Sacred settlements: the role of the gods in the resolution of interstate disputes
p. 413-429
Note de l’auteur
The following abbreviations have been employed in this paper: S. L. Ager, Interstate arbitrations in the Greek world, 337-90 BC, Berkeley-L. A., 1996 (Ager); H. Bengtson, Die Staatsverträge des Altertums, 2: Die Verträge der griechisch-römischen Welt von 700 bis 338 v. Chr., München-Berlin, 1962 (Bengtson); W. Burkert, “Krieg, Sieg und die Olympischen Götter der Griechen,” in Religion zu Krieg und Frieden, F. Stolz (ed.), Zürich, 1986, p.67-87 (Burkert); R. Lonis, Guerre et religion en Grèce à l’époque classique, Paris, 1979 (Lonis); L. Piccirilli, Gli arbitrati interstatali greci, 1: Dalle origini al 338 a. C., Pisa, 1973 (Piccirilli); U. Sinn, Olympia: cult, sport, and ancient festival, (translation by T. Thornton), Princeton, 2000 (Sinn 2000).
Texte intégral
1Although Homer’s Odyssey is not a tale of unremitting violence like its sister epic, the Iliad, it nevertheless offers numerous opportunities for its hero to show off his fighting aretê, and nowhere more so than in the vengeance he takes on the suitors of Penelope. That vengeance calls forth vengeance in its own turn, as the suitors’kinsmen join battle with Odysseus in the final lines of the final book:
Odysseus and his glorious son fell upon their front fighters, and began to strike with swords and stab with spears leaf-headed. And now they would have killed them all, and given none of them homecoming, had not Athene, daughter of Zeus of the aegis, cried out in a great voice and held back all the company: “Hold back, men of Ithaka, from the wearisome fighting, so that most soon, and without blood, you can settle everything.” So spoke Athena, and the green fear took hold of them, and in their terror they let fall from their hands their weapons, which fell all on the ground at the cry of the goddess speaking. Striving to save their lives, they turned in flight toward the city. With a terrible cry, much-enduring Odysseus, gathering himself together, made a swoop, like a high-flown eagle. But the son of Kronos then threw down a smoky thunderbolt, which fell in front of the gray-eyed daughter of the great father.
Then the gray-eyed goddess Athene said to Odysseus: “Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus, hold hard, stop this quarrel in closing combat, for fear Zeus of the wide brows, son of Kronos, may be angry with you.” So spoke Athene, and with happy heart he obeyed her. And pledges for the days to come, sworn to by both sides, were settled by Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus of the aegis.1
2Thus the goddess Athena brings to an end the violent feud between Odysseus and the kinsmen of the suitors, and the epic closes with a mediated settlement rather than a blood-bath. Yet it is worth noting not only that it takes a display of violence from Zeus to compel Odysseus to stay his hand, but also that the very goddess who persuades both sides to listen to reason and to cease slaughtering each other, had in fact instigated the conflict only seconds before:
Standing close beside [Laertes] gray-eyed Athene said to him: “Son of Arkeisios, far dearest of all my companions, make your prayer to the gray-eyed girl and to Zeus her father, then quickly balance your far-shadowing spear, and throw it”. (516-19)
3While this passage of the Odyssey is not necessarily programmatic for Greek beliefs about the gods and their behaviours and attitudes in matters of war and peace, justice and conciliation, it nevertheless does seem to provide a suitably ambivalent introduction to the matter. Athena is a goddess of civilization, the one who is capable of translating Zeus’s inarticulate thunderbolt into a rational discourse of harmony; the only one, it seems, who can peacefully resolve the terrible agonies of the House of Atreus as Aeschylus understood them. But she is also Hesiod’s “dread” goddess, “the strife-stirring leader of the host, the unwearying mistress, for whom uproars and wars and battles are a joy.” (Theogony, 925-26). Most of the other Olympian gods exhibit similarly ambiguous personae, particularly in the Iliad and the Odyssey, where they are found fighting a sort of meta-war alongside the human combatants. Later authors such as Plato objected to these images, and sought to modify them, or reject them altogether. But Homer always remained the touchstone of Greekness, and the warrior culture of which he writes affected the minds of the later Greeks just as the realities of contemporary wars affected their bodies.2 The gods of Homer, who sometimes pity the troubles of humanity, but rarely do anything to put a stop to them, who are more often to be found on the battlefield themselves than pursuing peaceful leisure on Olympos, are hardly models of pacifism.
