Ancient Greece, Cradle of Western Peace and Peacemaking?

Peace and peacemaking in Ancient Greece continued to be strategies of survival and subsistence, as in prehistoric times, as well as basic compo­nents of prosperous and unified cities, states and civilization, as in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.

Of all mythological families, none illustrates the evolution of peace in Ancient Greece better than that of Themis, whose name evoked the “reg­ularity of nature, the peaceful law shared by all its creatures.”¹⁷ She had triplets with Zeus, god of thunder and king of them all, called the Horae, meaning “rhythmic periods of the world’s unfolding,” root of the word hour. They initially controlled time spans related to rural peace and pros­perity: Thallo, “blossom-bringer,” was the goddess of spring; Auxo, the “increaser,” of summer plant growth; and Xarpo, “food-bringer,” of ripening and the autumn harvest. However, the Horae took on new names and profiles over time.

The literature of the Ancient Greeks exemplified the pragmatics of peace reflected in their mythology. In effect, Ancient Greek literature pre­sents the first comprehensive corpus of anti-war and pro-peace literature in the West, of which preeminent instances are the Homeric and Hesiodic epics. Passed orally by peripatetic bards for centuries, Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were already keystones of literary culture by the time they were inscribed c. the eighth century BCE. The Iliad revolves around the Greek armies’ greatest soldier, Achilles, in the last of a ten-year war against Troy. After his commander breaches the boundaries of his author­ity in his eyes, Achilles defects in an early literary instance of civil disobe­dience. Only when his best friend is killed does he rejoin the war, dying bravely in the process of securing a triumphal Greek return - except for the cunning Odysseus, who faced ten more years of unearthly misadven­tures narrated in the Odyssey before reaching home.

The moral of Homer’s stories, in the Odyssey’s last words, is to “let the mutual goodwill of the days of old be restored, and let peace and plenty prevail.”²¹ Which days of old are being referenced? According to Hesiod’s didactic epic, Works and Days (c. 700 BCE), humanity has passed through five Ages including the present. During the Golden Age, humans were at peace, living in harmony with worldly and cosmic spirits. In the subsequent Silver Age mythological deities arose, humans lived as chil­dren for a century, then aged rapidly and died. A great flood inaugurated the Bronze Age, when humans were fierce warriors consuming themselves in war. Achilles and Odysseus lived in the Heroic Age, in which demigods and heroes, often one and the same, roamed and ruled the earth. The current Iron Age is one in which gods no longer interact with humans and it seems our only escape from war and suffering is death. However, Hesiod does not leave humanity without hope.

In historical terms, there was in fact a proto-Greek culture located on the island of Crete that, if not fitted, then at least shows striking signs of being a possible wellspring of inspiration for these literary depictions of peace in the distant past. Archaeologists refer to this period as the Minoan Peace because they have found little (some argue, no) remains of warfare. Politically autonomous Minoan towns cooperated non- violently and as peers on an economic basis and on a scale unamtched in Europe until then. But no data suggests Minoa came close to the complex networks of Greek city-states a thousand years later. Although the Oracle of Delphi dates back to prehistoric times, first as a centre for the worship of the earth goddess Gaia, then her daughter Themis, in time it was housed in the temple of Apollo, god of healing, truth and defender of sheep flocks. Apollo’s brother Dionysus, god of wine, took his place in winter, as both were also known as promoters of peace.

By around 1100 BCE, Delphi had become the centre of a religious league of all major Greek cities. Known as the Amphictyonic or simply Delphic League, its aims were to ensure that sacred sites and personnel were protected, that no city was wiped out in war and that water supplies were never cut. Offenders, whether members of the League or not, faced joint attacks if they broke its code. The League’s council of heads of states or their representatives had the power to pass binding internal legislation and direct common foreign policy. This League outlived many of the later Greek ones modeled upon it, and lasted in varying forms until Roman times. By the sixth century BCE it had considerable political influence, and the more powerful cities could control policy by pressuring the lesser. Legend has it that late in the ninth century BCE, a League member, King Iphitos of Elis, visited the Oracle with the aim of ending altogether hos­tilities between his compatriots. The priestesses advised him to establish a special truce between local rulers like himself, a bold and unparalleled venture in which Iphitos was ultimately successful. The terms of the truce provided that, every four years, all fighting between Greeks would cease from twelve days before until twelve days after a sporting competition cel­ebrating the gods, in which all Greeks could participate and travel safely to and from.

