Chapter Four
Just Warfare
The semifictional orations in Thucydides leave the impression that in the fifth century B.C., Athenian political rhetoric was capable of a startling degree of Machiavellian realism, but we have no real political speeches from that period. Many survive from the fourth century, and they are decidedly more moralistic in tone than the Thucydidean speeches. Outside Athens, this was probably the dominant tone of Greek political rhetoric at any time. Orators did not hesitate to apply to states the same moral standards they applied to individuals. The worldwide primitive code of honorable vengeance was taken for granted: No war could be undertaken without a just (dikaios) cause, and justice (dikaion) was a key word in relations with other states; and a just cause meant simply that the enemy had wronged the state. As the speakers in the dialogue Alcibiades agreed, the job of the orator was to persuade his audience that they were victims of violence, deceit, or spoliation.
The Athenian funeral orations (epitaphioi) honoring those killed in war provide a unique record of the public self-image of a Greek citizen body.1 They place great importance on foreign policy: They claim that Athens never started a war without good cause, and they especially emphasize the services Athens rendered to all the Greeks during the Persian Wars. The Funeral Oration attributed to Demosthenes asserts that the Athenians had never done wrong to either Greek or barbarian and in addition, intervened actively to prevent injustices elsewhere—stopping unjust wars between Greek cities and protecting all the Greeks from Persian conquest (.Epitaphios 7-11).
Moralism reaches its height in the work of the great rhetorician Isocrates, who considered himself a sort of philosopher with a mission to raise political oratory to a new level of reflection and ethical purpose. His discourses are filled with praise for the deeds of the Athenians, and his great influence on later Greek, and European, literature made his work a major influence on the rhetoric of war and peace. He repeated the themes of the Funeral Orations even before non-Athenian audiences. In his Panegyric, delivered at the Olympic Games around 380 B.C., he told the Panhellenic crowd that the Athenians were the only Greeks to have always possessed the same land (a favorite theme of the funeral orations), and therefore their polis was not based on conquest like some others (a pointed reference to Sparta); the naval empire that Athens acquired after the Persian Wars was granted willingly by the other Greeks; the Athenians were regarded as saviors by their subject cities, whom they protected from foreign invaders and domestic oligarchs (Panegyric 24, 72, 80, 104-106). His advice to the Cypriot prince Nicocles— the earliest specimen of the “mirror for princes” literature, which would go on repeating this high-flown advice to princes until Machiavelli finally punctured it—shows the generally accepted Greek views about the ethics of interstate relations: Make no unjust wars, honor all treaties, do not desire to rule all men (To Nicoles 22-26). Be polemikos, “warlike,” in always being prepared for war, but eirenikos, “peaceable,” in never going to war without a just cause (To Nicocles 24; compare On the Peace 136). The foreign policy of Athens is said to have followed the principle “It is not just for the strong to rule the weak”(On the Peace 69). This maxim comes from a pamphlet written about 355 to persuade the Athenians to curb their imperial ambitions. The advice was meant to refute those principles of raison d’état, taught by certain Sophists and familiar to us from Thucydides’s speeches, that claimed it is just for the strong to rule the weak.
