Chapter Eight
Just War in the Late Republic
The great orator Cicero, a leading figure in Roman political life during the middle decades of the last century B.C., is the first Roman author from whose works we can extract something like a comprehensive theory of warfare. It is essentially a Greek theory, but with some significant Roman contributions. The most complete version of it appears in the On Duties (De officiis), a summary of moral philosophy written at the end of Cicero’s life (circa 44 B.C.), based upon a similar treatise by Panaetius of Rhodes, the Greek neo-Stoic who had introduced Stoicism to the Roman aristocracy one hundred years before. Because of the great influence of this treatise on later Western ethical thought, the statements on warfare in On Duties merit full quotation.
The first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong; and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for their common interests, private property for their own. There is, however, no such thing as private ownership established by nature, but property becomes private either through long occupancy (as in the case of those who long ago settled in unoccupied territory) or through conquest (as in the case of those who took it in war) or by due process of law, bargain, or purchase, or by allotment. (Duties 1.7.20-21 [trans. Walter Miller])
This passage summarizes a neo-Stoic theory of warfare that became influential at Rome. The judicial and vindicative purpose of warfare is taken for granted, as in all Greek philosophy. Also implicit is a theory about the origins of war that was particularly associated with neo-Stoics. This was a “euhemerized” version of the Hesiodic myth of the golden age: The golden age was thought to have been a real historical period when all men lived in peace and plenty, until the rise of civilization brought private property, inequality, and warfare. Conquest is said here to be a perfectly legitimate method of acquiring property, but in view of the first sentence, that must mean through victory in a just war, into which the conquerors had been provoked by wrongdoers. The basic assumptions resemble those of Plato and Aristotle, except for the emphasis on the pacifism of primitive man (the implications of this idea will be examined shortly) and the absence of any notion of a special kind of holy war against barbarians or natural slaves: These are the contributions of Stoic egalitarianism to Roman thought.1
This is followed by an unusually clear statement of the principle that vengeance is a common duty, implying that a powerful state is morally obligated, under the right circumstances, to intervene in the affairs of its neighbors:
There are, on the other hand, two kinds of injustice—the one, on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being inflicted. For he who, under the influence of anger or some other passion, wrongfully assaults another seems, as it were, to be laying violent hands on a comrade; but he who does not prevent or oppose wrong, if he can, is just as guilty of wrong as if he deserted his parents or his friends or his country. (1.7.23 [trans. Miller])
In addition to the jus ad bellum, natural law requires the jus in bello: Vengeance must be taken in accordance with humanity (humanitas) and balance (<aequitas), with the significant qualification that follows:
In the case of a state in its external relations, the rights of war [iura belli] must be strictly observed … The only excuse, therefore, for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed; and when the victory is won, we should spare those who have not been blood-thirsty and barbarous in their warfare. (1.11.34-35 [trans. Miller])
[Justice demands that we] avenge ourselves upon those who have attempted to injure us, and visit them with such retribution as justice and humanity will permit. (2.5.18 [trans. Miller])
Thus far, there is nothing here that is particularly Roman, for Cicero was far more Hellenized than most Roman senators of his time and at his most Hellenic in On Duties. But even there, and much more so in some of Cicero’s other works, distinctively Latin aspects of his thought can be distinguished. Roman religiosity crops up even in On Duties. The rules of war are rooted in universal laws of nature, but the fetial law of Rome is their perfect expression. This is obviously Cicero, not Panaetius: “As for war, humane laws touching it are drawn up in the fetial code of the Roman people under all the guarantees of religion; and from this it may be gathered that no war is just, unless it is entered upon after an official demand for satisfaction has been submitted or warning has been given and a formal declaration made” (1.11.36 ([trans. Miller]). The third book of Cicero’s On the Republic (De republica), now lost except for fragments, apparently contained an argument that the practical Romans had made more contributions toward the development of an ideal state than the theoretical Greeks, mentioning the fetial rites as evidence of the Roman concern for strict morality in interstate relations. Two of these fragments were to have great influence on medieval and later European thought about warfare because they were quoted in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, an encyclopedia of classical learning compiled in the seventh century A.D.: “Wars undertaken without cause are unjust. For no just war can be waged without a cause, either to take revenge or to repel an enemy…. No war is held to be just unless it has been declared, unless it has been proclaimed, unless reparation has been demanded” (Etymologies 18.1 [author’s trans.]). These passages established the legalistic terms in which the problem of the morality of war has been discussed to the present day. We do not know how the two statements were connected in the original text, but they appear to be complementary. Taken together they lay down three conditions for a just war: There must be a formal declaration by proper authorities; this must include a charge, which must be one of two things, either an attempt to resist injuries or an attempt to avenge them; there must first be a demand for reparations, and the guilty party must be given a chance to satisfy this. The Roman contribution is the insistence on formal procedure, unknown to the Greeks because they had no institution comparable to the fetial priesthood.
There is little about religious matters in these treatises in which Cicero tries to sound like a Greek philosopher. More revealing are his speeches before Roman audiences, especially a passing remark in a speech he delivered before the Senate shortly before he wrote the Republic. He asks the rhetorical question “Who is there so mad as to believe in the gods and yet not believe that it is through the will of the gods that this great empire has arisen, has expanded, and has been preserved?” (On the Responses of the Haruspices 9.19, author’s trans.). No senator would have admitted in public his disbelief in the gods, and it would have been as difficult to find a senator expressing any doubts about the divine mission of the Roman empire.
Even philosophically trained Greeks were impressed by Roman piety. Not long afterward, Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote his history of early Rome for the express purpose of justifying Roman rule to his fellow Greeks, and in that work he made much of the fetial rites as the secret of Roman military success: No other people, he said, had taken such pains to make sure that all their wars were approved by the gods (Roman Antiquities 2.72).