4Nevertheless, the conciliatory action of Athena at the close of the Odyssey does suggest that gods, like humans, could forswear violence in favour of peace, and might encourage others to do likewise. Indeed, the Olympian gods, one might think, were uniquely well-placed to intervene in human conflict: the respect and religious awe that they commanded, as well as their Panhellenic character, should have served to make them the perfect referees of human strife. Yet the intervention of the gods in support of the peaceful resolution of historical disputes is quite noticeably rare. I am not of course referring to direct epiphanies (a sort of Euripidean deus ex machina, where Apollo or Athena arrives in person to part the combatants on the battlefield), but rather to those real –not mythical– places and occasions where the human and divine worlds intersected: the sanctuaries and the oracles of the gods. At first glance, the Panhellenic religious sites –especially Delphi– seem to play a very considerable role in maintaining peaceful relations among the Greek states. Both Olympia and Delphi were depositories for the public display of dozens of international treaties and arbitration settlements. In fact, the latter site is the single most important source of epigraphic evidence for interstate arbitrations.3
5Setting up an inscription at a major Panhellenic site naturally guaranteed maximum publicity (and inviolability) of the document in the eyes of other humans, but it also co-opted the god as a witness and symbolic underwriter of the agreement. Even at home, therefore, a god’s temple was the preferred site of publication of important state documents. The gods could also act as overseers of international settlements by providing a sacred venue for the judicial inquiry itself. When five citizens of Rhodes carried out an arbitration in the early 2nd century in the lengthy dispute between Priene and Samos, the initial presentation of the disputants was made in the precinct of Dionysos at Rhodes, and the final summation of the evidence was heard in the temple of Artemis at Ephesos.4 But provision of divine guarantees was not only a matter of the gods’generosity with their dwellings, allowing disputants and mediators to use them as lawcourts or to scratch up their walls with exuberant inscriptions proclaiming the outcome of the settlement. Like any other interstate agreement, arbitration agreements were sealed by oaths, and perhaps the most important part played by the gods in the process was their role as witnesses and guarantors of these pledges. Thucydides tells us that the Athenians who so mysteriously just happened to be at Sparta in 432 invoked the gods who had been sponsors of the Thirty Years’Peace: “Let us settle our differences by arbitration, as is laid down in the treaty,” say the Athenians, somewhat disingenuously, “If you will not do so, we shall have as our witnesses the gods who heard our oaths, [and] you will have begun the war.”5
6So the gods of the historical period evidently did have a role to play in the peaceful settlement of disputes, just as Athena in Homer’s Odyssey or in Aeschylus’s Eumenides had in the mythic period. But the ambivalence referred to earlier remains. The Athenians in 432 were filled with the spirit of righteousness, and clearly felt justified in calling on the gods to acknowledge the justice of their cause. Yet simultaneously one of the greatest of the Olympian gods –Delphic Apollo– was declaring openly to the Spartans that war, rather than mediation, was the route to pursue. When the Spartans consulted the oracle, asking “whether it would be wise for them to go to war,” Thucydides says, “the god replied that, if they fought with all their might, victory would be theirs and that he himself would be on their side, whether they invoked him or not.”6 With encouragement like that, who would not choose war over peace? The oracle in effect advised the Spartans to ignore the arbitration treaty they had with Athens. Thucydides says that the Spartans later felt guilty about refusing arbitration (7, 18); he does not tell us whether the god ever had a guilty conscience in the matter. Furthermore, not one of the arbitration inscriptions from Delphi and Olympia represents in any unequivocal way the pro-active efforts of the sanctuary itself, or its oracle, in the peaceful settlement of whatever dispute was plaguing the states involved. The vast majority of these inscriptions was set up at a sanctuary only for the publication purposes described earlier; the sanctuary itself was completely uninvolved in the dispute resolution.
7Nevertheless, there are extant a few inscriptions which are occasionally cited in connection to a putative functional role played by the great sanctuaries and their oracles in peacemaking. Two of them tell of oracular approval of treaties, one between Philip II and the Chalkidians, the other between the Asia Minor states of Miletos and Herakleia.7 But in both cases it is quite clear that the oracle has not been asked to decide anything beyond the simple ratification of whether it is “better” to go ahead with the treaty. In other words, the agreement has been settled in detail beforehand, and the oracle provides merely the finishing touch. Two inscriptions found at Olympia have been touted as evidence for the Panhellenic and harmonizing role of that sanctuary, but unfortunately neither of them offers particularly compelling testimony. The first speaks only of the role of Olympia’s sacred officials in the guaranteeing of a treaty. They are perhaps to “give judgement” or impose sanctions, but it is not impossible that they are simply to “acknowledge” or publicize in some way whatever transgression might occur.8 As for the other inscription, the judgements it cites (judgements handed down by the mastroi, the financial officials of Olympia) are surely to be related only to some offence connected directly to the Olympic festival itself.9 It is a great leap of the imagination to follow Ulrich Sinn in concluding that these judgements represent the foundation of a “generally recognized […] arbitration court” through which “Olympia became the symbol of harmony among all Greek states.”10 Nevertheless, Sinn finds the notion of a “pan-Greek court of arbitration” so compelling that he finds visual testimony to it in the famous west pediment of the Zeus-temple at Olympia: he sees a direct connection between this relatively minor inscription and the apparent (to him) role of Apollo as mediator of the conflict between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, so vividly portrayed in these sculptures.11 At Delphi, moreover, Pythian Apollo, who told the visitors to his temple to “know themselves” and practice “nothing in excess”, was the god of moderation and the mean. On the face of it, then, we might indeed expect that the sophrosynê that Apollo preached could have been put into practice through a balanced adjudication of the conflicts that divided the Hellenic world.