In time, the Games included literary competitions, diplomatic meet­ings and trade summits. Winners in each event were revered as heroes in their homelands and received an olive-branch crown, ever since a prominent symbol of peace. According to myths, Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Poseidon, god of the sea, competed to see who could give humanity the most useful gift. Poseidon presented the horse and Athena the olive tree. Athena was judged the winner because her gift provided a stable source of nourishment in mountainous regions such as Greece and a shelter from their harsh sun and wind. Embodying the third staple of Ancient Greek agriculture aside from flocks and wine, the olive­branch crown was “uniquely suited to represent peace and social concord” because olive trees required one or two generations to bear fruit, which assumes a stable state able to withstand external and inter­nal threats.²⁴ The Games became such an important element of Greek culture that the four-year cycle of prescribed periods of peace, an Olympiad, became a basis of classical chronology. The ancient Olympic tradition continued unbroken for nearly a thousand years, until sup­pressed during the imposition of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, by then including Greece. The Olympic peace tradition was renewed in 2006 with the UN’s Olympic Resolution, by which 179 nations agreed to halt hostilities during the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, that year.

By 800 BCE, Ancient Greece was a network of prosperous agricultural and maritime trading communities, when they were not fighting over rights to land, sea and trade. Two of the largest, Sparta and Athens, began annexing proximate towns by force and diplomacy, a process they called synoikismos (“bringing together in one home”) while founding others of their own. Before long, the conflicting paradigms of peace these two city­states developed and had to offer brought all of Ancient Greece to war. For both Sparta and Athens, synoikismos was limited to Greek-speakers, the rest of the world were barbarians (“those who say ba-ba”), who could feel the wrath of their warfare but could never enjoy their peace. The reason for Sparta’s awkward appearance in a history of peace is that the militarism by which the city-state came to rule most of continental Greece also adeptly obviated domestic conflicts. After a series of skilful reforms by the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus (seventh century BCE), Sparta soon controlled two-fifth of the Peloponnese as its foremost polis. The central document of these reforms, the Great Rhetra, set a societal structure that for eight centuries sustained external warfare and, paradoxically, internal albeit oppressive peace. At the apex were hereditary double monarchs who could check each other’s actions and declare war, a power later trans­ferred to the popular assembly, in which all citizens could vote directly on proposals and elect members of the elder and executive councils, an inno­vative form of mixed government Plato would later laud. The agoge system, among the most rigorous, military-oriented mandatory education system ever instituted, was so effective in producing able, cooperative and obedient soldier-citizens of both sexes that Sparta was the only polis which did not find defensive walls necessary. The general Xenophon (c. 431-355) explains Sparta’s social cohesion in saying that “good order seems to provide safety while disorder has already destroyed many.”²⁵ Until they broke down in 4 CE, Sparta’s mixed government and the agoge system fostered an authoritarian society that was as internally peaceful as it was warlike to outsiders - especially as compared to its internally tumultuous rival.

