Early Greek "Proxenoi"

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

W E MAY LOOSELY DEFINE a proxenos as one city's official friend in another city.' Students of Hellenistic life know the institution of proxeny from quantities of inscriptions, but there is little evidence for its origins. Yet few aspects of Greek inter-state relations can be so clearly isolated, and few so graphically illustrate the detailed workings of the slowly widening archaic political consciousness. This note aims to collect and analyse the currently available testimony for proxeny down to ca. 460 B.C., by which time the institution was widely and firmly established in the Greek world.2