8Just what sort of evidence is there for the action of a god such as Apollo –the one most given to expressing himself directly to humans– in settling interstate discord in the historical (rather than the mythical) period? It concerns only Delphi, and is chiefly literary rather than epigraphic. The one remaining piece of epigraphic evidence is a fragmented treaty between Thasos and Neapolis, found on the island of Paros.12 Pouilloux, who gives the most careful examination of this inscription, argued that it represented the mediation of Delphi, who would in turn have recommended that Thasos and Neapolis turn to Paros to settle their differences. Yet it is evident from the extant portion of the inscription which actually mentions Delphi that the only secure thing we can say about Delphi’s role is that a copy of the treaty was to be inscribed there. Pouilloux’s reconstruction of events has been termed “ingenious”, but in the end, it is over-speculative.13 In fact, since the only reason Pouilloux believed even Paros to be involved was because the inscription was found there, we really cannot determine that mediation or arbitration was involved in this treaty at all.
9The literary sources which speak of the involvement of Delphi in peaceful resolution of disputes may be more help to us, as they are naturally far more nuanced than the epigraphic testimonia. Thucydides’report of Corcyra’s proposal of arbitration to Corinth in 435 bc is in my opinion the only solid evidence we have for the Delphic god being contemplated as a mediator in an interstate dispute:
[The] Corcyraeans… sent an embassy to Corinth, accompanied by some envoys from Sparta and Sikyon to support them. There they demanded that Corinth should withdraw her troops and colonists from Epidamnos, since Epidamnos was no concern of hers. They were prepared, however, if Corinth wished to put in a counter claim, to accept arbitration. Cities in the Peloponnese should be chosen by mutual agreement to act as arbitrators, and the colony should go to whichever side the arbitrators awarded it. Alternatively, they proposed referring the matter to the oracle at Delphi. They urged Corinth not to start a war… The Corinthian reply to this was that if Corcyra withdrew the fleet and the foreign army from Epidamnos, then discussion might be profitable; but it was quite absurd to talk of arbitration while the city was still being besieged.14
10Given that the Corcyraean ambassadors on this occasion were accompanied, and presumably supported, by emissaries from the Peloponnese, perhaps we cannot blame the Corinthians for rejecting the suggestion that a Peloponnesian state act as arbitrator. But why should the Corinthians have been so unwilling to contemplate the arbitration of the Delphic oracle? After all, the oracle had already implied that it was friendly to the Epidamnos-Corinth coalition, rather than to Corcyra;15 and it was shortly to declare for all who cared to hear that it whole-heartedly supported the anti-Athenian cause.
11A number of factors might spring to mind immediately, but choosing one to the exclusion of the others may be simplistic. For instance, one might argue that gods and their oracles only dealt with matters which constituted part of their particular province: that the oracle at Olympia would typically be consulted on victory in the Games, while that at Delphi tended to rule on questions of ritual or on matters related to colonization.16 Such an answer of course begs the question of why the sacred aspects of dispute settlement should be any different from the sacred aspects of colonial settlement, and in any case, there is plenty of evidence of consultations of Delphi at the time of the Persian wars, consultations that were entirely political and military (and non-colonial) in nature. The very fact that Corcyra made the proposal in the first place implies that in 435 this was not an outré suggestion.
12It is sometimes thought that a characteristic vital to an arbitrating authority is that of sufficient military might to back up its judgement. One might therefore argue that the military weakness of the oracular sites was a disincentive, as they would be unable to provide sanctions.17 Yet there are numerous examples of small poleis acting as arbitrators or mediators for their neighbours, in circumstances where there is clearly no question of potential military sanctions. So it seems we need to seek a plurality of answers, a complex of negative motivation that would result in disincentives to engage the gods and their sanctuaries in the peaceful settlement of interstate strife and violence.
