth and Athens were Greek city-states but Athens was the most popular. They constituted the first international society in Western history. It is important to state that Greece was
not a state. The society consisted of city-states which were for all intents and purpose independent of each other.
The city –state maintained relations but the identities of each was preserved through ceremonies, cults, oracles, but political arrangements were the same.
The city-states consulted the oracles at Delphi in resolving anything in dispute. They equally evolved such special political vocabularies as reconciliation, truce, alliance peace, etc. they did not establish resident diplomatic institutions. That were an invention of Italian renaissance. The ancient Greeks did not articulate international law because they could not conceive of the city states as having rights and duties in relation to other city-states.5 The ancient Greek city states were politically self contained, their international society was cultural/.religious rather than legal / political.5
Though the ancient Greeks did not conceive international law in practical terms, they nevertheless recognized that certain principles ordained by the gods or dictated by practical reality should govern the conduct of relations between the city-states.
The ancient Greeks constructed an international society which survived in the face of hegemonic empires like Persia, Rome and Macedonia. The first modern international society based on large-scale territorial states came into existence a little later in north western Europe out of which the global international society has evolved.
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