Just Empire in the Late Republic
Greek orators could associate just warfare with just hegemony, speaking of the second as a sort of reward for the first. But they do not make this association with the same regularity as the Romans. The speech just quoted shows that Cicero and his colleagues assumed the gods had favored not only the preservation of the imperium—the usual Latin equivalent of the Greek hegemonia—but also its enlargement. In On Duties, Cicero called it the duty of every statesman to make the state expand in imperium, in lands, and in revenues (2.24.85). The Roman concept of the just war was, in the modern sense of this word, imperialistic.
The Romans thought the just imperium, like the just war, was just because it righted wrongs. The idea that a just hegemony should benefit its subjects was a commonplace in Greek thought, and Cicero doubtless found it in the Stoic treatise that was his source for On Duties, but there it appears in Roman dress. In discussing the laws of war, Cicero—clearly this is Cicero, not Panaetius—remarks that it was the Roman mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, not only to spare the Italian peoples they defeated but to grant them Roman citizenship, and Roman generals often became the patrons (patroni) of the very cities and nations they had conquered (1.11.35). Elsewhere (2.8.27), Cicero describes the Roman imperium as not so much an imperium as a patrocinium orbis terrae, a patronage of all the world—at least it was such for as long as the old Roman ways lasted, until the corruption of the constitution began in the time of Sulla the dictator, around 80 B.C. This nostalgia for the past is a leitmotiv in Latin literature, which will be examined more closely in the next chapter. The point to be emphasized here is that Cicero has interpreted the Greek theory of hegemony as a patron-client relationship. Patronage was an important feature of all ancient societies, but at Rome was extraordinarily pervasive and formalized. Roman society was a network of ties between patron (patronus) and client (cliens), between rich citizen and poor citizen, the former offering financial aid and the latter a political following. Roman senatorial families built up similar networks of clients among the provincials and allies, though Cicero’s claim that Roman generals normally became the patrons of the peoples they conquered is mythical. Cicero makes patronage a metaphor for the international system, casting the city of Rome as patron of the world, and all the peoples of the world as her grateful and loyal clients. The metaphor implies voluntary submission on the part of the clients, protection and support on the part of the patron. Greek theories of hegemony usually assumed that the lesser states within a hegemonic sphere would remain independent, but Cicero’s metaphors imply a dependent relationship, often entailing the bestowal of Roman citizenship. It should be emphasized that this high-flown language has little or no connection with Roman practices or concepts of empire during the period of the conquests: It is an idealized theory of the late republic, when the imperium was a long-established fact, and may be wholly the invention of Cicero.2
But the conviction behind it was widely shared. We find much the same notions repeated in Cicero’s speeches before Senate, law courts, and assemblies . A passing remark in the speech In Defense of Sextus Roscius is particularly interesting: The old Romans cultivated their own lands and were not covetous of the lands of other people, and therefore they added “lands and cities and nations” to the republic and “expanded the empire and the fame of the Roman people” (18.50). This seems to be based on a Greek rhetorical commonplace, examples of which I have cited from the works of Isocrates. But what Isocrates said was that the just city defends its land and never covets the land of others, and the unjust city does the opposite—this is the defensive hoplite ethic. The twist Cicero puts on the saying is Roman: The just city defends its land and acquires an empire. A fragment of his Republic contains the line “our people by defending their allies became masters of the whole world” (3.23.35).
We have seen that the Greeks perceived no contradiction between the desire for freedom and the desire to dominate. Thucydides summarized the Athenian character by saying Athenians were accustomed not only to being free but to ruling others. Cicero borrows this line in one of his last speeches, when he tried to arouse the Senate to resist Mark Antony by reminding the senators that their ancestors had gone to war not merely that they might be free but that they might rule (“non modo ut liberi essent, sed etiam ut imperarent,” Eighth Philippic 4.12), and he contrasted this attitude with the degeneracy of the modern Senate, which would not even fight for freedom. The Romans knew that the Greeks shared their hunger for hegemonic power, and much Roman rhetoric about it was of Greek origin. But the Romans believed they did it better. In his speeches in the Senate, Cicero repeatedly brags that Romans are unique in pursuit of laus and gloria, congratulates Romans on their generous sharing of citizenship with client nations, and speaks of it as a normal expectation that Roman governors should be expanding the boundaries of their provinces.
In several of these passages, Cicero says the empire covers the whole orbis terrae, the circuit of the earth. In his treatise On the Orator; we are told that oratory is one of the many benefits that Roman rule has brought to the entire world (1.4.14). When he wishes to praise a commander, Cicero assures the Senate that the general in question has extended or is in the process of extending the Roman empire to the ends of the earth.3 In Cicero’s time, Romans took it for granted that their imperium covered the whole world and often cited this fact as proof of divine mission.
Cicero’s early speech On the Manilian Law (66 B.C.) is of special interest because it was delivered before the Assembly and not the Senate, and therefore it provides evidence that even ordinary citizens shared the assumptions described earlier: The empire of the Romans, he says, is expansive and universal, and equally, it is righteous and divine. He tells the citizens that hunger for military glory is the special tradition of the Romans and the quality in which they surpass all other nations (2.6); it is a point of pride that Rome always took the most drastic vengeance for even the smallest slights, and the terrible sack of Corinth in 146 B.C. that resulted merely from an insult to a Roman ambassador is brought up as a glorious episode in Roman history (5.11); Rome always fought far from home, carrying the offensive to its enemies (12.32); but Rome is a just conqueror, so much so that other nations would rather be ruled by Romans than rule themselves (14.41).
The point about fighting far from home deserves attention, because it helps to explain how Romans could so easily conflate just warfare and just imperialism. The Romans were obsessed with the idea of the preventive strike, which was not a new idea. The Greeks, for instance, were familiar with it from the time Greek strategic thought began. The reasoning behind it was simple: Burn the wasps in their nest and keep the fighting far away from here, an obvious extension of the defensive hoplite ethic. But when the Romans use this rhetoric, the reader is frequently struck by their sharp eyes for wasps5 nests.