Athens is generally considered the cradle of Western civilization. But whether or not it is the birthplace of Western peace and peacemaking is questionable at best. Originally limited to the fortified tip of the Acropolis, synoikismos soon made Athens a maritime superpower second only to land-backed Sparta. Noble-born hereditary rulers of four promi­nent local clans once met atop the indicatively named Mount Ares in a council known as the Areopagus to deliberate upon war, peace and affairs of state. As Athens’ fleets and economy grew, so did the power of the mer­chants and tradesmen, threatening the nobility. The exclusivity of the Areopagus caused internal strife in the seventh century BCE, only tem­porarily quelled by Draco’s harsh laws. So serious was this strife that the historian Thucydides describes it as a danger to day-to-day polis life. The severity of Draconian policies precluded even oppressive peace, so were followed early in the sixth century by Solon’s reforms. These reforms changed the Areopagus’ hereditary membership to land ownership requirements; bolstered the Boule’s power, a lottery-based legislative assembly initiated by Draco; developed a popular assembly similar to Sparta’s; and divided the population into classes upon which punishments and levels of political participation were decided. However, the more direct democracy instituted by Solon’s reforms only inflamed Athens’ class conflicts, which reached epidemic proportions again in the late sixth century. Once more, exclusivity was the cause of strife, since citizenship was still the privilege of a narrow minority of Athenians, landed males over the age of eighteen. The women, foreigners, landless and slaves who constituted the crestfallen majority were never citizens and so could not participate in political processes, notwithstanding that Athens could not have existed as it did without them.

Tyrants, not necessarily cruel rulers, but who took and held power by force, barely ruled chaotic Athens through the fifth century. One of their progeny, Cleisthenes, ushered Athens into its golden age by continuing the reforms Solon had started, though he self-consciously styled them iso- nomic, equality in law, rather than democratic, rule by the people. Other city-states then began emulating Athens’ isonomic model or were made to by Athenians, which Spartans started to see as a threat to their authori­tarian ways. The Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 BCE) said of his polis’ political prowess during this period:

...we established the same polity in the other states as in Athens itself - a polity which I see no need to extol at greater length, since I can tell the truth about it in a word: They continued to live under this regime for seventy years, and, during this time, they experienced no tyrannies, they were free from the domination of the barbarians, they were untroubled by internal factions, and they were at peace with all the world.²⁶

In the same rhetorical vein, the age’s great charismatic leader Pericles (c. 495-429 BCE) called the Athens he knew the “School of Greece,” though it was only partly the school of domestic peace, if at all. At its worst, Athens under Solon’s exclusivist democratic system was detrimen­tal to domestic peace because it vested too much power in the whims of a minority while prohibiting the majority from participating in the very political processes by which they were excluded. The result was a cycle of coups and tyrannies through which “lawless ferocity and violence” became the norm in historian Polybius’ words (c. 203-120 BCE).²⁷ At its best, Athens under Cleisthenes’ isonomic restructuring promoted peace by turning potentially violent conflicts between opposing constituents into non-violent political struggles.

Sparta, not Athens, was the guiding light of the many leagues between Ancient Greek city-states, for the only valid pretext for inter-polis peace proved to be uniting to face a common enemy, as exemplified in the Peloponnesian, Hellenic and Delian Leagues. The first of these, which flourished during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, was formed by Sparta to stop a rival from regaining power after defeat and to curtail another’s ascendancy. To these ends, Spartans used their skill in war as a bargain­ing chip, bringing Corinth into the League by overthrowing its tyrant upon request and securing Elis’ control over the Olympic Games by trouncing all of its competitors. A turning point in the history of Sparta’s foreign war and peace strategies came when war broke out with Tegea (c. 560 BCE). Sparta strategically limited the decisive battle to the frontiers in order keep the polis intact as a League ally after submission, which Tegea then became - among the earliest known instances of intentionally limiting warfare for the sake of post-war peace. In return for accepting Spartan hegemony, particularly but not only in matters of foreign policy, League members were promised protection from non-member aggressors, which now principally meant Persia. The Greco-Persian Wars (c. 500-450 BCE) showcased many of the League’s strengths, notably the effective cooperation, determination and military might of Greeks if and when they worked together. But the Wars also exposed many of the League’s defi­ciencies, including its erratic gatherings usually called only by Sparta, inconsistent financial and material support and disproportionate partici­pation in its missions.

