A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity

Sheila L. Ager

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350385726
• eBook ISBN: 9781350102767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A Cultural History of Peace presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers over 2500 years of history, charting the evolving nature and role of peace throughout history.

This volume, A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity, explores peace in the period from 500 BC to 800 AD. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Peace set, this volume presents essays on the meaning of peace, peace movements, maintaining peace, peace in relation to gender, religion and war and representations of peace.

A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on peace in the classical era.

CHAPTER ONE

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Definitions of Peace

SARAH BOLMARCICH

“Peace” is a word slippery with meaning. This is no less true in English than it is in Latin and Greek.¹ During the holiday season, Christians speak or sing of “peace on the earth, goodwill to men,” where peace means living in mutual harmony, either between individuals or between groups, including countries. When someone is arrested for “disturbing the peace,” the charge refers to their causing a commotion within their community and violating citizens’ sense of public order and safety. If your therapist tells you to be “at peace with yourself” or to “make your peace” with an issue, it means to let it go, to accept yourself, to achieve an internal state of tranquility and serenity. Those who die are exhorted to “rest in peace” and let their death be the end of any conflicts they experienced, rather than haunt the living.

Even within the field of international relations, “peace” has varied meanings. When the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany after negotiating with Chancellor Adolf Hitler first the Munich Agreement (essentially an attempt at appeasement of Germany by allowing it to annex German-speaking portions of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland), and then the Anglo-German Agreement, he boldly stated, “I believe it is peace for our time … Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” Subsequent events—the Second World War and the Blitz on London—made of Chamberlain a supreme ironist. What he meant by peace was “no future war”: he did not sign an official treaty of peace, ending a war, merely a vague statement of future peace between England and Germany. The Treaty of Versailles, by contrast, was an official peace treaty ending the state of war in Europe from 1914–1918; that it also sowed the seeds for future war does not change this.

Here, peace is either the absence of war or conflict and the presence of a passive harmony or tranquility (negative peace), as the examples in the first paragraph attest, or it is, as in the second paragraph, a state that must be striven for, that has to be actively achieved by the fulfillment of certain conditions, either stated or unstated (positive peace), such as the payment of war reparations or the laying down of arms or the giving of hostages. There is a tendency today to believe that peace is the “natural” state in which humans would live, were it not for social tensions, war, or other conflicts. This is not a point of view either the Greeks or the Romans would have recognized, although a few of their philosophers might have dreamt of it. Rather, those who claim peace is a natural state are really referencing a state of passivity, negative peace; successful, positive peace, just like the conduct of war, requires effort and planning.² It is in this context that the Greek and Roman attitudes—and their use of this extremely elastic word—must be read.

THE GREEKS

The Greeks had several words that could be equivalent to the English meanings of “peace” outlined above. Libations to the gods, known as spondai, are often mentioned in the context of making peace, and so are sometimes taken to mean a peace treaty or truce.³ Eirēnē is an extremely flexible word that covers both legal peace and informal peace, as well as peace in interpersonal relationships. Hēsychia refers to peace within oneself, a state of tranquility or serenity; other words like galēnē sometimes had a similar meaning. This section takes a closer look at spondai and eirēnē, considering what they meant to the Greeks, and finally asking whether the Greeks had any notion of positive peace at all.

Spondai

The term spondai is used as early as the Homeric poems to indicate “an agreement ratified by libations” (Cunliffe 1977, s.v. σπονδαί). It is used only twice in Homer, as a formula, referring to the shaking of right hands (later called dexiosis) and the pouring of unwatered wine to seal a compact. The first instance occurs after the near-revolt of the Achaian army in the Iliad: Nestor sarcastically comments that the leaders toss into the fire all their compacts and oaths (2.341). This must be a reference to the Oath of Tyndareus, intended to ensure peace in Greece between the princes who were the suitors of Helen by guaranteeing that all would abide by her choice of a husband and all would come to her husband’s aid if she were abducted. In this instance, a spondai would be trying to build a lasting foundation for peace, but on the basis of deterrence—negative peace. The other instance refers to a violation of a temporary truce in order to allow Menelaos and Paris to fight in single combat over Helen (Il. 4.159). Here the intent of the libations has been violated, but peace was not the goal of the libations; rather, it was the settlement of a conflict with the least harm done to the masses of men fighting on each side at Troy. The truce only guaranteed that no one would participate in the conflict except for Menelaos and Paris.