Just Hegemony
These moralistic statements about foreign policy are so common in Greek literature that they have led some modern historians to assume that Greeks were so dedicated to the principle of polis autonomy that they condemned any attempt by any city to dominate other cities; and some have attributed to this mindset the failure of the classical Greeks to create a unified political framework.2 This interpretation misses an important point about the Greek idea of justice in interstate relations. Being just to one’s neighbors did not prevent one from dominating them. Hegemonia (leadership) was not a bad word. Even arche (rule) was not always a bad word. Isocrates said that the Athenians in their great days had been leaders (hegemones) of other Greeks, not despotai, or slavemasters (Panegyric 80); rulers (<archein), but not tyrants (tyrannizein) (On the Peace 91). Greeks thought hegemony a noble goal and assumed that any city that was able to would aim for it. No contradiction was felt between the hunger for freedom and the desire for hegemony. In fact, they were almost two sides of the same coin. Freedom was assumed to entail a desire to rule others. It was said of Cyrus the Great that he found the Persians slaves and made them free, found them subjects and made them kings (Herodotus 1.210). Thucydides summarized the Athenian character by calling Athenians accustomed not only to being free but to ruling other cities (8.68). The implication of such language is that freedom is somehow incomplete without domination.3
The vindicativeness of the ancient just war concept made it easy for just warfare to become just hegemony. The principle that all wars were honorable if one sided with the injured party provided a ready excuse for intervention in the affairs of other states. The orators previously cited declared Athens a just city not only because Athens refrained from unjust wars but also because it took up the cause of other cities that were victims of unjust war; that is to say, Athens exercised a just hegemony. The mark of a just hegemony was that it was excercised for the benefit of weaker states, which submitted to it willingly and gratefully. Therefore just wars were often fought to acquire just hegemonies, without any sense of contradiction. Furthermore, all agreed that a city must fight for its honor and that honor and glory were supremely valuable for their own sake. Isocrates told the crowd at the Olympic Games that the gods must have brought about the Persian Wars deliberately so that the Athenians could win deathless fame (.Panegyric 84). Finally, just wars brought gain as well as glory and safety, and there was nothing wrong with accepting it. Isocrates assured his Cypriot prince that a just ruler was one who left his kingdom enlarged (.Nicocles 63)—perhaps not necessarily larger in extent, but surely not excluding this possibility. The final speech Thucydides attributed to Pericles contains a justification for the Athenian empire that is less moralistic than those cited earlier but still accords with the general Greek notions of international conduct:
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 [trans. Rex Warner])
When Pericles speaks here of the greatness of Athens, he is not thinking of the Parthenon.
The productions of Isocrates may smell of the study, but real orations delivered in the open air of the Pnyx on questions of war and peace sound much the same. One of the earliest political speeches we have, Lysias’s Against the Subversion of the Ancestral Constitution (Oration 34), delivered immediately after the end of the Peloponnesian War, justified the Athenian empire that had just been lost in the same moralistic terms. The series of speeches by Demosthenes against the rising power of Macedon reiterated the unswerving justice of Athenian foreign policy and praised the voluntary and beneficial nature of the old Athenian empire. The Peloponnesian War, according to him, had been fought by Athens to defend the rights of all the Greeks against Sparta (Second Olynthiac 24; compare Third Olynthiac 24-26, Fourth Philippic 24-27).
Sometimes the orators so emphasized the aggressive and vindicative character of the just war as to imply that neutral states had a positive duty to intervene in a war on the side of the injured party even when it was no quarrel of their own. Demosthenes, in his Third Philippic (341 B.C.), urged the Greek cities to unite against Macedon, claiming that in the past Greeks had never hesitated to unite against any city that was perceived as practicing injustice against its neighbors, whether the culprit was Athens or Sparta (23-29). If taken literally, this theory would, of course, make neutrality immoral. Rhetoric of that sort may appear in any war that takes on the character of a moral crusade: Neutrals in World War II were accused of failing to fight Nazism; those during the Cold War were blamed for not fighting Communism. But the vindicative concept of the just war made every war seem a moral crusade and made it very easy to condemn neutrals.4
In fact, the rhetoric of just war could be used to defend not only hegemony but outright imperialism. One of the most influential texts about warfare produced in antiquity was Xenophon’s Education of Gyrus (Gyropaedia:), an enormous and fanciful quasi-historical work purporting to be a biography of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire and the most successful conqueror who had ever lived up to that time (the midfourth century B.C.). In the text, the author makes the young Cyrus declare early in his career that he will fight only just wars, to protect himself and his friends (1.5.13). Most of the ensuing narrative is taken up by the indubitably just war that Cyrus wages against the great alliance formed against him by Croesus of Lydia. In the course of this war, Cyrus conquers all sorts of people, whom he immediately makes his friends, thereby winning their admiration and voluntary submission. “Friendship” (philia) in Greek diplomatic usage implied a relationship of nonhostility between two states, not necessarily including a military alliance, though the Greeks could also speak of “friends and allies.” After he takes Babylon, Cyrus makes a long speech to his army praising the gods for his victory (7.5.72-86). He justifies his brand-new empire on the following three grounds: (1) It is a law of nature that all the possessions of the conquered become the property of the conqueror; (2) This was a just war because our enemies plotted against us; (3) We Persians have proven ourselves better than they, so we deserve to rule them.