13Let us therefore turn to another literary testimonium for further exploration of such disincentives. The only apparently unambiguous example we have of a successful historical Delphic arbitration is reported by Diodoros. Under the year 383 bc he records an arbitration between the Asia Minor cities of Kymai and Klazomenai. The two cities were rivals over the possession of a small colony named Leukê, where there was an Apollo temple. They agreed to submit their dispute to the oracle, and the Pythia gave an answer that was quite characteristic, both in its emphasis on a religious angle and in its reservations about committing with any clarity to one side or the other:
Now at first the cities undertook to settle the matter by recourse to war, but later someone suggested that the god be asked which one of the two cities should be master of Leukê. The Pythia decided that it should be the one which should first offer sacrifice in Leukê, and that each side should start from his own city at the rising of the sun on a day upon which both should agree. When the day was set, the Kymaians assumed that they would have the advantage because their city lay the nearer, but the Klazomenians, though they were a greater distance away, devised the following scheme to get the victory. Choosing by lot colonists from their own citizens, they founded near Leukê a city from which they made their start at the rising of the sun and thus forestalled the Kymaians in performing the sacrifice. Having become masters of Leukê by this scheme [philotechnema], they decided to hold an annual festival to bear its name which they called the Prophthaseia [“Anticipation”].18
14I referred to this an “apparently unambiguous” example of a successful Delphic arbitration, but of course nothing about the Delphic oracle is ever unambiguous. Joseph Fontenrose is one of the most skeptical of the scholars who have examined the oracular pronouncements of Delphi, and he dismisses as fictitious a large number of oracles accepted by others as genuine. Nevertheless, curiously enough, not only does he unquestioningly accept the Kymai-Klazomenai affair as historical, he even classes it among the oracular responses that he designates as “simple clear commands”.19 Yet there are a number of things that ring false about the tale Diodoros reports, and that would seem to place it squarely in the realm of folktale rather than history.
15For example, the motif of victory hinging on the seemingly impossible task of arriving at a specific place within a certain time constraint is already found in Herodotos’s undoubtedly fictitious tale of the Delphic intervention in the dispute between the Lemnians and the Athenians (6.138-40). In this case, the Athenians win the day by sailing from Attica to the island of Lemnos in the north Aegean within a single day against a north wind. The fact that they achieve this by colonizing the Chersonese (just next door to Lemnos), and sailing from there, only amplifies their victory by enhancing it with their ingenuity. The tale is very similar to the faux colonization from Klazomenai. Another striking folktale motif is that of the question of victory hinging on which party succeeds in carrying out a certain action first, particularly a sacrifice. A mythic narrative tells of the quarrel between Medon and Neileus, the sons of Kodros, over the kingship of Athens in the heroic age.20 The dispute is referred to the Delphic oracle, which responds with the answer that whichever of the two is the first to make a libation when a certain event occurs will be king. There is the usual Delphic double-entendre and play on words, and the victory goes to Medon (to all appearances the disadvantaged party), who is able to see through the surface meaning of the oracle to the hidden meaning beneath.
16Its similarity to a variety of folktales makes it hard to accept the Kymai-Klazomenai story as a genuine example of arbitration by the Delphic oracle, and I am inclined to think that (at least in this form) it is nothing more than an aetiology for the festival of the Prophthaseia. Yet it is not so much the questionable authenticity of the Kymai-Klazomenai story that is relevant to the question of why the Greeks failed to turn to Delphi more regularly to settle their differences –the tale also has a subtly disturbing flavour. Aside from the typically Delphic ambiguity, there is also the god’s apparent sanction of the Klazomenaians’slippery tactics: the game goes not necessarily to the just, but to the wily. Apollo never chastised the winning side, and indeed the implication may be that if the Kymaians were too dull or complacent to devise a trick of their own, then they did not deserve to win. While this can make for a satisfying folktale, it does not exactly inspire confidence in the oracle as a font of justice. The elements of irony and inscrutability, and inevitably of cynicism, pervade the responses of the Delphic oracle, many of which have the flavour simply of a bad joke. Apollo’s “mighty empire” answer to Kroisos of Lydia is only the most obvious of the lot.