The best testimony to the Roman fascination with preventive strategies are the war commentaries of Julius Caesar, the only ancient historical works written by a major military leader and the only accounts any such commander has left of his own campaigns.4 A few years after Cicero reminded the citizens that Romans always fight far from Rome, Caesar, the proconsul of Gaul (the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis, then confined to the extreme south of modern France), launched the series of brilliant campaigns that suddenly extended the imperium to the Rhine River and the English Channel. He wrote his war commentaries to justify these conquests, for his conduct was being closely scrutinized by his enemies in the Senate, and the justifications he offers in these commentaries throw a harsh light on the common assumptions of the Roman elite about justice in war.
Caesar’s initial campaign against the migrating Helvetians in 58 B.C. is justified on the grounds that the Helvetians were approaching the borders of the Roman province and therefore constituted a potential threat; also, their intended destination was “not far” (non longe) from the province (it was in fact 130 miles away); moreover, he wished to avenge a defeat the Helvetians had inflicted upon Romans half a century earlier (Gallic Wars 1.7, 10, 14). Next, he marched to head off a German migration, after receiving an appeal for help from Gauls who were allies of Rome—he leaves the impression that all Gaul now looked to Rome for protection. He claims that if the Germans were allowed to settle in Gaul in large numbers, they might eventually threaten the Roman province in the south, and even Italy itself; this last suggestion is made to seem less implausible by reminding his readers of the invasions of the Cimbri and Teutones half a century earlier (1.30-33). Caesar informs the German king that he is merely defending Roman allies; but he adds that the Romans were in Gaul before the Germans and thus have a better right to rule the land (1.45). During the next year, 57 B.C., he carried war into the far north of Gaul on the grounds that the Belgic tribes were forming a conspiracy to attack the Roman sphere in the south (2.1-3). In 56, he invaded western Gaul on the mere suspicion that the Aquitanian tribes might join the alleged anti-Roman conspiracy, though he mentions, too, that these people had inflicted a defeat upon the Romans long ago (3.11, 20). He thought it no contradiction to say that these precautions were necessary because the Gauls, like all men, love freedom and hate servitude, and therefore would always be ready to resist the Romans at every opportunity (3.10). In 55, he invaded both Germany and Britain under the usual pretexts—particularly implausible in the case of the Britons—that these moves were necessary to forestall offenses against Roman provincials or allies (4.13, 16, 20).
It is also noticeable that Caesar describes his savage treatment of the enemy, including the massacre and enslavement of whole tribes, in the bluntest terms and clearly thinks this will make a good impression at Rome.
Setting out once more to harass the Eburones, Caesar sent out in all directions a large force of cavalry that he had collected from the neighboring tribes. Every village and every building they saw was set on fire; all over the country the cattle were either slaughtered or driven off as booty; and the crops, a part of which had already been laid flat by the autumnal rains, were consumed by the great numbers of horses and men. It seemed certain, therefore, that even if some of the inhabitants had escaped for the moment by hiding, they must die of starvation after the retirement of the troops. (6.43 [trans. S. A. Handford])
At the sack of Avaricum, he reports with pride that his soldiers butchered more than thirty thousand people, sparing neither age nor sex (7.28, 47). These acts, of course, are represented as reprisals for atrocities previously committed by the Gauls. On one occasion—the treacherous seizure of a group of German chiefs who had entered Caesar’s camp to parley—we know that there were protests in the Senate and that Cato, the Stoic, demanded that Caesar be handed over to the Germans for violating the laws of war. Treachery, not brutality, was generally thought the most heinous offense against the laws of war in antiquity, and Romans were supposed to display a special concern for the good faith of Rome. Cato the Censor, great–grandfather of this Cato, had instigated a famous prosecution of the praetor Galba in 149 B.C. for a similar act of treachery Galba had perpetrated in Spain. But the inquiry into Caesar’s conduct, which was of course politically motivated, came to nothing, and the manner in which Caesar describes this episode shows that he knew it would not be difficult to satisfy public opinion. He admits candidly that this was an act of premeditated duplicity; to save his fides he thinks it sufficient to simply assert that the German offer to negotiate must have been a trick, and as usual, he insists upon the need for prompt preventive action (4.13-14).
In that same year, 55 B.C., Cicero defended Caesar in the Senate in terms that show that Caesar had correctly gauged the mood of that body. The barbarous Gauls, the orator declared, have always been the greatest threat to Rome, yet until now Roman generals could do nothing but repel their attacks , even the great Marius who had defeated the Cimbri and Teutones. Only Caesar has carried the war to the Gauls, understanding that the only solution is to break and tame them (frangi domarique). Further, Caesar must be allowed to finish this work and extend the imperium over all Gaul or these enemies will attack again (On the Consular Provinces 30-35).
The Senate was familiar with the rhetoric of the preventive strike. According to Livy, the decision to invade the Hellenistic world in 200 B.C.—the most decisive break with traditional Roman foreign policy ever made—was supported by the argument that if Rome did not invade Macedon, the Macedonians would soon be in Italy (Livy 31.7).
Roman imperialism is best described as a “preventive,” not “defensive,” form of imperialism. There was nothing in either Roman or Greek military traditions to deny that just wars might be preventive, nor was there anything to even place any practical limitations on this assumption: There was much in Roman tradition to encourage it. P. A. Brunt has said, “Roman reactions to the possibility of a threat resembled those of a nervous tiger, disturbed when feeding.”5 The metaphor is arresting but not quite right, for tigers are not really that aggressive.
It was very important to Romans at all times, even in the cynical late republican age, to claim that all Rome’s wars were fought to repel or avenge injuries and to think of the imperium as a shield held over Rome’s grateful clients. But the past injuries might be very distant in time, the present threats very distant in space; the grateful clients might have been acquired yesterday for the purpose of providing pretexts for new wars and extending Roman influence into new areas. Thus the moralistic rhetoric can slide, without any evident sense of contradiction, into what seem to us open expressions of aggrandizement. Doubtless there was some conscious hypocrisy in all this. But I suggest that for the most part, we are dealing here with a unique pattern of values in which aggressive militarism and aggressive religiosity were inseparably tangled, buried so deeply in Roman aristocratic culture that it was difficult for the Romans to perceive any contradiction between just warfare and just imperialism.
