Just War in Religion and Politics

… Homer was so nice about war. He knew why people go to war and he stated it so simply: they may go to war by sheer necessity for their children and their wives; or they may go to war to avenge an offence, after the enemy has carried away their oxen or their horses or has wasted their harvest. Or they may fight to get glory for themselves and their chieftains. Or they may just want booty and wealth for themselves, though it is characteristic of Homer that this is rather implied than said in so many words. But war remains a sad necessity, the lot that gods have spun for miserable men that they should live in pain. Thus, ab Homero principium.

— Arnaldo Momigiano¹

So long as poverty forces men to be bold, so long as the insolence and pride of wealth nourish their ambitions, and in the other accidents of life they are continually dominated by some incurable master passion or another, so long will their impulses drive them into danger. And in every case there is hope and there is passion, the one leading and the other following, the one thinking out the plan of attack, the other suggesting the fullness of luck…. Besides these there is chance itself, which no less contributes to encouragement; for sometimes it stands by a man past all expectation and leads him on to run a risk though his resources are inferior. This is also true of states inasmuch as for them the stakes are of the greatest — freedom or the empire over others…. So it is just impossible and a mark of great simplicity of thought to imagine that by means of the strength of law or other terror one can devise a way of turning men aside from their goal when their human nature would earnestly have them achieve it.

— Diodotus, in Thucydides (3.45.4-7)²

The great fourth-century synthesizer, Aristotle, was among the first western thinkers to articulate the term, “just war,” but the context in which he uses it, in the first book of the Politics, only emphasizes how different his thinking is from anything we might call “just war theory” today.³ Aristotle is making an argument that animals occur for the benefit of humankind, and therefore hunting, if properly understood, belongs to the art of war, and he continues:

Hence the art of war too will be by nature somehow concerned with possession (since hunting is a part of it). This art is properly used both against wild animals and against as many of those human beings as have been born by their nature to be dominated but do not want to be, on the ground that war of this sort is by nature just (hôs phusei dikaion touton onta ton polemon).⁴

Aristotle’s phrase about “human beings born by their nature to be dominated” was used in the nineteenth century to justify chattel slavery. As the passage from the Politics as a whole makes clear, the ancient Greeks, our intellectual ancestors in so many ways, did not understand the concept of “just war” in the same way as the western world since St. Augustine has attempted to articulate it, and as Professor Berkowitz has so eloquently laid it out at the beginning of this conference.

Nonetheless, the Greeks have something to contribute, I think, to the conversation we are having today, for several reasons. First, the archaic and classical Greeks were an extremely bellicose people.⁵ Thucydides opines, in a phrase we will return to, that “war is a biaios didaskalos” — a violent teacher, and a teacher of violence (3.82). As early as we can see the polis, or city state, emerging, in the seventh century BCE, a Greek male’s citizenship was based on membership in his city’s fighting force, most often organized by clan units. He fought shoulder-to-shoulder with other men, and his timê, honor, was directly connected to his performance in the line of duty. Many of our own attitudes toward war itself, and its deep connection both to notions of manhood and to honor, have been handed down to us by the cluster of small Greek city-states in the east Mediterranean whose men spent a great deal of time training for war, and talking, thinking and writing about it.⁶

The geography of the Mediterranean basin itself meant that in their wars the Greeks fought both barbaroi, foreign peoples extremely different from themselves, and more importantly and much more frequently, each other. The Greek peninsula is a tongue of the southern Balkans that juts out into the Mediterranean — in historical times never very fertile and with rivers that dry up in the summer, so pasturage and arable farmland were always at a premium, and often contested by neighboring poleis. From cities lying near to each other but separated by a ridge of hills, citizen armies would march out in early spring to fight their neighbors over grazing rights, previous acts of hubris, insulting violence, that they thought needed to be avenged, or to protect their own farmland from depredations that they anticipated would come their way from their neighbors.⁷ In a most basic sense, our idea of individual political rights and freedoms comes from the late archaic and classical Greek idea of the citizen farmer, who owes his civic status to the fact that he can fight for his city, and that his duty is to defend his city against both seasonal territorial raids and the larger hegemonic ambitions of its neighbors.

On the other hand, even though most of the individual cities remained vigorously independent politically until the coming of the Macedonians, from the early fifth century at least the Greeks were aware that language, religion, and culture united them into a single people.⁸ Hence they could, and did, argue with each other. In the eyes of the later Romans, the Greeks were famous for always arguing, and one of their favorite topics for argument was war. Inside the city (most of our evidence here of course is Athenian), citizens would argue about when and why to go to war; externally, they would create elaborate networks of alliances and attempt to argue their allies into joining with them against a neighboring city that was for the moment an enemy. Part of what they argued about was the justice of their cause (ius ad bellum), and often their arguments were based on previous wrongdoing in war by their current enemy (ius in bello). These arguments too, often coming to us through the thinking of the Romans, have become part of our intellectual tradition, our very ways of thinking about war; to a certain extent, our whole notion of what a just war might be comes out of the language of the Greek experience of war and their justifications for their wars against each other.

Given the centrality of war for ancient Greek culture, and the elaborately articulated language about war that they developed, it is significant that we do not just inherit their assumptions and concerns through the Romans, but that we ourselves from the Renaissance on have also been reading many ancient Greek texts, that we now call “classical.” Homer, as everyone knows, was a formative text for every Greek school child well into the Hellenistic period, and both Cicero and Grotius (though probably not St. Augustine) could open their Homers and read what we still read today, and what an eighth or seventh-century Greek schoolboy memorized in the Iliad or Odyssey, two poems “full of Ares.”⁹ Although we can’t hear the music, we can appreciate the rhythms and language of the war poets Tyrtaeus or Callinus, and the ironic, personal response to war of the mercenary soldier Archilochus, or the exhortations to go to war over Salamis made by the famous sixth-century legislator Solon. We still struggle with the emotional complexities articulated about war in the great Athenian dramas of the middle and late fifth century, and above all, we can hear in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides the thoughts of the combatants themselves, as they argued about going to war, and as they justified its causes and behaviors, even as they experienced its glories and its horrors.