17In matters of trust, perception can be more important than reality. Whether the story of Kymai and Klazomenai is historical or not is less relevant than the fact that stories such as this had currency throughout Greek history, and that the obscure and riddling god of Delphi was widely believed to give oblique answers that could only be understood after one had already met with disaster.21 Thus, even if the tale is not historical, it does offer some clues as to why these great Panhellenic seats of divine wisdom and reverence –Delphi in particular– did not work as settlers of Greek conflict. The “arbitrary” nature of this “arbitration” may offer a clue to another problem the Greeks might have had with turning to the gods for settlement. The character of oracular responses is that they are brief and pithy; the gods are not given to the kind of lengthy negotiation necessary to bring about a mediated settlement.
18Another part of the complex of disincentives is surely the lingering power of the Homeric image of the gods, with which we began. The war-goddess Athena, “for whom uproars and wars and battles are a joy”, is only one of many; her brother Ares is the epitome of military violence, despised by the other gods, though perhaps more for his cowardly bullying than for his war mania as such.22 The civilized Apollo –no neutral judge, but firmly on the side of the Trojans– begins the violence of the Iliad with his plague-borne slaughter of the Greek forces.23 Even Zeus, who holds himself apart from the partiality and the fury displayed by the other gods, causes the death of multitudes by succumbing to the blandishments of Thetis. The Homeric gods are as much combatants as the humans are –indeed, their warrior characteristics are greatly magnified, and it has often been observed that their excessive attachment to their divine aretê and timê means that they are even more apt than the humans to insist on crushing their opponents rather than conciliating them.24 Humans –precisely because they are human, and therefore mortal– have a much greater need for social order, and for peace, than the gods do. There is something curiously and perhaps deliberately ironic in the presentation of humans and gods in Aristophanes’Peace. There, the gods are disgusted with human battles and wars, but rather than impose Peace they decamp and allow War to rule not only on earth but even on Olympos. It is the humble human Trygaios, on his dungbeetle, who has to coordinate the efforts of the human players, drawn from all the cities of Greece, to work together in order to haul Peace out of her deep cave. The gods set their will to impede these human efforts: Zeus mandates the death penalty for anyone attempting to liberate Peace.25
19Neutrality is a vital characteristic for a mediator. But in the Iliad even Zeus indulges in preferential feelings for some of the human players, and as for the other gods, they are all steadfastly aligned on one side or the other.26 The alignment – rather than the detachment– of the gods is at the heart of Greek belief about these deities, Panhellenic as they might appear to be.27 We have already seen that Delphic Apollo was pro-Spartan in 431. In the famous oath of Dreros, the young men of this Cretan polis swear by Zeus and Apollo and Athena and Leto and Artemis and Ares and Aphrodite and “all the other gods and goddesses” (just in case they missed any) that they will always do whatever evil they can to the people of the city of Lyttos.28 One must assume that the ephebes of Dreros believed that all these gods approved of this oath, and perhaps by naming them all, they were trying to ensure that there were no divine powers left over to take the side of the Lyttians (it would be interesting to know whether the young men of Lyttos took a similar oath, and invoked all the same deities). It would seem then to be challenging for any of the gods, even Zeus, to stand as an impartial judge, or to embrace or be embraced by all the Greeks equally. A polytheistic culture, while it often has the advantage of reflecting the reality of a complex and contradictory world better than monotheism can, carries with it the implicit belief that if one god can be your friend, another is bound to be your enemy, and that the divine allegiances and hostilities align themselves pretty well with the human ones. One might wonder, then, whether the role of religion in conciliation and peace-making would be more advantaged in a monotheistic culture.