Just War and Just Empire in the Principate6
Historians have tended to make a sharp distinction between the Roman republic and the Roman principate (a term modern historians use for the thinly disguised monarchy established by Augustus Caesar, circa 30 B.C.) and to think of the republic as a period of expansion and of the quasi-monarchy as a period when the frontiers were stabilized. Some of the literary sources from the latter period support this illusion. But in fact, expansion continued into the principate, as did the republican ideology of imperialism.
The propaganda of Augustus laid more emphasis on his image as world conqueror than any republican general had ever dared. In his Res gestae, a memoir composed by Augustus at the end of his life and inscribed on public monuments all over the empire, he declared in the opening sentence that he had “subjected the world to the power of the Roman people.” He had, in fact, added more territory to the empire than any single individual before him. The glorification of Rome as world empire is a recurrent theme in the Augustan poets, receiving its greatest literary expression in the Aeneid of Virgil, in which Rome is fated by the gods to rule the world from the beginning (Aeneid 1.278-279, 286-290; 3.714-718; 6.791-800; 7.601-615). In the histories of Livy, the concept of the just universal empire was anachronistically read back into the remote past. Even Hannibal is made to call Rome the caput orbis terrarum, capital of the world (Livy 21.30). The Roman generals who invaded the Hellenistic world in the early second century B.C., and likewise the Greeks they defeated, are given speeches in which all say that Rome is lord of the world, fights no unjust wars, and is revered by the human race next to the gods (Livy 36.17, 37.45, 37.54). In Livy, the practice of granting citizenship to conquered peoples is a “way of the ancestors” that goes back to the early republic (8.13). Dionysius of Halicarnassus contrasted Roman magnamity with the harsh treatment the Athenians and Spartans had dealt out to their subjects and attributed to this difference the failure of the Greek empires and the success of the Roman empire (Roman Antiquities 14.6).
The Augustan Age was the last great burst of Roman expansion, but much of the elite continued to expect military glory from that principes. The historian Tacitus, writing circa A.D. 100, blames both Augustus and Tiberius for failing to expand the empire (Annals 1.3, 4.32). He reports a probably apocryphal story that the dying Augustus added a clause to his will forbidding future emperors to expand the empire any further, and he comments that Augustus must have been motivated either by cowardice or by jealousy (Annals 1.11). No other possible motives even occur to Tacitus, and he clearly expects none to occur to his readers. He reports that when the emperor Claudius ordered his general Corbulo to withdraw from Germany, Corbulo, who feared the ridicule of the provincials, remarked sardonically that earlier Roman commanders had been more fortunate (“beati quondam duces Romani,” Annals 11.20), a statement implying that withdrawal was against all Roman tradition and that the Caesars had betrayed the military glory of the republic. Tacitus’s biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, who conquered much of Britain, contains one of the most extraordinary examples of Roman preventive imperialism: He says that Agricola planned to invade Ireland, not out of any present fear but rather in anticipation of future threats (“in spem magis quam ob formidinem”), for Agricola thought the Irish might someday invade the Roman empire—meaning, apparently, not only the British province but also the provinces on the continent (Agricola 24). Through the fourth century A.D., some of the Caesars continued to style themselves “extenders of the empire” (propagatores imperii) on their coins, though the claim was usually false, and all must have known it.
To us, it seems odd that Romans from the late republic on believed so consistently that Rome ruled all the world, because, of course, this was not literally true at any time. But they had borrowed the concept of world empire from the Greeks, and imperium translated “hegemony.” None of the previous world empires had literally ruled the entire world, either. In the second century B.C., Polybius called Rome the master of the entire oikoumene, the inhabited world, including the Hellenistic kingdoms, over which Rome at that time exercised only a loose hegemony. When Romans began to think of themselves as holding the lordship of the world, they interpreted these phrases in the same loose fashion. The imperium was always understood to include the allies of Rome, and the Roman concept of “our allies and friends” (socii et amicii) could be conveniently vague. The Res gestae of Augustus managed to suggest that Augustus had achieved some sort of leadership over the Germans and Dacians to the north and over the Parthians and Indians (!) to the east. If these shaky pretensions, which sometimes rested upon nothing but the existence of a previous diplomatic exchange with the alleged “client,” were taken at face value, then it would be possible to believe that Rome had a hegemonic position, or was at the point of achieving one, over practically the entire inhabited earth, which the Romans, of course, thought was far smaller than it is. (Roman geographers commonly believed that the oikoumene or orbis terrarum extended about ten thousand miles from east to west and four thousand miles from north to south.7) So long as the empire continued to expand intermittently, the claim to world hegemony seemed realistic enough, and though few additions were made after Augustus, the pretension had become too habitual to be dropped.
The continuance of the tradition of expansion is more difficult to understand than is that of universality. Although expansion had practically stopped, a good part of the elite still expected the Caesars to expand the frontiers, and Caesars who did not were widely blamed. We are confronted with the paradox of a continuing glorification of conquest in an empire that in practice had ceased to conquer long ago, a situation that produced tensions. By the second century A.D., when the reality of the stable frontier could no longer be denied, a body of influential opinion consciously opposed to further expansion can be discerned within the Roman elite.
Anti-Imperialist Currents
The Complaint of Peace
The literature of the Roman Empire is filled with criticisms of war and empire, especially from Stoics and Cynics, some of which is so extreme it has been called a “flirtation with pacifism.”8 But this rhetoric is not as radical as it may sound to us, for we tend to forget the grim bellicist assumptions that lie behind all ancient literature. When Latin and Greek poets compose elegant lyrics on the theme that making love is better than making war, they are displaying their wit, not making a political point of any kind.9 We find in the philosophers and orators many denunciations of greed and selfish ambition, which do have a political point, but the point is not to condemn the just war, only to condemn selfish ambition and greed. The ancient doctrine of the just war invariably condemned wars fought for such motives, as these were unjust wars by definition, and a more general critique of warfare was not normally implied.