Just war theory, as we discuss it today, is a function of totalizing war. We can unleash attacks on innocent populations that can destroy not just them but also their children, their cities, their animals, their crops, the very ground beneath them and the air they breathe. We endlessly discuss the limits of our right to wage war under these limitless capacities for destruction. The Greeks did not have the problems we have. But they also endlessly thought about war and justified it. Because the right to kill one’s enemies and sell a conquered people into slavery was part of the ethics of war as they saw it,¹⁰ in some respects their sense of war’s terrors, and its consequent rights and responsibilities, comes closer to our own than that of many Christian theorists of the intervening millennia.

The discussion in this paper will come in two halves. First I will at length and rather schematically consider different aspects of the Greek experience of war, their thoughts and feelings about it as combatants, during the archaic and classical period, down through the end of the fifth century.¹¹ Then I will discuss more briefly and generally some of the most basic justifications and standards of agreed-upon behavior that Greek communities articulated in their ongoing experience of waging war against each other, using most heavily the first two Greek historians, both of them historians of war, Herodotus and Thucydides. At the very end of the paper, most briefly of all, as a sort of envoi, I will address some of the probing questions that Prof. Berkowitz has posed in terms that might have made sense to an ancient Greek. Since they were an intensely argumentative people, however, I have no doubt the Greeks themselves would have contested everything I say.

I. THE GREEKS ON MOTIVES FOR GOING TO WAR

Speaking somewhat defensively, an unnamed Athenian at Sparta in Thucydides’ first book joins the Peloponnesian debate about whether Sparta and her allies should initiate a war of ‘liberation’ against Athens in 431 BCE. The anonymous Athenian uses the following arguments to justify the Athenian empire that had been imposed on the Greek cities of the east Aegean and had been maintained through military force by the Athenian navy over the previous thirty years or so: “We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human custom in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up. Three of the most powerful motives prevented us from doing so — fear, honor, and self-interest. Nor moreover were we were the first to act in this way. It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power” (Thucydides 1.76.2).¹²

I will discuss the anonymous Athenian’s larger and more sinister point, the rights of the stronger, in the second part of the paper, but important here is Thucydides’ articulation of three motives that both Herodotus and Thucydides think drive men to dominate each other in war: fear, honor, and self-interest.¹³ Much of what the Greeks thought about war can be considered using these three rubrics.

I. A. FEAR.

The Greeks elaborately articulated the stark fact of war’s terror for the combatants and their communities. Ares, the Greek god of war, had very few altars erected to him; he is even in Homer a fearsome, loathsome god “whose war chariot is harnessed by Fear and Terror, Phobos and Deimos; he is overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering.”¹⁴

Zeus in the Iliad addresses him (5.890 ff.): “To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos./ Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles.” The Iliad, the poem every Greek schoolboy knew, makes it clear why this is so. The book is full of gory descriptions of “the intimacies of the front line”;¹⁵ one can open Homer almost at random to encounter passages like the one in which Telamonian Aias kills a companion of the Lycian Sarpedon (12.380 ff.), “high-hearted Epikles/ … he struck with a great jagged stone, … [Aias], heaving it high threw it,/ and smashed in the four-sheeted helm, and pounded to pieces the bones of the head inside it, so that Epikles dropped/ like a diver from the high bastion, and the life left his bones.”¹⁶

Because the Greek city states were vigorously independent of each other and quite poor compared with the empires of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, or Persians, they did not develop professional armies with specialized duties, complex systems of chariot attack, or organized lines of slingers and archers, to do the bulk of the fighting, but rather continued to use a largely citizen-based infantry military formation through to the end of the fifth century.¹⁷ These men experienced the horrors of war by fighting face-to-face. One of the reasons that war continued to be so endemic in the Greek world, and that the fear of close-up, intimate violence continued to be part of their experience of war, was that the citizen male’s behavior in his heavy metal armor in the phalanx line contributed to his status as a man and as a citizen in a direct way.¹⁸

For the fighting man, the emotion of fear was common and recognized; Herodotus without adding blame tells of the fear the Greeks felt when they were forced first to face the Persians, and of the probably hysterical blindness of the foot soldier Epizelus in the battle of Marathon.¹⁹ But cowardly behavior as a consequence of fear was severely criticized. Idomeneus in the Iliad articulates the terror that the coward feels waiting for battle (13.279): “the skin of the coward changes colour one way and another,/ and the heart inside him has no control to make him sit steady,/ but he shifts his weight from one foot to another, then settles firmly/ on both feet, and the heart inside his chest pounds violent/ as he thinks of the death spirits, and his teeth chatter together.” The Spartans called tresantes, “tremblers,” those who had committed acts of cowardice in war, and punished them in a variety of humiliating ways.²⁰ The comic poet Aristophanes in fifth-century Athens too mocks the citizen warrior who loses control of his bladder and his bowels in the terror of combat;²¹ the politician Cleonymus, who apparently dropped his shield at the battle of Delium, appears for ten years afterward in Aristophanes’ plays as a coward and even a woman.²²

Because the Greeks institutionalized war as a foundational activity maintaining the social structure of their culture, the terrors the combatants endured were the necessary cost of that maintenance. But the combatants were not the only sufferers; there was fear for one’s family and friends as well. In one of the most moving passages of the Iliad, Hector stands on the walls of Troy with his dear wife Andromache, in the tenth and final year of the Trojan war, and she addresses him: “Dearest,/ your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity/ on your little son, nor on me, ill-starred, who soon must be your widow;/ for presently the Achaians, gathering together,/ will set upon you and kill you … Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart,/ that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow … “ (6.407-432).