Towards the Wars’ end, the Peloponnesian League gave way to the short-lived Hellenic League, which of necessity combined Sparta’s army and Athens’ navy to amphibiously deter Persia. When Pausanias, the new League’s Spartan military commander, was stripped of power for con­spiring with the Persians (c. 478 BCE), Athens was handed the Hellenic helm and proceeded to reform the League along more isonomic than authoritarian lines. Seeing Athens’ hegemony as a threat to its power, Sparta broke away from the Hellenic League and reformed the Peloponnesian League along its original lines. In 477 BCE, city-states faithful to Athens reunited in the Delian League, so-called after the sacred polis Delos where it originally met and collected its wealth, in the tradi­tion of the old Amphictyonic League. With Athenian wisdom, Delians called for the termination of hostilities between members, regular meet­ings and commensurate contributions. But Delians remained Spartan in spirit. Though early on they deployed diplomats around Greece to enlarge the League, they soon began doing so by force; its isonomic principles faded and began to favor larger members. That the Delian League had become an Athenian Empire became clear when Pericles moved its finan­cial centre from Delos to Athens in 454 BCE, putting the golden in Athens’ golden age. An Athenian delegate, Callias, negotiated a peace treaty with the Persians on behalf of the Delian League in 449, by which “all might sail without fear and be at peace,” in Plutarch’s account.²⁸ The operative word here is “sail,” symbolizing Athens and its naval allies. The Peace of Callias was not binding on Sparta and its continental allies, who arguably betrayed Athens in a separate peace with Persia in 387, the King’s Peace or the Treaty of Atlantidas, forfeiting centuries of Greek maritime gains.

The benefit of these Leagues, called symmachiae, offensive and defen­sive accords by which both friends and enemies are shared, was that Ancient Greeks explicitly agreed not to fight and to settle disputes diplomatically within them. Permanent ambassadors called proxenos rep­resented their city’s interests abroad, acting as arbiters and tendering trade treaties. Perpetual war with Persia precludes calling these alliances peace­ful, but they were nonetheless among the few ways inter-polis peace was achieved. With the Persian threat temporarily dissipated, the divergence in the Leagues’ interests, one land and the other the sea, made each the convenient common enemy the other needed to protect their respective inter-polis peace. In a vain attempt to preserve the status quo, the Leagues agreed to the Thirty Years Peace in 336 BCE to prevent an escalation in ongoing armed conflict. Within five years, however, friction between Sparta and Athens reached a boiling point, Persia sided with Sparta and diplomatic relations deteriorated. The resulting Peloponnesian War (431— 404) was a series of indecisive battles, pitting sea against land power, punctuated by brief periods of peace. Less than halfway into the war, the Athenian spokesman Nicias and Sparta’s king negotiated a truce. The events leading up to the Peace of Nicias, which historian Thucydides (c. 460-395) aptly called “hollow,” were satirically portrayed in Peace by Aristophanes, who pioneered anti-war theatre.²⁹ Delegates from each side decided its terms, reflecting “the results of a war which neither side had won,” that is, this was more a proclamation of stalemate than peace.³⁰ In Thucydides’ words, the Peace “cannot be reasonably defined as a real peace, since in that period they did not reciprocally return and recover all the things they pledged to do.”³¹ Neither party to the Peace was satisfied with the performance of the other and, as if inevitably, war flared up again five years later. In the end, downtrodden Sparta and destitute Athens both fell before the region’s rising star, Macedon and its Corinthian League. The conquests of Alexander the Great are worth noting here only insofar as they ushered in Ancient Greece’s last great territorial grab, which wholly un-peacefully paved the way for the Roman Empire and, in its footprints, medieval and modern Europe.