Cicero’s warnings against glory in On Duties are perfectly typical:
The great majority of people, however, when they fall a prey to ambition for either military or civil authority, are carried away by it so completely that they quite lose sight of the claims of justice … For whenever a situation is of such a nature that not more than one can hold preeminence in it, competition for it usually becomes so keen that it is an extremely difficult matter to hold a “fellowship inviolate” [sancta societas, a quotation from the old Latin poet Ennius]. We saw this proved but now in the effrontery of Gaius [Julius] Caesar, who, to gain that sovereign power which by a depraved imagination he had conceived in his fancy, trod underfoot all laws of gods and men. But the trouble about this matter is that it is in the greatest souls and the most brilliant geniuses that we usually find ambitions for civil and military authority, for power, and for glory, springing up; and therefore we must be the more heedful not to go wrong in that direction. (On Duties 1.8.26)
Most people think that the achievements of war are more important than those of peace; but this opinion needs to be corrected. For many men have sought occasions for war from the mere ambition for fame. (1.22.74 [trans. Miller])
The latter passage is followed by a list of statesmen who achieved more in peace than in war; but the “achievements of peace” Cicero has in mind include planning for war, and one of his examples is Cato the Censor, whose relentless policies led to the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. To be absolved of the taint of ambition for fame (gloriae cupiditas), it is sufficient not to want a triumph for oneself. Nor is there any hint that this ambition is not in itself a desirable quality, for only the perversions of it are censured. The examples are Roman, and the warlike emphasis may be also, but it is unlikely Cicero found anything essentially different in his Greek Stoic sources.
There are, however, some other Stoic or Stoicizing texts suggestive of a more profound critique of warfare. The neo-Stoic theory of a peaceable golden age has already been mentioned. The Stoic philosopher and historian Posidonius, disciple of Panaetius, wrote an account of this primeval and pacific period, which has been transmitted by Seneca (Epistle 90). It is a familiar motif in the Latin poets. The best-known version in later centuries was that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.76-215):
The first millennium was the age of gold;
Then living creatures trusted one another…
No cities climbed behind high walls and bridges;
No brass-lipped trumpets called, nor clanging swords,
Nor helmets marched the streets, country and town
Had never heard of war: and seasons traveled
Through the years of peace.
The age of gold was succeeded by the increasingly violent ages of silver, bronze, and finally iron, when
men invaded
Entrails of earth down deeper than the river
Where Death’s shades weave in darkness underground;
Where hidden from the sight of men Jove’s treasures
Were locked in night. There, in his sacred mines,
All that drives men to avarice and murder
Shone in the dark: the loot was dragged to light
And War, inspired by curse of iron and gold,
Lifted blood-clotted hands and marched the earth.
(trans. Horace Gregory)
But like all golden-age myths this is a negative and pessimistic pacifism, for there is never any notion of reviving the lost golden age, and despite their nostalgia for lost innocence, these authors do not regard the rise of civilization as by any means a misfortune. Mostly, the golden age is a handy metaphor used to castigate immorality and greed; for example, Seneca’s Epistle 94 contains another turn on the well-worn conceit that Nature put metals deep underground so that men would not be tempted by greed and warfare:
Gold and silver, with the iron, which, because of the gold and silver, never brings peace, she has hidden away, as if they were dangerous things to trust to our keeping. It is we ourselves who have dragged them into the light of day to the end that we might fight over them; it is we ourselves who, tearing away the superincumbent earth, have dug out the causes and tools of our own destruction. (94.57 [trans. R. M. Gummere])
These metaphors reflect the Greek philosophical doctrine that the original cause of warfare was greed for land and wealth. But this teaching implied that greed for land and wealth is an unjust cause of war. The Greek philosophers did not think wars should be fought for booty, except against barbarians; the Romans denied that they ever fought wars for such motives against anybody. The point of the golden-age motif is always to condemn unjust wars and unjust empires, never just ones.
It is true that sometimes these critiques are so generalized as to leave the suggestion that all, or almost all, wars are fought for these improper motives. In the same Epistle 94, Seneca condemns Alexander the Great, Marius, Pompey, and Julius Caesar for their greed and ambition. He is fond of the rhetorical commonplace that the so-called conquerors conquered the earth but could not conquer themselves: “Marius led the army, but ambition Marius” (Marius exercitus, Marium ambitio ducebat) (94.66); “Alexander wanted to control everything except his passions” (Id enim egerat, ut omnia potius haberet in potestate quam adfectus) (113.29 [author’s trans.]). Seneca can describe warfare as the gloriosum scelus, the crime of glory—a deliberate devaluation of the word gloria—and can affect shock that we hang men for murdering individuals and reward them for the murder of nations (Epistle 95.30-32). The Stoic preachers Epictetus (.Discourse 1.22) and Dio Chrysostom (Orations 13.35, 17.10, 34.51) sometimes speak as though all warfare, from the Trojan War to their own time, has been motivated by greed and all other motives have been false pretexts. Alexander the Great is usually a monster in Stoic writings, often contrasted with Diogenes the Dog, founder of Cynicism, a great hero to both Stoic and Cynic. Tales about the meeting between Alexander and Diogenes are legion, and Diogenes always gets the better of these exchanges, the point of which is always the folly of conquest.10
Another popular historical scheme derived from Greek philosophy was the succession of world empires. Like the golden age, this idea contained an anti-imperialist bias. The belief that world empires are fated to fall could easily suggest that they deserved to fall, even that their very rise was evil. In Dio Chrysostom’s oration On Wealth, the rise and fall of the Assyrian, Median, Persian, and Macedonian empires are simply examples of the wretched consequences of greed (79.6). He does not mention the last world empire, but perhaps he did not need to, the implications for Rome being clear enough.