But her husband, Hector, replies to her, “… I would feel deep shame/ before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,/ if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting; and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant/ and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans,/ winning for my own self great glory, and for my father./ For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,/ and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear./ But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans/ that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe,/ … as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured/ Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty,/ in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another,/ and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia,/ all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you/ … But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I/ hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive” (6.441-465).

Much later, Euripides’ fifth-century play, the Trojan Women, brutally describes the fate of Andromache and Hector’s infant son, Astyanax, at the end of the war.²³ In the play, Astyanax’s horrified mother, now a captive, hears that her child has been ordered by the Greek commander Odysseus to be thrown from the battlements of Troy, the same walls on which his parents had laughingly held him in Homer; late in the play the herald Talthybius orders the child’s grandmother, Hecuba, to attend to the details of the burial of his shattered body (Troiades 709-765; 1118-1155). From almost the same time (413 BCE), the historian Thucydides takes a brief detour from the larger political and military concerns of the Peloponnesian War to narrate the actual fate of the tiny Boeotian town of Mycalessus, at the hands of Thracian mercenaries the Athenians had sent out to do damage on their way home. “At daybreak they assaulted the city, which is not a big one, and captured it…. and the gates were open, since they had no fear of being attacked. The Thracians burst into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither the young nor the old, but methodically killing everyone they met, women and children alike, and even the farm animals and every living thing they saw…. Among other things, they broke into a boys’ school, the largest in the place, into which the children had just entered, and killed every one of them. Thus disaster fell upon the entire city, a disaster more complete than any, more sudden and more horrible” (7.29).

As we shall see below, the experience of Mycalessus was not normal war, as the Greeks understood it, but it was also something that could happen to any city, under the pressure of war, the biaios didaskalos, the violent teacher and teacher of violence. But this leads to a further question: if the Greeks understood the pity and terror of war so clearly, both for the combatants themselves and for the hapless civilians caught up in its wake, why did they go to war so often and so violently?

This is the final area where fear is horribly pertinent, because it was defined by more than just the individual anonymous Athenian speaker in Thucydides as one of the most powerful motivations for going to war in the first place. Thucydides’ history begins by presenting the elaborate pre-history, the charges and counter-charges, the bad faith and hidden motives, that led to the onset of the brutal twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War. Although he does not skimp on the minute details of the war’s buildup, at the end of the introductory section of his history Thucydides also makes the following declaration: “The truest cause, but the least apparent in discussion, I consider to be the fact that the Athenians, becoming powerful and inspiring fear in the Lacedaemonians, compelled them to make war” (1.23.6). Throughout the Peloponnesian War, the fear of the potential actions of others was, in Thucydides’ eyes, one of the most powerful engines of the war’s continuance.²⁴ Throughout human history the fear attending Ares had a double nature, as the Greeks saw it — both as the active, experienced fear of war’s horrors and as the fear paradoxically driving cities to aggression, to be the first to go to war, so that those horrors would fall on other cities, not one’s own. This doubled nature of fear was thought of as a basic fact that explained the way human beings both thought about war and fell into its commission.

I. B. HONOR

Thucydides’ second motivation for maintaining the Athenian empire through force, as the Athenian speaker at Sparta puts it in book one, is timê, honor. Of the three values Thucydides cites, honor and its attendant emotion, shame, hold pride of place in Greek eyes from the very beginning. They are already present in the passage from Iliad 6 quoted above, since Hector gives as his reason for fighting to the death for his city that if he did not, he would be shamed in the eyes of “the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments” (6.441). Sarpedon addresses his friend Glaukos in book twelve and asks him why they are honored with pride of place, meat and drink, good land, and vast public respect in Lycia. He answers his own question, observing that the honor they receive comes from the fact that “it is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians/ to take our stand, and bear our part of the blazing of battle,/ so that a man of the close-armoured Lykians may say of us/ ‘Indeed, these are no ignoble men who are lords of Lykia,/ these kings of ours … since indeed there is strength/ of valour in them, since they fight in the forefront of the Lykians’ “ (12.315-321).

The theme is developed even more deeply in Iliad nine, where Achilles tries to explain to his three comrades the impossible existential position Agamemnon’s insult has placed him in. Achilles knows from his divine mother that he will die in battle if he stays at Troy, and his whole raison d’être as a man has been to gain glory (kleos) and honor (timê) as a fighter, “the best of the Achaeans.” Now that Agamemnon’s actions have dishonored him, Achilles no longer sees what reason there is for him to stay at Troy and lose his life. None of his friends understand his dilemma — for them, the third of Thucydides’ three motivations, self-interest, should obviously be enough to change Achilles’ mind and bring him back to battle as a combatant, because by book nine Agamemnon has offered a formal apology and a stunning amount of compensation, in land, women, and war booty, to encourage Achilles to fight alongside them again. But Achilles, sitting out from the battle, has been thinking hard, and he now thinks all this compensation is not, cannot be, enough, since he knows that his reentry into war will come at the cost of his very life (9.314-420).²⁵

It is not until his closest comrade, Patroklos, dies in book sixteen that Achilles begins to grasp the deeper meaning of the warrior’s honor: yes, one fights for one’s personal kleos and timê as a warrior, but more importantly, one fights for the honor incurred in defending one’s city, family, and friends. The warrior’s loved ones and possibly his very community will die if he withholds his efforts from their defense. It is the survivors, grateful for his sacrifice of life, who will publicly honor him after his death.²⁶

Herodotus’ Histories are full of the public recognition for excellence in war. For each of the major battles of the Persian Wars of 490 and 480-79, he carefully retells the outstanding achievements of those fighting and names the best fighters.²⁷ When he recounts the battle of Thermopylae, at which 300 Spartans and their allies fell in an unsuccessful but heroic effort to block the Persians from the pass that would take them down into central Greece, Herodotus adds in summary: “Leonidas fought to the death with the utmost bravery during this mêlée; and with him fell other famous Spartiates too, whose names I was told as men who proved their worth. In fact, I learned the names of all the three hundred” (7.224).