The sharply jagged line of political peace in Ancient Greece should not detract from the smoother though no less curved one drawn by its famous philosophers. Thucydides argued that “speaking as they do the same lan­guage, [Greeks] should end their disputes by the means of heralds and messengers, and by any way rather than fighting.”³² Philosophy proved to be one of those ways. How peace principles, if they exist, should be put in practice by individuals in society, if they can, are just a few of the ques­tions raised and divergently answered. Philosophers before Socrates are usually grouped together for their materialist rather than mythological (as in Hesiod’s) explanations of the universe and humanity’s place within it. Thales, credited with being the first such thinker, devised a scheme to unite Greek cities into one state, keeping their autonomy but coordinated from a capital. Empedocles developed the theory of the four universal elements (water, fire, earth and air) being united by the attractive force of love and separated by the repulsive force of strife. Relations between these ele­ments as between humans unfold in four phases. In the first love domi­nates, in the second love and strife compete for supremacy, in the third strife triumphs and in the last love trumps strife, an unending cycle. In Pythagoras’ theory of universal harmony, based on the study of rigorous yet mystic mathematical formulas and astronomical observations, vio­lence and war are aberrations of a creative cosmic order he called the One, which humanity can learn about and live by. An early biographer claims “So much did he hate killing and killers that not only did he refuse to eat the meat of slaughtered animals but he avoided the company of cooks and hunters.”³³ Thus Western philosophies of peace were born.

The historian Herodotus developed a similar concept of universal patterns (eike) that, when recognized and acted upon, can improve humanity’s lot. He correspondingly sees peace as a universal pattern and war its aberration: “In peace children bury their parents; war violates the universal pattern, causing parents to bury their children.”³⁴ Heraclitus, in contrast, contended that the universe’s true being is flux and that perma­nence is an illusion. From his metaphoric river, which can never be stepped in twice, it can be inferred that peace and peacemaking violate universal law to the extent they resist change, while “war is the father of all things” insofar as it sires change.³⁵ The famed Oath of the physician Hippocrates, still invoked today, did more than make medicine a profes­sion distinct from theurgy. Swearing to work “for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment,” physicians must also promise to “keep them from harm and injustice” and “neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it,” nor “make a suggestion to this effect.”³⁶ His medical law prescribed both a non-violent code of conduct for practicing medical professionals and collective moral guidelines - also the ethical agenda of modern organizations and conventions. Encapsulating individ­ualistic pathos and collective ethos of pre-Socratic philosophers is Protagoras. He practiced Sophistry (“to become wise”), and was hired as a private tutor or to plead on his client’s behalf. The relativistic reasoning and rhetorical skills Protagoras engaged in could be used to argue all sides of any dispute between individuals or groups. A fellow Sophist once remarked that “Philosophy is a machine for attacking the laws,” a non­violent alternative to weapons.³⁷ Replacing armed conflict with debate, preventing violence by compromise, and expediting reconciliation through agreement, Sophistic abilities fetched a high price in turbulent Athens. But the open, critical dialogue Protagoras practiced has proved invaluable to peace and conflict resolution throughout history.

Socrates’ crux status in the philosophy of peace derives from the intel­lectual and pedagogical traditions culminating in and inaugurated by his star student, Plato. His place in the history of peace, however, derives from how he lived and faced his death. Like Protagoras, Socrates pro­moted open, critical dialogue, took on students and argued cases. Xenophon quotes him saying that “enmities and dangers are inseparable from violence, but persuasion produces the same results... who would rather take a man’s life than have a live and willing follower?”³⁸ But unlike Protagoras, he disparaged payment and titles, living as an urban itinerant with an uncanny knack for conversation, fountainhead of his fame and downfall. The Socratic Method named after him consists of pointed questions and answers which aggregately reveal truths or ideas. Directed by individuals, actualized in collective collaboration, the dialec­tical process Socrates practiced still stands as a paradigm for studying and teaching peace, as well as for making and maintaining it. However, reduc­ing the Method to a formula blinds us to the social significance of his way of life. Socrates’ quest for wisdom, and the “good life” lived accordingly, is radically democratic in that anyone can do likewise, regardless of their background. The Socratic paragon is also seditiously isonomic in that everyone begins on an equal footing with the same rights to wisdom and its benefits, like peace. The path Protagoras trampled, Socrates made his own: a total replacement of force with dialogue in daily affairs, used towards social-, not just self-improvement and -empowerment. Harassed but unharmed during the Thirty Tyrants’ reign, when Athenians were convicted and executed without trial, only after democracy was restored was he charged with disruptive behavior and corrupting youth. He defended his cause and was found guilty of these capital crimes. Friends tried to convince him to escape; he tried to convince them that injustice, inherently antithetical to peace, cannot be overcome by further injustice.