Both the golden age and the succession-of-empires theories are prominent motifs in the world history written in the Augustan Age by Pompeius Trogus. A Roman citizen of Gallic origin, he did not belong to the circles that produced most Roman historiography (for which see the next chapter). A universal history was something new in Latin, so Trogus’s Philippic Histories were necessarily based on Greek models, as his title acknowledged; and since this work survived in the form of a Latin epitome written by Justin in the second or third century A.D., it became an important source for historical theory in later times. Trogus portrayed the earliest period of human history as peaceable, using terms that suggested the idea of defensive warfare: “It was their custom to guard the boundaries of their empires, not to advance them” (Fines imperii tueri magis quam proferre mos erat). He maintained that the practice of going to war for greed was introduced by the evil King Ninus of Assyria (Justin 1.1). Trogus made much of the Scythians as a people practicing perfect peace and justice, owning no gold or silver, coveting nothing, never harming their neighbors (Justin 2.2-5, 9.1-3, 12.2). He used the Scythians as a foil to the aggressive world empires of the Persians and Macedonians and as an implicit foil to Rome. That conquerors come to grief when they invade poor nations was a stock item in the succession-of-empires tradition, going back to Herodotus; but usually, it is the warlikeness of the poor nations that is emphasized, not their peacefulness. Trogus may have influenced the Latin history of Alexander the Great written in the first century A.D. by Quintus Curtius Rufus. Curtius brings Alexander onto the Scythian steppes so that his ambition can be rebuked by the just Scythians, who play the role usually assigned to Diogenes the Dog or to various Indian Brahmans in the Alexander legend (Curtius 7.8).
We should remind ourselves again that all these texts, even when they sound like blanket condemnations of warfare, are speaking of unjust wars. We should not read into them any criticism of just wars fought to preserve freedom, such as the Scythians practiced. But there are some Stoic passages that seem to criticize even wars for freedom. In his Oration 38, Dio Chrysostom lists the reasons men go to war—rulership, freedom, territory, dominion over the sea—to make the point that all wars are bad, with no suggestion that wars for freedom belong in any different category (38.16-19). His oration On Freedom plays with the irony that men fight wars for a false “freedom,” when the only true freedom lies within (80.3-4). And here is Epictetus on freedom:
Fix your eyes on these examples [Socrates and Diogenes], if you wish to be free, if you set your desires on freedom as it deserves … Men hang themselves, or cast themselves down headlong, nay sometimes whole cities perish for the sake of what the world calls “freedom,” and will you not repay to God what he has given, when he asks it, for the sake of true freedom, the freedom which stands secure against all attack? (Discourse 4.1.171 [transi. P. E. Matheson])
But when we read such passages we tend to forget the idealizing tendencies of classical moral and political philosophy, which made possible very elevated standards precisely because these were not expected to have much practical effect in the real world. Stoics carried this to extremes. Stoic ethics was meant for an ideal wise man, a morally perfect human being; when Stoics contrast true freedom and false freedom they mean the true freedom of the wise man. But Stoics believed there were probably no wise men living and perhaps had been none since Socrates and Diogenes; therefore to hold up this ideal standard was not to suggest that men who live in the world as it is should not fight and die for freedom. Stoics, especially the neo-Stoics who followed Panaetius, accepted the existence of a sphere of second-best ethics for those who were not wise but were “progressing” toward wisdom, which is to say, for people in the real world. And they accepted that at this level, external values like freedom, though not to be compared with the inner virtue of the wise man, possessed a certain worth of their own. Even the false freedom was worth fighting for.
Stoics repeatedly contrasted the king and the tyrant and thought one of the main differences between them was that the good king goes to war for the right reasons and the tyrant for frivolous reasons, like greed and false ambition. (Dio Chrysostom has Diogenes the Dog make this comparison in his Oration 6.50.) The true king is compared to a brave bull who protects his herd from lions (Dio, Oration 2.69; Epictetus, Discourse 3.22). Epictetus says that the emperor Trajan brought peace to the world so that people could travel anywhere without fear of war or brigandage; but he also says this is not the same as the inner peace that only comes from philosophy (Discourse 3.13). His point is to demonstrate the superiority of the higher sphere of values, in the usual Stoic fashion; no one in his audience would have taken him to mean that the peace of Caesar was not worth having. Even the inner peace of the wise man is described by Epictetus through a military metaphor, albeit a defensive one: The wise man or progressor toward wisdom is at peace with all men, like a well-fortified and well-supplied city that can laugh at besieging armies (.Discourse 4.5). Seneca recognizes that the philosopher owes a debt to the ruler, who fights wars so that the philosopher can enjoy peace and find his inner freedom (Epistle 73.9-10). Stoics believed that even a wise man might fight in a just war. Epictetus, in the same discourse in which he scoffs at false freedom, praises Socrates for doing his military duty (4.1.159). Seneca praises Cato the Younger, a great hero of Roman Stoicism, because Cato fought for true gloria in the civil wars, in contrast with the false glory pursued by his contemporaries Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus (.Epistles 95.37, 69-73; 104.29-33). Elsewhere, it is true, Seneca wonders whether a philoso-Ph er like Cato should have entered politics at all (.Epistle 14.12-14). There was always some ambivalence among Stoics about whether a philosopher should become a ruler, but there was none about the place of just warfare among the duties of a ruler. Even Alexander the Great was not invariably cast as a tyrant. Panaetius mentions him along with Cyrus the Great and Pericles as one of the good rulers (Cicero, On Duties 2.5.16). Arrian, who was at least a casual Stoic and a follower of Epictetus, wrote a history of Alexander that brings in the usual moralistic anecdotes in which Alexander suffers rebuke at the hands of Diogenes the Dog and the Hindu sages (Anabasis of Alexander 7.1-2), but this does not prevent Arrian from taking a generally favorable view of Alexander’s conquests (1.12, 7.28-30).
In short, Stoic “pacifism” consists of a set of moral commonplaces about the dangers of greed and ambition. This traditional rhetoric could sometimes have an effect on policy. During the civil war of A.D. 69, the Senate sent embassies to the rival commanders to persuade them to keep the peace, and one of these included the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, who harangued the troops about the blessings of peace and the hazards of war (Tacitus, Histories 3.81), probably using some of the Stoic arguments cited earlier. The fact that he was a noted Stoic may have lent extra credibility to his mission, but there was nothing new about his arguments. As the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetoric to Alexander had advised centuries earlier, any orator who wished to persuade his audience to make peace should harp on these themes. The fact that this was a civil war made the arguments for peace particularly cogent. We cannot say that Musonius would not have been equally ready to use the traditional arguments for war had he thought the cause just.