The clearest statement of this deeper kind of public honor, gained in the sacrifice of one’s life for the community, however, occurs in Thucydides’ rendition of Pericles’ funeral oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, in 430 BCE. Pericles asserts there that the families of the fallen can claim as their dead relatives’ honor the very fame of their famous city: “… what made [Athens] great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard…. They gave her their lives, to her and to all of us, and for their own selves they won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of tombs — not the tomb in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men’s minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action” (2.43). A little later, when Pericles is on the defensive because the Athenians are suffering from plague and war, and shortly before his own death from the plague, he continues in the same vein: “… even if now (since all things are born to decay) there should come a time when we were forced to yield: yet still it will be remembered that of all Hellenic powers we held the widest sway over the Hellenes, that we stood firm in the greatest wars against their combined forces and against individual states, that we lived in a city which had been perfectly equipped in every direction and which was the greatest in Hellas” (2.64). The honor and glory of the individual citizen is now, in Pericles’ thinking, subsumed and integrated into the glory of the city of Athens itself, an honor and glory gained through war and conquest.

The honorable status one gained as a male citizen warrior held significant costs for Greek society as a whole. It required regular war, and the glorification of war on the part of the individual Greek cities whose citizens would be glorified. Hoplite warfare continued to be prevalent throughout the classical period precisely because it held enormous power as an ideological subtext. Graham Shipley comments, “if public religion in the world of the polis was ever more bound up with the military successes of the community … this says much about the real structures of power in Greek society. The selection of war as the paramount activity can be regarded as an attempt to direct energy towards maintaining a particular social structure, one in which citizen was dominated by aristocrat, non-citizen by citizen, female by male, and barbarian by Greek. It is only by understanding the interplay between these social categories, and the ideological use made of them, that Greek warfare can be understood.”²⁸ Issues of honor, many of them already articulated in Homer, were felt internally by the individual soldier, and they were recognized publicly by his community. They went very far in determining and maintaining the social structure in which the heavy-armored Greek citizen male remained dominant.

This same principle, as we shall see again below, was extended to the relations between states. Hans van Wees tellingly observes, “Communities no less than individuals had a place in a ranking-order of honour and demanded the appropriate level of deference from others. ‘So long as people stand their ground before equals, are well-behaved toward superiors, and behave with moderation towards inferiors, they will act most correctly’, ran one summary of international etiquette (Thucydides 5.111.4). States thus fought to demonstrate the ‘excellence’ (aretê) that entitled them to a place at the top of the tree, and at the same time they fought to stop inferiors from acting like equals, equals from acting like superiors, and superiors from demanding more deference than they deserved.”²⁹

I. C. THE THIRD AND FINAL OF THUCYDIDES’ THREE CATEGORIES IS SELF-INTEREST.

It is hard to know precisely what either Thucydides or his anonymous Athenian speaker has in mind, when he mentions ôphelia, the last reason for undertaking to maintain an empire by military force. It is a term more difficult to translate precisely than either timê or deos, since it can signify, in different contexts, a generalized advantage or benefit, help or assistance, profit, or even in war, simple plunder or booty.

The last meaning, plunder or booty, was something the ancient Greeks took for granted as an integral part of any war.³⁰ In the Iliad and Odyssey, Greek forces engaged in war, or wending their way home from it, support themselves by leisteia, brigandage; the elder statesman of the Greeks, Nestor, reminisces (Il. 11.669 ff.) about a retaliatory cattle-raiding venture he had undertaken as a young man, and Odysseus entertains Eumaeus (Od. 14.229 ff.) with an invented account of his life as a Cretan soldier and pirate. In the archaeologia of his first book, Thucydides comments that in early Greece, piracy, unconnected with formal war, was considered an honorable profession (1.5). He continues, “It is an attitude that can be illustrated even today by some of the inhabitants of the mainland among whom successful piracy is regarded as something to be proud of; and in the old poets, too, we find that the regular question always asked of those who arrive by sea is ‘Are you pirates?’”

A purely predatory attitude toward the lives and possessions of one’s enemy was an essential part of archaic and classical Greek warfare. Even in the fourth century, in the Cyropaedeia (7.4.73), Xenophon opines “for it is a custom established for all time among all people that, when a city is taken in war, the persons and the property of the inhabitants belong to the captors.”³¹ In the passage from Aristotle’s Politics quoted at the beginning of this paper, war is likened to hunting because both activities are ktêtikai, ‘about acquisition.’ An invading army, if not met promptly by an opposing army, habitually devastated what they could of the city’s fields and orchards and proceeded to carry off whatever was portable. “Men would look for grain, wine, farm equipment, animals, people — whatever they could eat, use, or sell. They stripped houses and farm buildings of bronze and iron implements and wood trim; during the Decelean War the Thebans even carried off the Athenians’ roof tiles.”³² Frequently merchants would accompany an invading army, and set up markets as middlemen, to dispose of the human beings and the goods gained in war.³³

