Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:29:47.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Laws of War in Ancient Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Adriaan Lanni
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the earliest and the most famous statements of realism in international law comes from ancient Greece: the Melian dialogue in history of the Peloponnesian War. In 416 B.C.E., the Athenians invaded Melos, a small island in the Aegean that sought to remain neutral and avoid joining the Athenian empire. Thucydides presents an account of the negotiation between the Athenians and the Melian leaders. The Athenians offer the Melians a choice: become a subject of Athens, or resist and be annihilated. The Melians argue, among other things, that justice is on their side. The Athenians dismiss arguments from justice as irrelevant and reply with a statement that many scholars believe represents view: “We both alike know that in human reckoning the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”

Type
Part I. The Conduct of War in the Ancient World and Early Islamic History
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 26 , Issue 3: Law, War, and History: A Special Issue , Fall 2008 , pp. 469 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. For references, see Hornblower, Simon, Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2:81–92.Google Scholar

2. Thucydides 5.89 (The Peloponnesian Wars, trans. Jowett, Benjamin, rev. and Brunt, abridged P. A. [London: New English Library, 1966]).Google Scholar

3. The most famous written convention is the treaty reportedly conducted between the archaic city states of Chalcis and Eretria banning the use of missile weapons (Polybius 13.3.2-4; Strabo 10.1.12). Herodotus (1.82; 9.26) also mentions a couple of bilateral agreements to limit the scale of war by specifying the number of combatants per side or providing for a battle of champions. The historicity of these treaties has been questioned by scholars. See, for instance, Wheeler, Everett L., “Ephorus and the Prohibition of Missiles,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 117 (1987): 178–82Google Scholar; Ober, Josiah, “Classical Greek Times,” in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, ed. Howard, Michael, Andreopoulos, George J., and Shulman, Mark R. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 12Google Scholar. In any case, if such agreements to exercise restraint in war did exist, they seem to have been exceedingly rare in the archaic period and nearly unheard of in the classical period. Thucydides (5.41) does refer to a treaty between Sparta and Argos in 420 B.C.E. in which the parties agreed that disputes would be decided in a single pitched battle, but suggests that this type of convention was old-fashioned.

4. Aeschines 2.115.

5. Herodotus 6.92; Diodorus 16.23.2-3, 29.2; Wees, Hans van, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (London: Duckworth, 2004), 10 and 255 n.19.Google Scholar

6. Representative passages are collected in Phillipson, Coleman, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome (1911; Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co., 2001), 1:58Google Scholar. Both nomoi and nomima are used to refer to “the laws.”

7. Plato, Republic 471aGoogle Scholar; Euripides, Medea 536–40Google Scholar.

8. Phillipson, , The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 1:59–60.Google Scholar

9. For example, the prosecutor in Lysias 30 never states the law under which he is bringing the case.

10. Lycurgus 1.9.

11. Thomas, Rosalind, “Written in Stone? Liberty, Equality, Orality and the Codification of Law,” in Greek Law in Its Political Setting: Justifications, Not Justice, ed. Foxhall, L. and Lewis, A. D. E. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 31.Google Scholar

12. Thucydides 4.98.

13. Thucydides 3.52.

14. Thucydides 3.56.

15. Thucydides 3.52.

16. Polybius 5.9-10; 4.62, 67.

17. Herodotus 7.136.

18. Herodotus 9.79.

19. Meron, Theodor, “The Humanization of Humanitarian Law,” American Journal of International Law 94 (2000): 249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Thucydides 3.56 (trans. Warner, Rex, History of the Peloponnesian War [Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1954]).Google Scholar

21. Most famously, Pausanias (1.14.5) tells us that Aeschylus's grave made no mention of his plays but described his service at the battle of Marathon. In a similar vein, Socrates' admirers often repeated the story of how he distinguished himself while serving as a hoplite by saving the life and armor of the wounded Alcibiades during battle (Plato, Symposium 220d-e).Google Scholar

22. Herodotus 7.133-136.

23. Pausanias 1.36.3.

24. Solon Fr. 13.11-32 (West) provides a Greek version of the doctrine of “sins of the father visited on the children.”

25. Parker, Robert, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 126–30Google Scholar; Parker, Robert, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 210–14Google Scholar.

26. Aristophanes, Birds 1606–25Google Scholar; Clouds 398-402. For discussion, see Garland, Robert, Religion and the Greeks (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1994), 22Google Scholar.

27. Plutarch, Demosthenes 20.1. AsGoogle ScholarParker, (Athenian Religion, 214 n.60)Google Scholarpoints out, in other cases Demosthenes appears to have taken oracles seriously. Nevertheless, the story suggests that there was enough uncertainty about divine signs and sanctions to make it possible to counsel openly flouting them.