The Seventh Epode of Horace, another locus classicus of “antiwar” sentiment, also derives its point from the fact that the poet is addressing the subject of civil war only:
Why are your hands grasping the swords that have once been sheathed? Has too little Roman blood been shed on field and flood—not that the Roman might burn the proud towers of jealous Carthage, or that the Briton, as yet unscathed, might descend the Sacred Way in fetters, but that, in fulfillment of the Parthians’ prayers, this city might perish by its own right hand? Such habit ne’er belonged to wolves or lions, whose fierceness is turned only against beasts of other kinds, (trans. C. E. Bennett)
The contrast between the virtuous beasts and corrupt civilized man is another commonplace, a variant on the golden-age theme. But the lions and wolves are better than men because they do not practice intraspecific conflict, which is here equated with civil war; just warfare is the equivalent of predation and other interspecific conflict, as though Carthaginians and Britons belonged to another species.
This Stoic tradition—as it may loosely be described, though its rhetoric was used by many other writers—was not without effect in curbing warfare, but it is better called an anti-imperialistic rather than an antiwar rhetoric. It encouraged closer scrutiny of the motives for so-called just wars, and it has influenced the literature of pacifism to the present day. In the Renaissance, Erasmus and his followers collected these classical texts and in such satires as the Complaint of Peace turned the tradition into a genuine antiwar polemic, not by denying the validity of just warfare in principle but by arguing that in practice almost all wars are unjust. This strategy was suggested to Erasmus by some of the classical authors cited earlier. But in ancient times, the complaint of peace never explicitly went so far as to deny that just wars existed.
The Wall of the World
It is more significant to find this moralistic rhetoric occasionally used to advocate a general policy of defense. There is no doubt that by the second century A.D., some members of the elite were highly suspicious of any further attempt to expand the empire. At this time a new empirewide elite was developing, vociferously claiming to continue the old Roman mores but in reality less and less dominated by the old Roman code of honor and glory. By the reign of Trajan, who was the most ambitious conqueror among the post-Augustan Caesars, some members of this elite were becoming vocal in their opposition to expansion.
The Fourth Oration of Dio Chrysostom, On Kingship, was probably delivered before Trajan around A.D. 100, when the emperor was about to embark upon his conquest of Mesopotamia.11 It is another retelling of the Diogenes-Alexander meeting, in which the Cynic reproves Alexander for his insatiable ambition. This is clearly an oblique criticism of Trajan, who openly sought to emulate Alexander; Dio, who sometimes called himself a Cynic, just as openly casts himself in the role of Diogenes. At about the same time, Epictetus, another Stoic teacher with Cynic sympathies, told his audience that wars are among the supreme examples of human folly and ignorance and offered a list of such wars, starting with the Trojan War, which he said was over nothing but a pretty woman, and ending with the current Roman wars against the Getae—an undisguised reference to Trajan’s conquest of Dacia (.Discourse 2.22).
Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, abruptly reversed Trajan’s policy and withdrew from the new eastern conquests. This policy clearly met with the approval of the imperial bureaucrat Suetonius, who wrote his Lives of the Caesars under Hadrian. This is a revisionist account of the history of the principate, which consistently debunks conquest and conquerors. Suetonius does not accept Julius Caesar’s justification for the conquest of Gaul. According to him, Caesar actually went about picking quarrels with neighbors, even allies, of Rome on the flimsiest of pretexts; he implies that Caesar was really after money—the invasion of Britain is said to have been motivated by Caesar’s greed for pearls (Life of Julius 24, 47). Augustus, on the other hand, receives Suetonius’s praise on the grounds that he never tried to expand the empire (Life of Augustus 21). This was an absurd piece of revisionism, contradicted by Augustus’s own Res gestae, which was on display on public inscriptions all over the empire; but Augustus was the model emperor, and those who opposed Trajan’s expansionism had to claim somehow that it was not in the spirit of Augustus. Among the more recent Caesars, Domitian is criticized for going to war without good cause (Life of Domitian 6), and had Suetonius thought it politic to continue his biographies any further, he would doubtless have criticized Trajan on the same grounds.
Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, continued his policy of retrenchment. When the canon of ideal Caesars was fixed in the late second century A.D., it consisted of Augustus, Trajan, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius, three of whom spent much of their reigns in warfare; but the absence of military activity in Antoninus’s reign did not disqualify him. It should be noted, however, that Antoninus was said to have intimidated his enemies by reputation alone, so that he did not have to go to war (Victor 15.1). The Romans still thought of the peaceable man as the one who, in the words of Isocrates, is always prepared for war.
The traditional rhetoric went on through the Antonine Age, but now there is clear evidence for the spread of a defensive mentality that implicitly rejected the idea of expansion. The most striking literary testimony to this new mentality is the Roman Oration that the celebrated Greek rhetorician Aelius Aristides delivered in A.D. 143 to honor the anniversary of the founding of Rome. Here, the universality of Rome is a repeated theme, but the theme of expansion, which had normally accompanied it in the literature of the late republic and early principate, is altogether absent. Instead, the orator uses the recurrent metaphor of a walled city. He speaks as if all the human race lives within the walls of this world-city, by which he means all of the human race that matters. It is acknowledged that there are some peoples left outside the empire (otherwise, of course, there would be no need for a wall around it), but these are not worth including: “There are no sections which you have omitted, neither city nor tribe nor harbor nor district, except possibly some that you condemned as worthless. The Red Sea and the Cataracts of the Nile and Lake Maeotis, which formerly were said to lie on the boundaries of the earth, are like the courtyard walls to the house which is this city of yours” (28).12 The Roman empire is said to far exceed in size the empires of the Persians and the Macedonians because it extends much farther west than either (the fact that both extended much farther east than Rome ever did goes unmentioned). Rome equally exceeds the earlier empires in justice: “Of all who ever gained empire you alone rule over men who are free” (36). The Athenian and the Spartan empires failed because they did not know “how to rule with justice and with reason” (58).