Partly this emphasis on profit occurred because almost all Greek armies except for those of Athens and Sparta needed to pay their own way; customarily slaves and rowers as well as men in hoplite formation actively participated in looting and ravaging. The only truly profitable battles, though, were those that resulted in a conquered city whose population could be ransomed, if they had wealthy friends elsewhere, or sold into slavery if they did not. Those too young, old, or sick to be sold were abandoned by the roadside or killed.³⁴ Under normal conditions, sacred spaces were considered untouchable, as much for superstitious reasons as anything else; Herodotus tells of sickness or death falling on those who desecrate temples (e.g. 1.19). But Dionysius of Syracuse made the enormous sum of 1000 talents by plundering an Etruscan temple,³⁵ and although in theory war was rigorously agonal, fought in pitched infantry battle with a set of restrictive rules in place, “in reality, a ferocious pursuit of profit and honor constantly strained against any such restrictions and frequently drove the Greeks to the most uninhibited, destructive kind of ‘total’ warfare.”³⁶

Individuals and states could join in a war effort, or even instigate one, out of pleonexia, greed or a desire for personal advantage; this is what Nicias charges Alcibiades with in the period just before the Sicilian Expedition, an Athenian naval expedition that Thucydides makes clear was undertaken unwisely and indeed played a major part in the Athenian defeat, in the Peloponnesian War.³⁷ Herodotus, too, describes the Milesian tyrant Aristagoras attempting to persuade the Spartan king Cleomenes, and successfully persuading the Athenians into an unwise expedition against Lydia because of the promise of much plunder.³⁸ Individual rulers and commanders could become very wealthy from war; Agesilaus the Spartan general and king gave Xenophon his own country estate near Olympia out of the wealth he had made from military campaigns. Among important politicians, one standard way to ‘help one’s friends and hurt one’s enemies’ was to share in the proceeds of war undertaken for profit.³⁹

The benefits a conquering city could achieve in war were not all material ones, of course. Apart from the plunder allocated among the soldiers themselves, distributed to their allies, put in their city’s treasury, or dedicated to a temple in thanksgiving to a god, a victorious city had available to it the possibility of new alliances, and a higher status among its peers in the alliances it already had. Provided that it became successful in war, like Sparta, a Greek city feared by its neighbors might form alliances on terms very favorable to it, or by the mere threat of invasion might extort what we would think of as ‘protection money’, or wrest significant diplomatic concessions; its voice would be listened to very carefully at the bargaining table. In the last analysis, though, the lure of ôphelia is best summed up by the speaker Diodotus in Thucydides’ third book, quoted at the beginning of this paper: “So long as poverty forces men to be bold, so long as the insolence and pride of wealth nourish their ambitions, and in the other accidents of life they are continually dominated by some incurable master passion or another, so long will their impulses drive them into danger” (3.45).

II. THE GREEKS ON JUSTIFICATIONS FOR WAR

So fear, honor, and self-interest are powerful motives that underlie all the arguments the ancient Greeks made to each other for why a particular war should or should not happen, or what should or should not happen in it. The themes of fear or profit, however, did not appear very often in their public discussions; these rather centered on honor, and honor’s relation to a closely allied concept that we have not yet directly considered: justice.

Dikê, Justice, was a powerful goddess. She was a daughter of Zeus, and was one of the divine abstract nouns that became increasingly potent in the Greek imagination, as the late archaic Greeks began to reject as divine the more egregious aspects of the Olympian gods’ personalities. By the sixth century BCE, the ethically ambiguous exploits of the Olympians, that had originated in myth and then been given literary form by the poets, had become problematic, even embarrassing, to serious thinkers.⁴⁰ But Dikê was very respectable, as the agent of Zeus’ ethical concerns for humankind. In Hesiod’s Works and Days (256-60), “Dike, justice personified as a goddess, comes to her father Zeus when she is offended, sits down beside him, and tells him of the unjust mind of men so that they pay the penalty. ‘Whoever offends and contrives outrages, on them the son of Kronos brings from heaven great bane, hunger and plague,’ an army is destroyed, the city wall collapses, or ships are lost at sea: such is the punishment of the god.”⁴¹

Greek attitudes to interstate justice were relatively simple; states were described in exactly the same moral terms used of individuals. The basic Greek moral principle, articulated by many archaic and classical poets and prose writers, required both individuals and states to “help their friends and hurt their enemies.”⁴² The exercise of hegemony by a powerful state over weaker ones was not seen in itself as a wrong, but rather a logical outgrowth of the ancient principle of reciprocity between individuals and a realistic acknowledgment of the relative timê of each state.⁴³ K.J. Dover comments, “no one seems ever to have hesitated to apply to any sovereign nation, in respect of its dealings with other sovereign nations, the same array of evaluative words as were applied to an individual in his dealings with other individuals: ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘honest’ or ‘dishonest’, ‘generous’, ‘magnanimous’, ‘cruel’, ‘selfish’, ‘ungrateful’, and so on…. Interstate agreements, like business contracts, loans, etc. were synthêkai, sealed by oaths, … and violation of an oath by a nation was no less impious, and no less liable to incur divine punishment, than its violation by an individual.”⁴⁴

So what, in archaic and early classical Greek eyes, might have constituted a ‘just war’ ? Here, at the conclusion of my paper, I can only offer a series of tentative assessments, based largely on the narratives of Herodotus and Thucydides. First, a potential combatant was supposed to adhere carefully to whatever treaties or agreements had predated the run-up to war. The Spartans in 431 were wrong, they felt later, to go to war with Athens without first seeking arbitration, and because of their refusal to negotiate, they “thought there was some justice in the misfortunes they had suffered.”⁴⁵ Elaborate forms of interstate agreements existed by the early fifth century among many Greek cities, put in place precisely to avert the horrors of war.⁴⁶ There were sometimes fines assessed by a hegemonic leader for breaking a treaty or an arrangement to aid an ally, but no mechanism beyond war itself existed for collecting such fines.