20A society we might turn to for the sake of comparison is that of medieval Europe, where the popes at times acted to resolve disputes between the various kings, princes, dukes, viscounts, and other lords of the patchwork of medieval states. Yet it would be easy to get carried away with enthusiasm here (as some 19th and 20th century-historians have), and overestimate the role of the Church in medieval peace-making. For one thing, various secular authorities, such as France’s canonized king, Louis IX, played an even greater role than the pope did as arbitrators and mediators; for another, the pope himself was from time to time a politicized and militant party to the dispute, rather than the impartial authority charged with finding a peaceful solution to it; and finally, the pope was suspected, on more than one occasion, of having succumbed to bribery, a charge also leveled against the Pythia of Delphi.29
21One pope, Boniface VIII, specified his reasons for wanting to make peace between Philippe le Bel of France and Edward I of England in 1298: aside from the somewhat venal one, that war between them was draining revenues away from their proper destination, the Church, Boniface pointed out that the conflict was also diverting attention from the Holy Land and the crusade against the “infidel”.30 This call to peace in the Christian world, with the goal of a military assault on the non-Christian one, has its echoes in the ancient Greek world as well. The calls to Panhellenic peace that proliferated in the 4th century bc sought to unite the Greeks against a common foe: the “barbarian” Persian. This was the endless cry of Isokrates, among others, and he seizes every opportunity to claim divine endorsement for his program of military action.31
22The great Panhellenic sanctuaries and festivals became the place, the occasion, and the symbol of these calls to peace, but ambivalence reigns here too. The gods of the sanctuaries were consulted on victory in the Games and in war, but ignored when it came to matters of peace.32 For instance, the Peloponnesians held a military strategy conference at Olympia in 428 after the end of the festival (and Sinn, in spite of his beliefs about Olympic arbitration, thinks that the Zeus oracle at Olympia specialized in matters of war); Xenophon, for his part, complains that at the peace conference in Delphi in 368, no one bothered to consult the god on the matter.33 The sanctuaries were literally stuffed with the trophies and dedications from wars of Greek against Greek; the construction of the grand temple of Zeus at Olympia was funded by booty from one of those wars. The Olympic Games themselves, so often touted as occasions of international unity –in both the ancient and the modern world– were in fact times of institutionalized, and enormously enhanced, rivalry and competition.34 As for arbitration, it too could be a contest and a competition, undertaken with a view to victory. One of the most outstanding monuments at Olympia was the famous Nike of Paionios, commemorating a military victory of the Messenians over the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War. On the lofty base of this statue, some three hundred years later, the Messenians gleefully recorded another victory: a judicial one, this time, an arbitral decision made by the Milesians in a territorial dispute between the Messenians and the Spartans.35 It may be one of the more subtle and deeply hidden morals of the golden tripod legend that it takes the uncommon wisdom of the proverbial sages of Greece to reject outright the notion of self-aggrandizing rivalry and competition, and achieve peace without either victory or defeat.36
23An entirely cynical approach –both to the institution of arbitration and to the question of Greek religious faith– might suggest that the Greeks avoided turning to the gods for judicial settlement of their disputes precisely because they saw arbitration as a means of winning the prize. Those skeptical of the sincerity of the Greek institutions of arbitration and mediation argue that the Greeks submitted to such negotiations not in the spirit of true conciliation, but rather with a view to ignoring any unfavourable judgement, and continuing to pursue their ambitions through other means.37 It could obviously prove more difficult on a number of levels for a state bent on getting its own way to reject the words of a god than those of a mere mortal, though of course the case of Themistokles and the Salamis oracles in 480 demonstrates that no divine pronouncement need be thought of as final.
24There is a great deal of debate about the extent to which the Greeks actually associated advanced concepts of justice with the Olympian gods. It would probably be safe to state, for the purposes of this argument, that the Greeks both believed that there was –or ought to be– some connection between the gods and justice, and also doubted, from their own observation of the world, that this was consistently the case.38 In spite of Walter Burkert’s argument that the Greeks did not really have a concept of “just war”,39 in the same way that the Romans did, it is clear that the Greeks associated notions of justice with both war and peace, and that they did assign some role to the gods in the pursuance of “justified” combat. Nikias, that sublime model of how not to be a general, reassured the Athenian troops at Sicily in 413 with the rousing declaration, “if any of the gods was angry with us at our setting out, by this time we have been sufficiently punished… by now we deserve their pity rather than their jealousy.”40 In that same year, the Spartans were contemplating the notion that things had gone badly for them during the Archidamian War precisely because they had angered the gods by their refusal to go to arbitration in 431.41 But numerous instances in Greek history and literature suggest that what most provoked punishment from the gods was impiety and hybris, rather than militarism and aggression in themselves.42 Nikias makes it clear that it was the overweening behaviour of the Athenians which had provoked the divine phthonos,43 and certainly it seems likely that Sparta –if she really did believe herself to have offended the gods in 431– had done so by breaking the oaths of the Thirty Years’Peace, which called for arbitration, rather than by refusing arbitration as such. The story is no indication that the gods preferred peace to war, especially when we consider that Delphi had openly urged the Spartans to ignore the arbitration treaty. Even when the oracle allegedly advised the Athenians to pursue a peaceful policy on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, this advice was so wrapped up in Delphic homonymy and double entendre that it represents simply one more dark and ironic warning of disaster, rather than a realistic prompting to a philosophy of peace.44
25In spite of poets such as Hesiod and Pindar, who associate Justice and Peace in the divine genealogy, the link between Justice and War is a profound one.45 Battles themselves were of course permeated with religious ritual.46 All formal notions of the “just war” aside, the intense violence of warfare would simply have made it absolutely vital in psychological terms to feel that the gods were on your side, that they approved your cause, and above all, that they supported your victory.47 It would be hard indeed to go into battle with the belief that the gods were merely neutral, that they would stand as uncommitted judges of both sides equally. Certainly neutrality among humans, the neutrality so necessary to a mediator, has often been viewed with a jaundiced eye, as it is often construed as an unfriendly reluctance to support the cause of righteousness.48 Of course, this leads to the paradoxical, yet necessary, conclusion that, when it comes to mediation, both gods and men can be damned for being both too neutral, and not neutral enough. As Solon said, “in great matters, it is hard to please all.”
26Philosophically and theologically, the end result of this viewpoint is that war itself becomes the perfect act of divine judgement and arbitration, as exemplified in the medieval Christian notion of trial by combat. Raoul Lonis argues that the trophy erected by the winning side on the battlefield is in fact a symbolic statue of Zeus, a visible token of Zeus’s judgement in the battle.49 Thus the “arbitration of Zeus” may be better identified with his presence on the battlefield than with the mundane yet nonviolent assessment of financial penalties by his ministers at Olympia; just as the “mediating” actions of his son Apollo, on the west pediment of the Olympia temple, surely moderated not a peaceful compromise acceptable to both sides, but rather the defeat –if not the extermination– of the Centaurs.
27The Greeks accepted the reality of violence and war as part of their world, and this acceptance goes a long way towards explaining their association of these characteristics with the gods, who represented so many different aspects of life. Nevertheless, they found peace to be a more desirable state than war, and expressed longing for it in their writings, from the time of Homer onward. In Aristophanes’Peace, the gods blame the humans for instigating and prolonging war (though it is clear that the gods do not propose to ameliorate the situation at all, and have simply abandoned the humans to their fate). A different view is put forward a few decades later, by Xenophon. “If it is really true,” says one of his characters in the Hellenika, “that it is divinely ordained that there should be wars among men, then what we should do is to be as slow as we can to start a war and as quick as we can to end it, once it has begun.” (6, 3, 6). The gods, then, have decreed that wars must always exist; it is humans who must do their best to limit them. It would seem that conciliatory philosophies that promote the peaceful settlement of violent conflict are something that only humans can develop –after all, as mortals, we are the only ones who have a real stake in peace.
Bibliographie
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Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 Odyssey 24, 526-47 (translation R. Lattimore, New York, 1965).
2 See Burkert; H. van Wees, Status warriors: war, violence and society in Homer and history, Amsterdam, 1992.
3 See the examples in Piccirilli; Ager; and A. Magnetto, Gli arbitrati interstatali greci, 2: Dal 337 al 196 a. C., Pisa, 1997.
4 Ager, no. 74.
5 Thucydides 1, 78 (translation R. Warner, London, 1954).
6 Thucydides 1, 118; cf. 2, 54.
7 Bengtson, no. 308; Syll3, no. 633 (Ager, no. 108).
8 Bengtson, no. 111 (ll. 5-7: αἰ τό[ν] ὄρκον παρβαίνοιαν, γνόμαν τόρ ἰ[α]ρομάορ τʹ Ὀλυμπίαι). See R. A. Bauslaugh, The concept of neutrality in Classical Greece, Berkeley-L. A., 1991, p.57, and note that Piccirilli does not recognize this inscription as an arbitration agreement of any kind.
9 P. Siewert, “Eine Bronze-Urkunde mit elischen Urteilen über Böoter, Thessaler, Athen und Thespiai”, in Olympia Bericht, 10, Berlin, 1981, p.228-48.
10 Sinn 2000, p.55-56; see also Siewert 1981 (above, note 9). For a contrary view (that Olympia never functioned as a unifier of Greece) see A. Hönle, Olympia in der Politik der griechischen Staatenwelt, Tübingen, 1968.
11 U. Sinn, “Apollon und die Kentauromachie im Westgiebel des Zeustempels in Olympia”, AA, 1994, p.585-602.
12 J. Pouilloux, Recherches sur l’histoire et les cultes de Thasos, 1, 1954, p.189 (Piccirilli no. 33); a fragment of the Delphic copy of this treaty has since been discovered: J.-C. Moretti, BCH, 111, 1987, p.157-66.
13 See R. Parker, “Greek states and Greek oracles”, in Crux: Essays in Greek history presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, P. Cartledge and F. Harvey (eds.), London, 1985, p.309, and note Bengtson’s cautions regarding Pouilloux’s conclusions (Bengtson, p.145).
14 Thucydides 1, 28-29 (see Piccirilli no. 23); translation adapted from R. Warner. The assertion that this is the only solid evidence for an appeal to Delphi as a mediator does not address the mediation of Delphi in internal disputes (Herodotos 4, 161; Kallimachos, Aitia 2, 43, 58-83; Diodoros 12, 35). The gods always advised peaceful resolution of internal conflict, since stasis (unlike war) was universally recognized as an evil (cf. OGI, no. 237).