This is an interesting summary of the Greek ethic of war. The Sophists and orators of the late fifth and fourth centuries often classified wars under three headings—gain, safety, and glory, as Hobbes called them. Cyrus’s first point reflects sophistic rationalism and belongs to a tradition of thought entirely different from the one just surveyed; it will be discussed in the next chapter. The second point repeats the familiar just war doctrine; and the third presents an unusually blatant statement of the doctrine of just hegemony, refleeting the idealized picture of an Athenian empire governed through the voluntary cooperation of its subjects and justified by the benefits it brings them, which we have just traced in the Attic orators. Throughout Xenophon’s history, Cyrus has fought just wars and built up this empire of virtue. But what follows comes as a surprise to the modern reader. Cyrus now proceeds cheerfully and effortlessly to conquer all the rest of the known world (8.6.20-23), without the slightest attempt at any further justification of his conquests. There is no suggestion that from now on any of Cyrus’s victims will be so foolish as to provoke him. Apparently, once Cyrus has established the just empire and demonstrated his fitness to rule it, there is no objection to expanding it. His continued popularity among his subjects is emphasized, and probably there is an underlying assumption that all future wars of expansion have to be just wars, too; in other words, Cyrus cannot conquer anybody unless they have first done something to offend him, though Xenophon is certainly casual about the matter.5
The same assumptions, in a less imperialistic form, appear in Plato and Aristotle. The ideal city described in the Laws of Plato is to be isolated from foreign contact as much as possible, yet Plato assumes that even this city must be prepared to fight wars—not only to defend itself, but also to assist neighboring cities when they are being wronged (Laws 737).
The work of Aristotle offers the clearest theory of warfare. He takes for granted the necessity of the just war: A state must be self-sufficient or it cannot be a state, therefore one of the basic elements of any state is that which protects its freedom (Politics 4.4, 1291a). He criticizes excessively warlike states like Sparta and various barbarian states because they make war for its own sake and seek to dominate their neighbors without their consent (7.2, 1324b). In Aristotle’s view, the just city will take peace, not war, as its aim and will fight wars only to get peace; only peace is seemly (kalos), war is merely necessary and useful; therefore “we should choose war for the sake of peace, work for the sake of leisure, necessary and useful things for the sake of the noble” (7.14, 1333a [trans. Sinclair and Saunders]).
According to Aristotle, in addition to wars fought for freedom and safety, wars may be fought “to win a position of leadership, exercised for the benefit of the ruled, not with a view to being the master of all” (7.14, 1333b, trans. Sinclair and Saunders). He assumed that any state, if it is to live the life of a state and not that of a hermit, must maintain a large military establishment and conduct regular military interventions into the affairs of other states, and he criticizes Plato’s ideal state in the Laws for its isolationism (2.6, 1265a). Further, if the state is to be a hegemonic state it must also have a big navy (7.6, 1327a). It is taken for granted that hegemony is desirable.
Aristotle’s views on just war and just hegemony are therefore entirely traditional. But this is not the case with a third type of warfare he distinguishes—the war against the barbarians.
The Panhellenic Crusade
“Panhellenism” is a modern coinage describing the spirit of cultural and national unity that arose among the Greeks during the Persian Wars. Greek unity against the barbarians was a major theme in the histories of Herodotus, to which we will turn shortly. During the Peloponnesian War, which tore that unity apart, the Sophist Gorgias made a speech at the Olympic Games urging all Greeks to bury their quarrels and unite against the Persians as their fathers had done. The orator Lysias made a speech on the same theme at the Olympic Games of 384 B.C. (Oration 33). It was a recurrent idea in the discourses of Isocrates. In his Panegyric, delivered at the Olympic Games of 380, he called upon Athens and Sparta to bring together all the other cities under their leadership for a war of revenge against the Persians, referring to this kind of war as the only type that is better than peace, more like a theoria (festival or sacred embassy) than a strateia (military campaign) (Panegyric 182). The identity of the barbarian enemy might change: Around 354, Demosthenes was still calling for Greek unity against Persia (Oration 14) but soon afterward tried to substitute Macedon for Persia. In his long series of anti-Macedonian orations he repeatedly portrayed the Macedonians (who in fact spoke a sort of Greek dialect but had never been much influenced by southern Greek culture) as total barbarians and called for a Panhellenic crusade against them. Isocrates, who belonged to the pro-Macedonian faction at Athens, naturally took the opposite line, baptizing Philip of Macedon as a full Greek and urging him to lead a Panhellenic war against the traditional Persian enemy (To Philip, 346 B.C.).