Next, it was wrong to start a war without prior notification. The Thebans in 431 broke a truce and, unheralded, surprised by night the small city of Plataea on their border; according to the Thebans, the Plataeans then broke an oath they had made to give the Thebans back the invading Thebans that had been captured in the night raid (Th. 2.2-5). In choosing to identify this tissue of deceit, lies, and broken promises as the formal beginning of the twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War, Thucydides also serves notice that the war to come will be full of betrayals and unjust, and in that sense illegal, interstate aggression.

Third, in order to initiate a war, one went to considerable effort to present clear arguments, both at home and to one’s allies, based on commonly accepted ethical principles. One fought to defend one’s country, or to defend one’s friends (that is, states connected by philia or formal treaties), or to avenge one’s honor for some wrong suffered in the past. This list of what constitutes just behavior in war can be elaborated; Paul Woodruff, writing on Thucydides’ values in particular, has fleshed it out as follows: “Justice consists in the following:

The truly curious fact, however, is that although many speakers in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides make arguments that claim to adhere to something like this set of values, both historians construct their historical narratives in such a way as to undercut the arguments advanced for the justice of any offensive war.

Herodotus, organizes his long narrative concerning the growth of Persian power and its defeat in Greece in 481-479 BCE around the ongoing theme of reciprocal injustices. At the very beginning of book one, he singles out Croesus of Lydia as “the man who first committed injustices against the Greeks” (1.5.3). At the beginning of book seven, the account of the Persian War proper, Herodotus delivers several long speeches made by King Xerxes and his ambitious cousin, Mardonius (7.5-9), followed by the intervention of Xerxes’ sensible uncle Artabanus (7.10-18), precisely in order to emphasize the injustice of the forthcoming Persian expedition against Greece. The Persian king expresses his desire to go to war because it is a Persian custom to go to war, in order to equal his father in glory, and to gain valuable land, as well as to visit retribution on Athens for Athens’ part more than fifteen years earlier in the burning of his western capital, Sardis. He exhorts his courtiers, “With your help I will sweep through the whole of Europe and make all lands into a single land…. And so the innocent will bear the yoke of slavery along with those who have wronged us” (7.8).

In the workings out of events, hoi theoi, the powers that set the world in order, as Herodotus mostly anonymously calls them, are clearly in charge, but their goals and methods remain invisible to human beings until as historians, investigators, we look back afterward. Only then can we begin to discern ‘the divine’ overseeing the pattern of events: the way that each human state in turn grows too big, overreaches itself in its aggressive grandiosity, and then falls, giving way to the next state that will go through a similar process, led on by the ambitions of its powerful men.⁴⁸ Ominously, the last recorded event in Herodotus’ Histories is the crucifixion of a captured Persian satrap in the Thracian Chersonese by the Athenians, as they stone his son to death before his eyes (9.120). Although Herodotus does not say so overtly, it looks as though the Athenians in 479 are about to become themselves caught in the familiar pattern of cause-and-effect, becoming too big, unjust, and eventually falling, as the Persians and many others before them have done.

Thucydides in this one important respect may be seen as the continuator of Herodotus, since what he narrates is precisely that downfall — that is, the Athenian loss to the Spartans in the twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). Thucydides’ war is a war of Greek against Greek, and so throughout his history they argue with one another. In book one, Thucydides presents a number of speakers making arguments justifying their own position in the impending war between Athenians and Peloponnesians. The Corcyraeans and Corinthians, enemies of each other, argue at Athens, each about the justice of their own cause (1.32-43); the Corinthians and our previously mentioned unnamed Athenian argue before the Spartan assembly about the justice of Athens’ imperial ambitions (1.68-78); the Spartan king Archidamus and the ephor Sthenelaidas argue against each other about Sparta’s potential offensive strategy (1.80-86); at the Peloponnesian conference on declaring war the Corinthians argue an upbeat assessment of the ease of defeating Athens (1.120-124), but Pericles the famous Athenian statesman, argues for war in the Athenian assembly in terms that effectively rebut the earlier Corinthian arguments (1.140-144).

What strikes the naive reader about these speeches (indeed, almost all the speeches in Thucydides) is how intelligent they are in marshaling arguments for their own positions — and yet they cannot all be right. This is true, moreover, throughout Thucydides’ long text. Each speaker represents his own point of view brilliantly, but we shudder in horror at the earnest savagery of Cleon, the coldblooded Machtpolitik of the Athenians on Melos, and the disastrous enmity of Alcibiades and Nicias before the Sicilian Expedition. What is all too clearly lurking under the high-flown but self-justifying ethics of their rhetoric is Thucydides’ familiar triad of motivations: fear, a wounded sense of honor, and calculating self-interest.

Can war really become just? Or better yet, be done away with? Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides seems to think so. I end this paper with one of Thucydides’ bleakest and most brilliant explanations of why this might be true, his discussion of how words changed their meaning during the stasis at Corcyra and, after that, in many other places as well (3.82.2-3): “In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a biaios didaskalos, a violent teacher and a teacher of violence; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s dispositions down to the level of their actual circumstances.” Thucydides goes on to explain one of the mechanisms through which this happens (3.32.4, 8): “To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfit for action…. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.”