What another city is to its own boundaries and territory, this city is to the boundaries and territory of the entire civilized world, as if the latter were a country district and she had been appointed common town. It might be said that this one citadel is the refuge and assembly place of all perioeci or of all who dwell in outside demes. (61)
You did not forget walls, but these you placed around the empire, not the city. (80)
An encamped army like a rampart encloses the civilized world in a ring. (82)
It is right to pity only those outside your hegemony, if indeed there are any, because they lose such blessings. (99 [my italics])
This notion that the empire already included all the human race worth ruling was common in the Antonine Age. Pausanias in his Description of Greece asserts that the only peoples left outside Roman rule had been deliberately left out owing to their worthlessness (1.9.5). He praises Antoninus Pius because the emperor never went to war unless attacked, in which case he always punished the invaders (8.43.3). Appian of Alexandria, Pausanius’s contemporary, presents an even more exaggerated version of Antonine universalism in the preface to his Roman History:
Possessing the best part of the earth and sea they [the Romans] have, on the whole, aimed to preserve their empire by the exercise of prudence, rather than to extend their sway indefinitely over poverty-stricken and profitless tribes of barbarians, some of whom I have seen at Rome offering themselves, by their ambassadors, as its subjects, but the emperor would not accept them because they would be of no use to him. They give kings to a great many other nations whom they do not wish to have under their own government. On some of these subject nations they spend more than they receive from them, deeming it dishonourable to give them up even though they are costly. They surround the empire with great armies and they garrison the whole stretch of land and sea like a single stronghold. (Preface 7 [trans. Horace White])
All who are outside the Roman empire are assumed to be Roman clients. The notion that the empire already includes everyone worth including implies, of course, that there is no further need for expansion.
As we have seen, the old ideology of expansion nevertheless persisted, and at the end of the second century A.D., some of the Severan emperors attempted new conquests, especially Caracalla, who modeled himself on Alexander the Great and dreamed of seizing Mesopotamia. The historian Cassius Dio, a Roman senator of Greek origin related to the Stoic orator Dio Chrysostom, left an oblique criticism of Caracalla’s policies in his Roman History. There already existed a tradition that Augustus had been opposed to expansion, and Dio elaborates it: He claims that Augustus left a will explicitly forbidding his successors to enlarge the empire on the grounds that it would become too large to defend (dysphylakton) (Dio 54.9, 56.33). He condemns Domitian and other emperors who went to war unnecessarily (67.4). He praises Hadrian for living in peace; but one should note that even Dio must add the traditional qualification—Hadrian was able to live at peace only because he was always prepared for war (69.9).13
Notes
1. Not all Stoics believed in human equality. A fragment of Posidonius shows that he accepted the Aristotelian doctrine that some peoples are naturally servile. But there is no reason to think this was intended as a justification for the Roman empire, as some have thought. See Posidonius, ed. Ludwig Edelstein and I. G. Kidd (Cambridge, 1988), frag. 60, with commentary; and Peter Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley, 1984), 351. The fragments of the third book of Cicero’s On the Republic show that it contained a similar doctrine of natural slavery. But no such doctrine appears in the more mature political philosophy of Cicero’s On Duties.
2. See the full discussion of this problem by Gruen (Hellenistic World, 158-200), who concludes it is unlikely that the terminology of patronage was ever applied to interstate relations during the period of Roman ascendancy.
3. Cicero, Defense of Balbus 64 (speaking of Caesar); Defense of Sestus 67 (of Pompey); On Catiline 3.26 (Pompey); and On the Consular Provinces 3Off. (Pompey and Caesar).
4. J. H. Collins, “Caesar as Political Propagandist,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang des Römischen Welt I, vol. 1, ed. Hildegard Temporini (Berlin, 1972), 922-966.
5. P. A. Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes (Oxford, 1990), 307. On Roman concepts of empire, see especially Brunt, “Roman Imperial Illusions,” and other essays collected in Roman Imperial Themes; Benjamin Isaac, The lim its of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford, 1990); D. C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (Ithaca, 1967), especially the chapter on gloria.
6. For the policy of Augustus, see Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes; Peter Gruen, “The Imperial Policy of Augustus,” in Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate, ed. K. A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher (Berkeley, 1990), 395-416; Josiah Ober, “Tiberius and the Political Testament of Augustus,” Historia 31 (1982), 306-328. Attitudes toward expansion in the later principate are discussed by J. B. Campbell, The Emperor and the Roman Army, 31 B.C.-A.D. 235 (Oxford, 1984), 382-401.
7. J. C. Mann, “The Frontiers of the Principate,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römisches Welt, II, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1974), 508-533.
8. Harry Sidebottom, “Philosophers’ Attitudes to Warfare Under the Principate,” in War and Society in the Roman World, ed. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London, 1993), 241-264. Other discussions of philosophers’ attitudes to war include 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; and Christopher Pelling, “Plutarch: Roman Heroes and Greek Culture,” in Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society, ed. Miriam Griffin and Jonathan Barnes (Oxford, 1989), 199-232.
9. Duncan Cloud, “Roman Poetry and Anti-Militarism,” in War and Society in the Roman World, 113-138.
10. On the Stoic view of Alexander, see Brunt, “From Epictetus to Arrian,” Athenaeum n.s. 55 (1977), 19-48; and J. R. Fears, “The Stoic View of the Career and Character of Alexander the Great,” Philologus 118 (1974), 113-130.
11. John Moles, “The Date and Purpose of the Fourth Kingship Oration of Dio Chrysostom,” Classical Antiquity 2 (1983), 251-278.
12. Translated with commentary by J. H. Oliver, “The Ruling Power. A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century After Christ Through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 43, pt. 4 (Philadelphia, 1953).
13. Meyer Reinhold and P. M. Swan, “Cassius Dio’s Assessment of Augustus,” in Between Republic and Empire, 155-173.