The novelty of Panhellenism can easily be exaggerated. In practice, the appeal to pan-Greek feeling was almost always an excuse for hegemony.6 The literature of this era shows how commonly the Athenian hegemony was justified by references to the leadership Athens had provided against the Persians. The Spartan hegemony that succeeded it was justified in the same way. When Panhellenism meant something deeper, it seems to have appealed to a small circle of intellectuals, none of whom suggested that it meant the individual polis should sacrifice its autonomy. Even they used the traditional just war rhetoric, for the crusade was always justified as an act of vengeance for the Persian attack on the Greeks. According to Herodotus (5.49), Aristagoras of Miletus came to Sparta just before the Persian Wars to persuade the Spartans to liberate the Greeks of Asia from Persian rule, offering arguments based on safety, glory, and gain: Firstly, they would please the gods by defending the freedom of fellow Greeks (the traditional just war argument); secondly, the Spartans had a particular obligation to do this because they were the strongest power in Greece (the traditional just hegemony argument); thirdly, they could then seize all the wealth of Asia (which he next described in detail). The third argument was thought especially appropriate for a war against barbarians. It is true that Greeks saw nothing wrong in profiting from a just war even against other Greeks, but at that time, wars among Greeks offered little chance for large-scale spoliation.
Nevertheless, Isocrates seems to suggest that there is something qualitatively different about a war against barbarians. This idea was then being developed at the Academy of Plato. In Plato’s Republic, probably written at about the same time as Isocrates’s Panegyric, it takes the form of a utopian scheme; indeed, this is the first plan for the reform of international relations that deserves the adjective “utopian.” In the new code of warfare Plato proposed, all wars between Greek cities would be regarded as civil wars, and no defeated Greek city would ever be occupied, enslaved, or dishonored. Wars against barbarians, however, would be fought to the limit, using every extreme of ruthlessness and deceit. It is hinted that the need to capture slaves from the barbarians (for under the new rules they could no longer be taken from Greeks) would provide an incentive for Greeks to unite in crusades, or slave raids, into barbarian territory and would help to reduce warfare among Greeks (.Republic 469-471).
Plato’s pupil Aristotle presented this idea systematically in a passage already quoted in part:
As for military training, the object in practicing it regularly is not to bring into subjection those not worthy of such treatment, but to enable men (a) to save themselves from being subject to others [the just war], (b) to win a position of leadership, exercised for the benefit of the ruled, not with a view to being master of all [the just hegemony], and (c) to exercise the rule of a master over those who deserve to be slaves [the holy war]. (.Politics 7.14, 1333b38-1334a2 [trans. Sinclair and Saunders])
Aristotle refers here to the notorious theory of natural slavery that he developed in the first book of the Politics. He argues there that some peoples (barbarians) are slaves by nature, so it is in accordance with nature to make war on them for the purpose of ruling and exploiting them, without regard for their welfare. Such warfare is one of the natural human economic systems: Some peoples live by farming, some by pastoralism, and some by predation, which may be directed against wild beasts, against fish, or against the sort of men who are slaves by nature. If we prey upon beasts, it is called hunting; if the prey is piscine, it is called fishing; and if we go after slavelike men, we call it either piracy or war, depending apparently on the scale of the effort (Politics 1.8, 1256ab; 7.2,1324b).
This anthropological theory drew upon certain older Greek ideas about the origins of society.7 Some Sophist, perhaps Protagoras (author of a lost work called On the Original State), had suggested that the original cause of warfare was greed for wealth. This theory seems implicit in the description of early mankind at the beginning of Thucydides’s history, and it was assumed by Plato both in the Republic (373) and the Laws (678). To suggest that predation is in the course of nature is of course to suggest amoral realism in politics and the rejection of the traditional Greek ethic of warfare. Some Sophists had not hesitated to draw that conclusion, as will become clear in the next chapter. But that is not at all the conclusion that Plato and Aristotle wished to draw. Aristotle says that warfare is a basic and natural mode of economic life on the same moral level as the fishing industry but then immediately adds that it is natural only when used against such men as are natural slaves: “We must try to exercise master-like rule not over all people but only over those fit for such treatment—just as we should not pursue human beings for food or sacrifice, but only such wild animals as are edible and so suitable to be hunted for this purpose” (trans. Sinclair and Saunders) (.Politics 72, 1324b).
This is the clearest statement in Greek literature of the view that a crusade against barbarians is quite distinct from the normal wars of justice and leadership and that one does not need a just cause to make war on inferior human races. We do not know how widely shared this concept was. Isocrates also says that warfare against barbarians is like hunting animals (.Panathenaic Oration 163). When Aristotle’s pupil Alexander invaded the Persian empire, we know that he justified the war in traditional ethical terms, as a war of vengeance for the Persian invasions of Greece; but the later Alexander legend also emphasizes how Alexander enriched himself with fantastic booty, asserting that all the possessions of the conquered belong to the conqueror, as his teacher would have approved in the case of conquered barbarians.8 And later Greek and Latin literature was always ambivalent about the morality of Alexander’s conquests, as will be discussed later on.
In conclusion, Greek morality placed few restrictions on warfare. Any wrong could provide a legitimate excuse for war. Wrongs might include insults as well as injuries; in Alcibiades /, for example, deceit is considered just as valid a cause for war as violence or spoliation. There was no statue of limitations for either insult or injury, so no one seemed to think it strange when Alexander claimed he would attack the Persians in just retaliation for the Persian Wars—which had taken place more than a century earlier. Ideas about justice in interstate relations were always compatible with the exercise of hegemony by a powerful state. The elasticity of these ideas made it relatively easy to justify almost anything. Nevertheless, by the later fourth century, warfare among Greek cities was increasingly regarded as an unmitigated evil, and there was a movement among philosophers and rhetoricians to terminate it and deflect its energies into a cultural holy war against the East.
The Moral Theory of History: Herodotus9
The ideas discussed here were widespread in the classical Greek world. All professed to believe in the justice of war for honor, all acquiesced when convenient in just leadership, and many had at least heard of the notion that there was something specially just about a war of all the Greeks against the non-Greek. But there was another way of looking at warfare, probably not yet widely known except to some intellectuals, that deserves attention here: The idea that history operates according to a moral and divine law that reveals itself in the rise and fall of states and empires. Warfare is the main instrument of this law, and therefore warfare has a meaning and a cause concealed from the human actors. This philosophy of history—and written history itself—was the invention of Herodotus, who developed the new genre for the purpose of commemorating and explaining warfare.
The concept of a prose epic about the Persian Wars issued from the mind of Herodotus with the unexpectedness of Athena springing from the brow of Zeus. Before he wrote, the Greeks were poor in records of the past. They had no royal or priestly documents like the king-lists, annals, and inscriptions of the East; this was well and good, for no genuine curiosity about the past could have arisen from that tradition of triumphal theocracy. For knowledge of the legendary past, Greeks depended upon a mass of mythological traditions, constantly reenacted by the poets; for recent events, popular storytellers probably recited, perhaps wrote down, praises of the deeds of famous men and cities. To weave this material into a connected Homeric narrative was, so far as we know, the inspiration of Herodotus.
In doing so, Herodotus established certain expectations about historical narrative that were to last as long as the classical tradition. These are summarized in Herodotus’s opening sentence: “I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history [historié, literally ‘inquiry’], that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds, manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report, and, together with all this, the reason why they fought one another” (trans. David Grene). The purpose is twofold, poetic and investigative. The new genre is a commemoration of great deeds of war in epic fashion but also an inquiry into the aitiai, the causes or reasons of the war.