28. Most notably, Nicias doomed the Sicilian expedition by refusing to set sail from Syracuse after a lunar eclipse (Plutarch, Nicias 23)Google Scholar. But we are told that Nicias was an unusually superstitious man.

29. Two excellent short introductions to Greek religion areZaidman, Louise Bruit and Pantel, Pauline Schmitt, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, trans. Cartledge, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989) andGoogle ScholarGarland, , Religion and the GreeksGoogle Scholar.

30. Odyssey 1.6-8; Polybius 5.11; 31.11; 32.27.

31. Pausanias 10.28.3; Xenophon, Agesilaus 10.1Google Scholar; Polybius 5.10; Phillipson, , The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 2:246–49Google Scholar.

32. Thucydides 4.97-98; Bederman, David J., International Law in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Thucydides 4.97.

34. Thucydides 4.98.

35. Iliad 1.442-45; Polybius 16.33; Phillipson, , The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 2.269–71.Google Scholar

36. Alexander, for example, spared the priests when enslaving the population of Thebes (Plutarch Alexander 11).

37. E.g., Thucydides 5.49.1.

38. E.g., Xenophon, Hellenica 4.7.2–7.Google Scholar

39. E.g., Thucydides 7.73.2; Herodotus 6.106; 7.206.

40. E.g., Herodotus 1.150, 6.87; Xenophon, Hellenica 5.2.29Google Scholar; for discussion of this norm, see Goodman, M. D. and Holladay, A. J., “Religious Scruples in Ancient Warfare,” Classical Quarterly 36.1 (1986): 158–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Krentz, Peter, “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agon,” Hesperia 71 (2002): 26–27Google Scholar.

41. Xenophon, Hellenica 4.7.2.Google Scholar

42. Thucydides 7.73.2, 8.9.1; Herodotus 7.206.

43. Herodotus 7.136.

44. Iliad 1.334.

45. Pausanias 1.36.3; Herodotus 7.133-136.

46. Herodotus 9.78-79; 4.202-205. This norm did not exist in the Homeric period.

47. Thucydides 4.98; Euripides, Suppliant Women 311, 526.Google Scholar

48. Euripides, Suppliant Women 19, 311, 526.Google Scholar

49. The best known exception, the Boeotians' refusal to give the Athenians their dead, is justified by the Boeotians as a reprisal for the Athenians' fortification of the sacred precinct in Delium (Thucydides 4.97-101).

50. Stacey, Robert C., “The Age of Chivalry” in The Laws of War, ed. Howard, et al., 27–39.Google Scholar

51. Plato Republic 332a; Lysias 9.20;Whitlock-Blundell, Mary, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. Cohen, David, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Krentz, Peter, “Deception in Archaic and Classical GreekWarfare,” in War and Violence in Ancient Greece, ed. Wees, Hans van (London: Duckworth, 2000), 167–200.Google Scholar

54. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 7.5.73.Google Scholar

55. Aristotle Politics, bk. 1, chap. 6, lines 6-7, 1255a6-8; see also Polybius 5.11.

56. Pritchett, W. Kendrick (The Greek State at War. Part V [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991]) provides lists of massacres (218-19), enslavements (226-34), and ransom exchanges (247-71).Google Scholar

57. Herodotus 6.80.

58. Thucydides 1.106. Other examples: Xenophon, Hellenica 4.4.12Google Scholar; Thucydides 4.96; Diodorus 12.10.1; Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 31Google Scholar; Wees, Van, Greek Warfare, 135Google Scholar.

59. Euripides, Heracleidae 961–66.Google Scholar

60. Euripides, Heracleidae 1009–11.Google Scholar

61. Ducrey, Pierre, Le Traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Grèce antique, des origines à la conquête romaine (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968), 290.Google Scholar

62. E.g., Xenophon, Hellenica 4.6.4Google Scholar; Thucydides 2.14.1; Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 27Google Scholar.

63. The rape of women rarely merits mention in our historical sources. For discussion, see Schaps, David, “Women of Greece in Wartime,” Classical Philology 77 (1982): 193–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64. But the Athenians did kill all the women and children of Mycalessus (Thucydides 7.29).

65. Thucydides 2.70; Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.6.Google Scholar

66. Thucydides 3.36-48.

67. Cleon, who argues for extermination of the entire male population, does make an argument from justice, but he argues, absurdly, that the Mytileneans had done a great wrong to Athens by revolting.