The Iliadic references leave a slightly confused picture, describing as they do two distinct agreements with different goals. The word does not recur in the sense of “truce” or “peace treaty” until the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, when Greece was torn by a number of successive wars, internal and external.⁴ Herodotos uses the word in a general sense of “truce” with a temporary or finite purpose (1.21; 7.149). Aischines uses it to describe a five-year truce around 450 BCE (2.172). There was of course the Olympic truce (Thuc. 5.49) and a truce during the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Aeschin. 2.133; IG I³ 6; IEleus. 138.150), both of which lasted no more than a few weeks.

Spondai is used by Thucydides to refer to the Thirty Years’ Peace (1.35, 44, 78, 87, 146), to the Peace of Nikias (5.18, 21, 30; 6.7), and to a peace between the Spartans and the Argives (5.76). These three peace treaties all brought some form of hostilities to an end: the Thirty Years’ Peace, the so-called undeclared “First Peloponnesian War,” and the Peace of Nikias, which was to last for fifty years, the Archidamian War; the agreement between the Spartans and the Argives, which countered an earlier hundred-year Athenian treaty with Argos, Elis, and Mantinea, was to last for fifty years as well (Thuc. 5.47, 79).

The Peace of Nikias and the Thirty Years’ Peace were notable failures when viewed as instruments of diplomacy seeking a lasting peace. The latter lasted fifteen years, half of its term, and the former—depending on whether you were an Athenian or a Spartan—a mere three to six years (Thuc. 5.56). Both treaties were vitiated by their focus on either preserving or returning to the status quo that had existed in Greece prior to the hostilities they sought to end; they did not address the pressing questions behind those hostilities, such as Athenian imperialism. Additionally, the Peace of Nikias was an essentially toothless document because Sparta’s allies did not sign it, and the fulfillment of several key provisions was dependent on those allies’ cooperation (Thuc. 5.3, 18, 39, 40).

All three of these treaties—the Thirty Years’ Peace, the Peace of Nikias, and the Spartan peace with the Argives—had gain in mind: not tangible gain but the gain of time. The duration of each was to be at least a generation, a long enough period for circumstances to change, either peaceably or with an eye to military gain, as each side husbanded its resources for the next round of conflict. Herodotos makes exactly this point, as the Argives consider medizing and making a thirty-years’ truce with the Persians: “it was important to them to secure the thirty-years’ truce (spondai), to give their sons the chance of growing up during the period of peace” (7.149.1). Although their set durations might seem to indicate that these treaties were meant to establish a long-lasting positive peace, in fact they were merely truces measured in decades.

Spondai vs. eirēnē

Spondai is a word very much belonging to the fifth century BCE; its use in literature and epigraphy declines drastically thereafter. In epigraphy, eirēnē begins to be used much more frequently in the fourth century BCE, although its use too dates back to Homer; a similar phenomenon occurs in surviving literary evidence. Why this chronological shift should happen can only be speculated upon; it may parallel a more legalistic tone to Greek diplomacy in the fourth century, such as the use of more detailed oaths. But the Greeks also recognized other differences between the two, and fourth-century authors appeared to be at special pains to distinguish them. For instance, Andokides in On the Peace with Sparta observes:

There is a wide difference between a peace (eirēnē) and a truce (spondai). A peace is a settlement of differences between equals; a truce is the dictation of terms to the conquered by the conquerors after victory in war, exactly as the Spartans laid down after their victory over us that we should demolish our walls, surrender our fleet, and restore our exiles. The agreement made then was a forced truce (spondai) upon dictated terms; whereas today you are considering a peace (eirēnē).

—11; trans. Maidment

Another preoccupation of fourth-century diplomacy was at least the pretense of equality between allies or signatories to a treaty. Oaths were mutually exchanged when making treaties, for instance, and they were almost always the same oath, with the names of the states involved reversed. The fifth century, by contrast, had practiced equivalency of exchange—protection by Athens in exchange for tribute payments, for example—or straightforward domination. Andokides’ distinction also brings to mind the distinction between positive and negative peace mentioned at the beginning of this ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Definitions of Peace
• 2 Human Nature, Peace, and War
• 3 Peace, War, and Gender
• 4 Peace, Pacifism, and Religion
• 5 Representations of Peace
• 6 Peace Movements
• 7 Peace, Security, and Deterrence
• 8 Peace as Integration
• Notes
• Abbreviations and Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright