Recovering the substantive pelagic in the classic archipelagic landscape's law and justice

'Archipelago' has been narrowed today to chiefly mean an expanse of water with many scattered islands or just a group of islands. Focusing primarily on the Aegean Sea and the island of Delos with its encircling Cyclades islands, and subsidiarily on the North and Norwegian Seas, this essay seeks to recover the archipelagic's originary classical, archetypal and substantive meaning as a common sea providing the context within which diverse coastal and insular polities are fluidly interwoven on the basis of customary and 'natural' laws. The integrative relational space of such archipelagic seas stands in contradistinction to the legal nature of gridded Euclidean continental space used to enclose people and peoples within the homogenous space of separate territories.