In order not to end on so grim a note, I’d like to append a brief envoi, regarding the questions Prof. Berkowitz has asked about just war, to which the Greeks we have been thinking about might have an answer:

Q. 1: Ought we to try to justify war? Yes, one ought rigorously to justify everything, but also (if we learn from Herodotus and Thucydides) to take care that one’s terms remain honest, that what Thucydides says happened in the Corcyraean stasis does not happen to us.

Q. 2: Is war justifiable? evil and criminal? beautiful? I think the Greeks would say that it depends on the particular war whether it is justifiable or not. Herodotus thought the Spartan self-sacrifice at Thermopylae beautiful; both Herodotus and Thucydides think most wars of aggression dishonest and morally suspect.

Q. 4: Is just war theory a secular project? The Greeks might say that a set of ethical standards about what constitutes justice in war must underlie the actions of every civilized people. Perhaps they would add that their own polytheism lends a level of realism to war rhetoric, since as Greeks they would see that different gods would be present on both sides of a conflict, not in monotheistic or trinitarian fantasy supporting only one’s own (virtuous) side.

Q. 5c: Are some religions more militaristic than others? Regarding Thucydides’ three motivations for war — fear, honor, self-interest — everyone might succumb to greed or fear, but the ancient Greeks in hoplite armor, burdened with their touchy sense of military honor both for their individual persons and for their city states, might have been more inclined to fight than many other peoples. They would see this, though, more as a matter of culture than of religion per se (they did not actually have a word for ‘religion’).

Q. 6: Ought we seek to suppress and criminalize all war? The Greeks would probably consider that all efforts to do so are doomed to fail, for the reasons that Momigliano and Diodotus set out at the beginning of this paper.

Finally, Q. 8: Is there a moral reality of war? Is war a moral endeavor? Since war is an inevitable part of the human social fabric, we must make every effort possible to articulate ways in which this might become so. If we give up on this project, we have entirely lost that ‘ancient simplicity’ whose disappearance in the Corcyraean stasis of 427 BCE the historian Thucydides mourns.

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ENDNOTES

¹ Momigliano, “Some Observations on Causes of War in Ancient Historiography,” in Studies in Historiography (London 1966), 113.

² The translation is adapted from the Penguin Thucydides of R. Warner (1972) and the version of Peter Grene in Greek Political Theory (1965) 58. Throughout this paper, I have sometimes slightly modified published translations, for greater precision or an emphasis more telling for the relevant point at hand.

³ Orend (2006) 10 cites P. Christopher (1994) 8-16 for the claim that Aristotle here is the first to use the term “just war.” But the fourth-century orators and historians also made much use of the concept if not the precise term; cf. Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia 1.5.13 or many of the speeches of Demosthenes and Isocrates.

⁵ Bellicose but not militaristic; see Hornblower (2007) 28-35 for the way military organization reflected civic organization, rather than the reverse.

⁶ For the formation of the Greek hoplite, see Cartledge (2003) 153-166. There is some controversy about how serious or how frequent Greek wars actually were. Finley, Ancient History, Evidence and Models (1985) 67 comments, “it can be shown that Athens alone was at war on average more than two years out of every three between the Persian Wars and the defeat by Philip of Macedon at Chaeronea in 338 BC, and that it never enjoyed ten consecutive years of peace in all that period.” Shipley in Rich and Shipley (1993) and Hornblower in Sabin etc. (2007) doubt that; they emphasize that war, although often necessary, was not ‘natural’; it was not a Greek ‘way of life.’ The quotation from Plato’s Laws (626a) that is often used to support the idea of war as a basic state of existence among the Greeks, if read in context, rather indicates that this was not a widely held view among the Greeks themselves.

⁷ Foxhall in Rich and Shipley (1993) 134-145 summarizes the work done by V. Hanson, J. Ober, and others discussing the difficulty of ravaging crops or severely disrupting a city’s food supply through infantry incursions into its farmland. She argues, with R. Osborne (1987) 154, that the greatest threat posed by such invasions was to morale and the social cohesiveness of the city under attack.

¹¹ I end this paper with the fifth-century historians rather than the fourth-century historians, orators, and philosophers; war itself changed, and its justifications changed, as hegemonic alliances in the fourth century came to be a necessity. The necessity for such alliances was first introduced with the early fifth-century incursions into the Greek peninsula by the Persians (490, 481-479 BCE), and was already visible in the Peloponnesian War of the last third of the fifth century, but became absolute in the fourth century. The Peloponnesian War was among the last wars fought among independent Greek poleis.

¹² Trans. Warner; as stated before, in this paper, I have sometimes slightly modified published translations, for greater precision or particular emphasis.

¹³ Van Wees in Sabin etc. (2007) 288n53 notes the similar statements of Plato (Protagoras 354b), Xenophon (Hellenica 3.5.12), Demosthenes (15.17), and Aristotle (Politics 1266b38-9).

¹⁶ S. Hornblower (2007) 24 cites R. Rutherford (1996) 43 and 55n54 for the extreme anatomical detail of wounds in Homer, “brains oozing out of eye-sockets along the spear, eyeballs popping out onto the ground, not to mention medically impossible wounds….” J. Shay (1994) argues that the bloody details of Homer’s poetry served a useful function for the later hoplite warrior, habituating and to a certain degree thus insulating him from the more severe forms of post-traumatic stress disorder that can follow infantry combat experience.

¹⁸ For the details of hoplite armor and the status issues involved in forming the hoplite phalanx, see van Wees (2004) 47-60. Cf. Hanson (1995) for the idea of a Greek ‘middle class’ hoplite warrior that van Wees doubts existed; Rawlings (2007) 45-64 summarizes the issues very even-handedly. Sparta remains an anomaly throughout the classical period, because of the extreme professionalization of her citizen army: van Wees (2004) 87-90, Cartledge (1977) and (2002) 64-76. See Hodkinson in Rich and Shipley (2004) 146-176 for the difficulties Sparta faced in the fourth century in consequence.