Let us consider first the affinities between the historian and the poet. It was assumed in antiquity that the historian, like the epic poet, should deal not with the past as such but only with great and memorable deeds, especially wars; that the historian’s narrative should be a unified and artful composition, given a natural unity by the theme of a great war, imposing its own explanation upon events, not through direct statements interjected by the author but through a creative process of selection and emphasis using narrative and dramatic devices borrowed from the poets. Herodotus created word pictures like Homer, giving his characters speeches and conversations to dramatize situations; he visualized sequences of episodes like the scenes of an Attic tragedy, scenes that often consisted of dialogues between a leader and his councillors or messengers. Dramatic construction and fictionalized speeches would always remain standard devices of classical historiography, imparting to it an immediacy like that of a historical novel: The historian puts us in the place of the historical figures and invites us to vicariously share their experience.
But the narrative strategies of Herodotus are closer to epic than those of any later historian. He creates a linear, strung-out, episodic narrative, moving from one topic to the next with a storyteller’s logic, often ignoring chronological sequence, relying on the devices of oral style to bind the story together. There is much use of the epic framing device called ring composition: Herodotus reminds us at the beginning and again at the end about the significance of the Trojan War, prefigurement of all later East-West conflicts; the story begins with the enslavement of Ionia and ends with the liberation of Ionia; episodes and digressions are enclosed by framing sentences, rounded off by repetition at the end of the formula heard at the beginning. Within these concentric rings, the stories (logoi) are connected by links that take us sometimes forward, sometimes backward, and sometimes sideways, but the narrative progresses.
The main narrative link is the simple principle of reciprocal action. Herodotus presents us with a cast of about one thousand characters, gathered from the Greek collective memory that stretched back one hundred years, all of which information was stored and organized in his own astonishing memory. The characters are linked by exchanges of benefits that commonly take the form of gifts and exchanges of injuries that commonly turn into blood debts. Both alliances and enmities are hereditary and often span generations, connecting past and present through a tangled web of contracts. This network of inherited obligation forms the basic structure of Herodotean narrative—in effect a chain of stories linked together by the principle of action and reaction, of tit for tat.
Some exchanges have hidden hooks connected to events that lie in the future. For instance, the first alliance between Greeks and Orientals—a key link—was made when the Spartans sent to Croesus of Lydia the gift of a great bronze bowl, which somehow ended up on Samos (1.70). Long after, this bowl reappears. In recounting the Persian conquest of Egypt, Herodotus mentions that some Samians were involved in it, then goes back to fill us in on the recent history of Samos. We learn that Samos was attacked by the Spartans in revenge for the theft of Croesus’s bowl (3.39ff.). The bowl, which earlier symbolized the first Spartan alliance in Asia, now causes the first Spartan military venture on the Asian coast. It suggests a growing network of exchanges, drawing Europe and Asia fatefully together. And it gives Herodotus an opportunity to insert a digression, the famous story of Polycrates’s ring, which reminds us of one of his key themes—the gods’ jealousy of prosperity.
The chain of action and reaction is not meaningless. It reveals a pattern in the world, which manifests itself at the transgression of limits. The central metaphor of Herodotus is that there are important spatial boundaries that men in pursuit of their multitudinous contracts cross only at their peril. The natural boundary between Europe and Asia is mentioned at the beginning, and the Persian temptation to cross it is a recurrent theme, repeated on a progressively larger scale in the reigns of Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes. The epic story ends with the magical revenge of the hero Protesilaus, the first Greek to land at Troy, reminding us of the mythic theme of East-West conflict with which the tale began.
