Invitations to Diplomacy

Ambassadors, Journalists and Spies brings together three of Professor G. R. Berridge's influential works in a single volume, offering a compact yet wide-ranging history of diplomacy from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The collection opens with The Diplomacy of Ancient Greece: A Short Introduction, which reveals the classical world not only as a theatre of war but as a pioneering laboratory of diplomatic practice, where alliances were forged, commerce sustained, and relations managed through special embassies and proxenoi, citizens acting on behalf of foreign city-states. It then moves to Victorian Britain in Diplomacy, Satire and the Victorians: The Life and Writings of E. C. Grenville-Murray, a richly researched and newly abridged study of a brilliant but rebellious diplomat-journalist whose sharp satire and public criticism repeatedly brought him into conflict with the Foreign Office, culminating in his dismissal. The volume concludes with Diplomacy and Secret Service: A Short Introduction, an updated examination of the evolving and often uneasy relationship between diplomats and intelligence officers, tracing how rivalry and suspicion gradually gave way to pragmatic cooperation. Together, these studies show diplomacy as a practice shaped not only by institutions and rules, but by information, secrecy, personality, and the shifting boundaries between representation, reporting, and espionage.

Employed against a warlike background, the diplomatic methods of the ancient Greeks are thought by some to have been useless but by others to have been the most advanced seen prior to modern times. This book works to its own view by looking at the conditions that produced this diplomacy, the personnel it employed, the forms it took, and-in a concluding essay-its fitness for its various purposes. In passing, it draws attention to the usually overlooked private side of the diplomacy of the ancient Greeks, and the greater importance of the proxenos revealed by recent research. The book draws heavily on translations of some of the most important primary sources, notably Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, but is essentially a work of synthesis of existing scholarship. It is designed for the student of diplomacy and the general reader with no prior knowledge of the subject and gives guidance for further reading.