¹⁹ Herodotus 6.112; 6.117. See Tritle (2006) 212 for ‘the face of battle’ in Herodotus’ narrative.

²⁰ Van Wees (2004) 112 nn.37 and 38. In Athens too fines and other punishments were assessed for the warrior who evaded duty or deserted: van Wees (2004) 99 and n. 38.

²¹ Eg. Acharnians. 349-51; Knights 1056; Lys. 216. V. Hanson (1989) 96-104 contributes a useful chapter on the “Dread of Massed Attack.” He discusses, among many other things, Aristophanes’ ridicule of the “sudden, fear-induced defecation by hoplites…. Incontinence was an especially uncomfortable, if not embarrassing, experience among men who were heavily armored, and stationed packed together in close ranks under a summer sun” (102).

²² For Cleonymus, e.g., Knights 1372, Clouds 353, 673, Wasps 19-20, 592-5, 822, Peace 446, 673-8, 1295, Birds 290, 1475-77. Cowardice is only one topic Aristophanes uses to attack Cleonymus; see also Acharnians 88, 844, Knights 958, 1294, Clouds 400, and further Ostwald (1986) 331. Greek warriors did regularly run away, when the war turned against them; Odysseus articulates the ideal (Iliad 11.499), but cf. Iliad 8.137-56 and 22.33-137, and the regular breaking of the hoplite line in battle later: Hanson (1991) 91, 99. The Greeks recognized that the emotion of fear could strike an entire army in a disastrously irrational way; the word ‘panic’ comes from the belief that the god Pan could overwhelm a whole fighting force into blind flight. Thucydides describes the superstitious and immobilizing fear of the Athenian general Nicias and much of his navy at the eclipse of the moon that ultimately destroyed the Athenian fleet by losing them their last chance to escape the great harbor of Syracuse (7.50).

²³ The Athenians must have had a strong stomach, collectively, for facing such dramatized horrors, since the audience watching the play had themselves recently seen condemned to death the tiny island city Melos, at the hands of Athenian generals.

²⁴ See esp. Thucydides 3.82.7; Rood (1998) develops the topic of anticipatory response as a governing theme in Thucydides.

²⁵ Achilles also is rejecting the implicit claim of dominance that Agamemnon’s gifts imply; see Dewald (2008) 33-35.

²⁶ In the passage from book twelve quoted above, Glaukos goes on to say that if he were immortal, he would not fight (Iliad 12.322-325). For the nature of civic honors given the fallen, see van Wees (2004) 145-6 and nn.44-48, Krentz in Sabin etc. (2007) 175; Strauss in Sabin etc. (2007) 236.

²⁷ Herodotus 6.114, 8.17, 8.87-8 and 93-4, 9.71-74. For Herodotean deaths, see Boedeker (2003) 17-36 “Pedestrian Fatalities: the Prosaics of Death in Herodotus” in Derow and Parker (eds.) Herodotus and his World. Oxford.

³⁰ Part of the problem here is terminology. Shipley (1993) 2-3 comments that polemos, the Greek word we translate as war, even in the classical period meant something closer to ‘fighting’ than to a clearly formally demarcated ‘war’ with a beginning, middle, and end. We have given individual Greek ‘wars’ names that the Greeks themselves would not have used.

³³ See, e.g., Thucydides’ description of the merchant ships accompanying the Athenian fleet at the outset of the Sicilian Expedition (6.44).

³⁴ Rawlings (2007) 151 quotes Xenophon’s encomium on Agesilaus (Ages. 1.21) for the fact that “often when he was moving camp, [Agesilaus] looked after the little captive children who had been abandoned by the merchants on the roadside because they had been unwilling to carry and feed them.”

³⁹ Xenophon Anabasis 5.3.7. In Agesilaus 1.17-18 Xenophon describes how Agesilaus systematically tried to help his friends by making the profits of war booty available to them. For a more systematic description of the economic implications of Greek warfare, see Rawlings (2007) 144-176.

⁴¹ Burkert (1985) 249. What stays slightly confusing to us, but was apparently not confusing for the Greeks, is the fact that the same noun, dikê, now with a small d, was also both the word for a judgment at law and a common word for a more generalized righteousness. Dover (1974) 185-6 comments, “Since laws are designed to prohibit pursuit of one’s own advantage to the detriment of others, the antithesis ‘legal/illegal’ tended to converge … with dikaios/adikos; … it was easier than it would be nowadays to regard the law as expressing the collective will and to treat ‘legal/illegal’ as virtually congruent with ‘right/ wrong’.” A citizen could be described as dikaios when one wanted to say he was patriotic (Dem. viii.72); particular dikai themselves could be criticized as dikaioi or adikoi, just or unjust.

⁴² Dover (1974) 180-184 for the duty to retaliate against enemies for wrongs done oneself and one’s friends.

⁴³ The Athenians and the Spartans in the fifth century BCE both exercised hegemony without compunction. Part of the Athenians’ anger at the tiny island of Melos (Thucydides 5.84-116) stemmed from the fact that the Melians did not realistically accept that Athens was much stronger and therefore entitled to claim hegemony; the Melians were therefore insulting Athenian timê. Cf. van Wees’ comment (n.29 above).

⁴⁶ Hall (2007) 85-107 and van Wees (2004) 10-18 discuss the elaborate tissue of pledged bonds of friendship and alliance that Greek states formed with one another, and the careful rituals surrounding treaties of various kinds.

⁴⁸ For the connection between tyranny and freedom in Herodotus, see Dewald (2003).

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Justice and Justifications: War Theory among the Ancient Greeks