68. E.g., Koh, Harold Hongju, “Why Do Nations Obey International Law?” Yale Law Journal 106 (1997): 2603CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helfer, Laurence R. and Slaughter, Anne-Marie, “Toward a Theory of Efficient Supranational Adjudication,” Yale Law Journal 107 (1997): 337–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franck, Thomas M., The Power of Legitimacy among Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 183–94Google Scholar; cf. Goodman, Ryan and Jinks, Derek, “How to Influence States: Socialization and International Human Rights Law,” Duke Law Journal 54 (2004): 621Google Scholar.

69. For discussion, see Goldsmith, Jack L. and Posner, Eric A., The Limits of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14–17.Google Scholar

70. Goldsmith, and Posner, , The Limits of International Law, 3Google Scholar. Goldsmith, and Posner's, work has sparked debate in the legal academy: “Symposium on The Limits of International Law,” Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 34 (2006): 253–484Google Scholar; Hathaway, Oona A. and Lavinbuk, Ariel N., “Rationalism and Revisionism in International Law,” Harvard Law Review 119 (2006): 1404Google Scholar.

71. Hanson, Victor Davis, “The Ideology of Hoplite Battle, Ancient and Modern,” in Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience, ed. Hanson, Victor Davis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For similar views, seeOber, “Classical Greek Times,” andConnor, W. R., “Early Greek Land Warfare as Symbolic Expression,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 3–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72. Ober, , “Classical Greek Times,” 13Google Scholar; see also Ducrey, , Le Traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Grèce antique, 334–36Google Scholar; Hanson, Victor Davis, The Western Way of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 14-18, 36, 223Google Scholar.

73. Ober, , “Classical Greek Times,” 15–17Google Scholar; Connor, , “Early Greek Land Warfare,” 20Google Scholar; cf. Hanson, Victor Davis, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2005), 299–300Google Scholar.

74. Hanson, , A War Like No Other, 146Google Scholar; Hanson, , The Western Way of War, 37Google Scholar; Connor, , “Early Greek Land Warfare,” 27Google Scholar; Ober, , “Classical Greek Times,” 18–19Google Scholar.

75. Hanson, , A War Like No Other, 90.Google Scholar

76. Hanson, , The Western Way of War, 37–39Google Scholar; Ober, , “Classical Greek Times,” 18–19Google Scholar.

77. Ober, , “Classical Greek Times,” 20–21.Google Scholar

78. Ibid., 18.

79. Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules.”Google Scholar

80. Van Wees, , Greek Warfare, 115–50.Google Scholar

81. Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 27.Google Scholar

82. Polybius 13.3.1-8.

83. Wees, Hans van, “The Development of the Hoplite Phalanx: Iconography and Reality in the 7th Century,” in War and Violence in Ancient Greece, ed. Wees, Hans van (London: Duckworth, 2000), 146–56Google Scholar; Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 29–30Google Scholar.

84. Van Wees, , Greek Warfare, 116.Google Scholar

85. Ibid., 135;Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 30–31Google Scholar.

86. Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 30–31 (collecting examples)Google Scholar; Van Wees, , Greek Warfare, 135Google Scholar.

87. E.g., Thucydides 2.14;Krentz, , “Fighting by the Rules,” 27Google Scholar.

88. Enslavement: Herodotus 3.59, 6.66, 6.23, 7.156; Diodorus 11.21, 11.25, 11.62, 11.65, 11.88, 12.9; Thucydides 1.98; Diodorus 11.62, 11.65, 11.88; Thucydides 1.113; Athenaeus 13.10. Massacres: Thucydides 1.30, 1.50, 1.100.3;Plutarch, Pericles 23Google Scholar. For a detailed catalogue, seePritchett, , The Greek State at War, 5.218-19, 226-34, 247–71Google Scholar.

89. Aristotle, Politics 1255a6-8.Google Scholar

90. Plutarch, Agis 21.Google Scholar

91. Thucydides 7.73.3.

92. Thucydides 8.9.

93. Herodotus 6.106, 120. A similar case occurred in 479: When the Persians threatened Athens, Athens applied to Sparta for help, but the Spartans refused to send a force because of a religious festival. The speculation that the Spartans were using the norm against fighting during the festival as an excuse seems unlikely, since the Spartans sent a very large force with great speed as soon as the festival ended (Herodotus 9.7-10). For discussion of instances where a state refused to send forces to help an ally under attack because of a local religious festival, seeGoodman, and Holladay, , “Religious Scruples,” 159Google Scholar.

94. E.g., Thucydides 5.54, 75-76.

95. E.g., Thucydides 3.3, 3.56; Xenophon, Hellenica 5.2.29.Google Scholar

96. Thucydides 3.3.

97. Thucydides 3.56.