As his final remonstration, Socrates silently drank the fabled hemlock, making the greatest irony of his life his death. Not an act of civil disobe­dience, nor passive or non-violent resistance, since he carried out the sen­tence of killing himself; rather, Socrates’ distinctive form of peaceful protest, if it can be so called, turned silence into statement, complicity into defiance, submission into rebellion and surrender into victory.

Socrates’ philosophy of peace cannot be discussed separately from that of his student, Plato. Only after meeting him did Plato embark on his own quest, the crowning achievements of which are his Dialogues, the Academy he founded and his prodigy, Aristotle. Plato’s ostensibly open Dialogues are never open-ended. Instead, Socrates, usually their main character, skillfully steers the conversation. In The Republic, for example, discussion springs from Socrates’ deceptively simple question: What is dike, the source of concord and a determinant of polis peace since mytho­logical times? One of the “discoveries” made through the Socratic Method is that war is “derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all evils in states, private as well as public.”³⁹ Thus, in The Laws: “every one of us should live the life of peace as long and as well as he can” and “cities are like individuals in this, for a city, if good, has a life of peace, but if evil, a life of war within and without.”⁴⁰ But what are good and evil in this context? While this question has been debated ever since Plato, for our purposes they correspond to pursuing perfect and eternal Ideas, adopting them as ideals and implementing them, or not. The Republic’s famous Allegory of the Cave, in which Plato illustrates this idealism, begins with people who live confined inside one, forced to stare at its back wall from birth. A fire behind the captives casts shadows of moving statues shaped like worldly objects onto the wall, figurative of sensory perceptions that always fall short of the Ideas they represent. One breaks free, uncovers the ruse but is blinded as he makes his way past the fire­light into sunlight, symbolic of rational inquiry, the pursuit of Ideas. Outside, he eventually regains sight and sees the actual world, represent­ing Ideas. Whether he re-enters the cave to “enlighten” his people and if he does whether they embrace, ridicule or reject him are the Allegory’s closing questions, leaving the problem of implementation unresolved.

Peace fits within the Allegory’s conceptual framework in three metaphoric places. As a shadow, peace is not an Idea but an image, “in fact only a name.”⁴¹ The consequential paradox of Plato’s contribution to the philosophy and practice of peace lies in the light. As the firelight, peace is pursuable by our bodies and an implementable ideal, but is not an Idea. As the sunlight, peace is an Idea pursuable by rational inquiry, but cannot be implemented otherwise. Plato’s Cave thus construes the conditions, experience and ideals of peace inside and outside as mutually exclusive and hierarchical. Humans can adapt to and adopt both, but pursuing or implementing peace inside will a priori always fall short of doing so outside. In other words, the Idea of peace is accessible by our minds, but un-implementable with our bodies; all we can do is try. Rather than resolve this paradox, the socio-political model Socrates goes on to con­struct builds upon it. Placed at the apex of Plato’s ideal state is a class of philosopher-kings who, though vested with near-absolute power, are enlightened and so rule with prudent reason. Fortitude and vigor are the defining traits of the guardian class that takes and executes philosopher- kings’ orders. The laboring class under their combined control, farmers and craftsmen who provide for themselves and their rulers, is character­ized as tempered by their work despite being temperamentally inclined. Plato, through Socrates, contends that in this state, the Ideas of dike and peace come closest to being enacted by the complementary qualities each of the three classes embodies in fulfilling their prescribed roles. The pos­sibilities and limits of peace Plato congealed have shaped the history of peace and peacemaking in the West and, through the West’s influence, the world. But there can be no doubt that without Rome’s espousal of Ancient Greek culture, Plato would not have had the same influence on pacific thought and practices as he did.