These boundaries are set by the gods. Sometimes we are told that the gods take vengeance for human crimes. Herodotus explains the fall of Troy in that way (2.120) and, likewise, the fall of Lydia (1.13), but this belief seems to weaken as we approach the present, for he does not try to explain the fall of Persia in those terms. More often we are told that the gods are simply jealous of human prosperity. At the council where Xerxes orders the invasion of Greece, Artabanus, a folkloric wise counselor, warns him that the gods5 lightning strikes the tallest trees (7.10; compare 1.32, 1.207, 3.40). Sometimes there is a sense of a vague necessity behind the gods. The Delphic oracle tells Croesus of Lydia that even Apollo could not prevent his defeat, though the god had managed to delay the course of fate for Croesus for three years (1.91). There seems to be an overarching plan or providence in the world, a plan that keeps down the numbers of lions but multiplies hares (3.108). The gods5 just retribution, the gods5 jealous lightning, the beneficial providence of the gods or fates—all are different ways of describing the same thing. Herodotus and his people assume there is an order in the cosmos, which takes on different masks at different times, and are not interested in a more precise theology.
Herodotus was unique among pagan historians in the importance he assigns to divine forces, and such summaries as the one made here may leave the impression that his characters are mere puppets controlled by divine forces, but that is hardly the impression left by reading Herodotus. His main actions have two parallel sets of causation, the divine and the human, which constantly interact. Such multiple causation is a habit of the primitive mind. It is everywhere in the Homeric poems, in which gods continually interfere in human actions; yet humans are assumed to be completely responsible for their actions, and divine causation is never pleaded as an excuse. Herodotus writes for an audience that perceived no tension between the two levels of causation: Everything that is fated must be worked out by human agency, everything of importance done by human agency must be fated, and human events may be viewed from either perspective.10
In practice, the plans of the gods are effected through the chain of retributive action that forms the basic structure of Herodotean narrative and the Herodotean world. This is not only a narrative device but a historical explanation. If it reflects an old-fashioned view of the world, it is for that reason appropriate to the times Herodotus describes. As we have seen, the traditional Greek concept of war is essentially revenge war. Communities are connected in time by a process of vengeance and countervengeance that has an inherent tendency to transgress limits. Men have to avenge wrongs, with the help of the gods; but they will always be tempted to overreact and overreach, to exceed natural boundaries, to disturb the balance of the world, thus inviting the gods5 jealousy, which, from another point of view, is the gods5 retribution and, from yet another, the gods5 wise providence.
These great metaphors or myths—the chain of retributive action, the proper realm and the danger of crossing its boundaries—are the ultimate “causes” of events in Herodotus’s story. These myths are, among other things, political explanations. Herodotus’s boundary crossing is a political idea as well as a literary motif; he had perceived a main problem of interstate relations and warfare, the tendency of power to overextend itself. But Herodotus’s political explanations are never separated from their mythical nexus, and political actions are always described in terms of personal intention and moral evaluation. The poetic conventions of Herodotus’s culture did not call for further analysis. His main literary models, the Greek epic and tragedy, are about the willed acts of heroic individuals and, behind them, the inscrutable will of the gods; and the willed act remains a final mystery. At the core of Herodotus’s narrative is a theme out of tragedy—the tale of the wrath of Xerxes, who tried to pass limits set by gods and men.
But there are other kinds of “causes.” Sometimes Herodotus can see certain patterns in history. The dominant motif is a vision of human life as a kyklos, a revolving wheel, which allows no one to remain long in prosperity (1.207). He sees the uniqueness of human events, but under the glass of eternity the main lesson is their essential sameness. His opening declaration that certain great deeds are uniquely worthy of remembrance is soon followed by a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun: “I will go forward in my account, covering alike the small and great cities of mankind. For of those that were great in earlier times most have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before. Since, then, I know that man’s good fortune never abides in the same place, I will make mention of both alike” (1.5 [trans. Grene]).
The other pattern is that of the succession of empires—an idea that does not seem wholly compatible with that of the revolving wheel, as it implies that not all events are the same.11 In the background of Herodotus’s story lies the assumption that there had been a series of major empires in Asia: first, the Assyrian, then the Median, and finally the Persian (1.95, 130). He suggests that the sequence was not accidental: Poor peoples are tough and warlike and rich peoples soft and unwarlike, so the poor tend to attack the rich and the rich tend to make easy marks (1.71, 1.126, 5.49, 7.102, 9.122). Implicit in this scheme is an idea that there is something natural and fated in the succession, because a nation that becomes imperial becomes soft and vulnerable almost immediately. The theme of the succession of empires later became popular, for it provided not only an explanation for the rise of empires but a means of predicting their fall. It may have caught on at the end of the fourth century, when the Persian empire fell to Alexander, and Greeks immediately cast Macedon as the fourth world empire. The philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, as reported by Polybius (29.21), made this connection in Alexander’s lifetime and drew the conclusion that it was only a matter of time until the empire of the Macedonians went the same way. It will be explained later what happened when Rome became the fifth and last of the world empires.
Notes
1. Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, English trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), thinks the epitaphios logos, which was unique to Athens, was invented in the mid-fifth century to celebrate democracy. Examples attributed to Lysias and Demosthenes, and fragments of funeral orations by other orators, have survived, along with fictional specimens like the Funeral Oration of Pericles in Thucydides (which is untypical in that it says nothing about the past history of the city) and the oration attributed to Aspasia in Plato’s Menexenus, which some think was meant as a parody of the genre but which was taken seriously in later antiquity.
2. W. S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism (New York, 1941), said the political thought of Aristotle was blinded by “the aversion instinctively felt by his age for imperialism,” which made it impossible for the Greeks to contemplate any political organization larger than the city-state (11 Iff.).
3. J.A.O. Larsen, “Freedom and Its Obstacles in Ancient Greece,” Classical Philology 57 (19G2), 230-234.
4. A recent book, The Concept of Neutrality in Classical Greece by R. A. Baus-laugh (Berkeley, 1991), asks, I think, the wrong question. The Greeks did not really have a concept of neutrality in the sense Bauslaugh means. They knew, of course, that the option of “keeping the peace” (their usual expression for “neutrality”) was often open. But for them, neutrality was not an important goal of foreign policy. Their central concept in such debates was not neutrality but rather the just war; the main question was not Should we remain neutral? but Must we go to war? Neutrality becomes a positive goal in itself only in a modern diplomatic world where war is seen as an avoidable evil that should be practiced only in self-defense.
5. I must disagree with Bodil Due, The Cyropaedia: Xenophon’s Aims and Methods (Aarhus, Denmark 1989), who finds in Cyrus’s policies a modern and sophisticated distinction between offensive and defensive warfare (158-163).
6. S. Perlman, “Isokrates’ Advice on Philip’s Attitudes Toward Barbarians (V, 154),” Historia 16 (1967), 338-343; “Isocrates’ Philippus and Panhellenism,” Historia 18 (1969), 370-374; and “Panhellenism, the Polis and Imperialism,” Historia 25 (1976), 1-30.
7. Thomas Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Cleveland, 1967).
8. Michael Austin, “Alexander and the Macedonian Invasion of Asia: Aspects of the Historiography of War and Empire in Antiquity,” in War and Society in the Greek World, ed. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London, 1993), 197-223.
9. There has been a notable revival of interest in Herodotus in recent decades. For a short introduction to the subject I recommend John Gould, Herodotus (New York, 1989). The interpretation offered here also owes much to H. R. Immerwahr, Form and Thought in Herodotus (Cleveland, 1966); M. L. Lang, Herodotean Narrative and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Donald Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto, 1989). Herodotus’s reliability as a reporter has been much attacked, but he is ably defended by W. K. Pritchett, The Liar School of Herodotus (Amsterdam, 1993).
10. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), is a classic study of this syndrome.
11. Some have attributed the succession-of-empires theory to Oriental sources because the three empires in the original scheme were all Asian, but it seems more likely an invention of Greek historiography. The only large empires known to the Greeks then were Asian. See J. W. Swain, “The Theory of the Four Monarchies: Opposition History Under the Roman Empire,” Classical Philology 35 (1940), 1-21; Jacqueline de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors, trans. Philip Thody (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977); D. Mendels, “The Five Empires: A Note on a Propagandistic Topos” American Journal of Philology 102 (1981), 330-337; E. J. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley, 1984), 329, 339; Austin, “Alexander and the Macedonian Invasion of Asia.”