15 Thucydides 1, 25.
16 See L. Piccirilli, “Aspetti storico-giuridici dell’anfizionia delfica e suoi rapporti con la colonizzazione greca”, ANSP, 1972, p.35-61.
17 The military forces of an organization such as the Delphic Amphiktyony do not enter into this discussion; the Amphiktyony, although it could be involved in judicial as well as military activities, did not mediate the quarrels of Greek states, except insofar as they touched on the sacred site of Delphi (see F. Lefèvre, L’amphictionie pyléo-delphique: histoire et institutions, Athens-Paris, 1998, and P. Sánchez, L’amphictionie des Pyles et de Delphes, Stuttgart, 2001).
18 Diodoros 15, 18 (Piccirilli, no. 39); translation adapted from C. H. Oldfather, Cambridge (Mass.)-London 1954.
19 J. Fontenrose, The Delphic oracle, Berkeley-L. A., 1978, p.16.
20 Pausanias 7, 2, 1; Aelian, VH 8, 5; Piccirilli, no. 19*.
21 Pace Fontenrose (above, note 19), p.236, who believes strangely that Delphi’s reputation for enigma is entirely modern.
22 S. Deacy (“Athena and Ares: war, violence, and warlike deities”, in War and violence in ancient Greece, H. van Wees (ed.), London, 2000, p.285-98) finds a number of points of similarity between Athena and Ares; cf. Iliad 5, 891 with Hesiod, Theogony 926, cited above.
23 Even in The Eumenides, where Apollo seems to stand for advanced justice and opposition to blood vengeance, the god is a partial advocate, not a judge.
24 Van Wees 1992 (above, note 2), p. 138ff.
25 Peace, ll. 371-2. Note also the gloomy oracles proclaimed by Hierokles, though admittedly these may not represent the true will of the gods (ll. 1073-9). Cf. Burkert p.77.
26 Iliad 16, 431-461; Odyssey 11, 559-560.
27 Van Wees (above, note 2), p. 138ff; C. Morgan, Athletes and oracles: the transformation of Olympia and Delphi in the eighth century BC, Cambridge, 1990, p.137, 183-84, 224; C. Sourvinou-Inwood, “What is polis religion?”, in Oxford readings in Greek religion, R. Buxton (ed.), Oxford, 2000, p.13-37; A. Schachter, “Greek deities: local and panhellenic identities”, in Further studies in the ancient Greek polis, P. Flensted-Jensen (ed.), Stuttgart, 2000, p.9-17.
28 Syll3, no. 527, ll. 14-43.
29 For a survey of medieval arbitrations, see M. Novacovitch, Les compromis et les arbitrages internationaux du xiie au xvesiècle, Paris, 1905, and A. Mérignhac, Traité théorique et pratique de l’arbitrage international, Paris, 1895, p.31-42.
30 See R. Balch, “The resigning of quarrels: conflict resolution in the thirteenth century”, Peace and change, 5, 1978, p.38.
31 Isokrates, Panegyricus; Letter to Philip; Panathenaicus, 163.
32 Plutarch, Mor 386c, makes it clear that victory in war (not peaceful resolution of conflict) was the most compelling reason for consulting an oracle (W.K. Pritchett, The Greek state at war, iii, Berkeley-L. A.-London, 1979, p.303-4; see also H.W. Parke and D.E.W.Wormell, The Delphic oracle, Oxford, 1956).
33 Thucydides 3, 8-15; Sinn 2000, p.15-22 (drawing on Xenophon Hellenika 3, 2, 21-23 and 4, 7, 2); Xenophon, Hellenika 7, 1, 27. Xenophon’s anecdote about Agis (3, 2, 21-23) might suggest that Zeus refused to sanction war of Greek against Greek, but it is likely that the Eleians were indulging in some ad hoc hostility against Sparta here, and in any case, the fact that Agis was trying to consult the oracle at all on this question suggests that, as Sinn argues, the oracle at Olympia was accustomed to hearing pleas for victory; see Lonis, p.75.
34 Pace M. B. Poliakoff, “Competition”, in Gab es das griechische Wunder?, D. Papenfuß and V. M. Strocka (eds.), Mainz, 2001, p.61. The foundation story of the Olympic festival suggests that neikos in the Games became a symbolic substitute for the real neikos of war; see Parke and Wormell (above, note 32), 485ff. On the military dedications at Panhellenic sanctuaries such as Delphi and Olympia, see Plutarch, Mor 401c-d; 402a; A. H. Jackson, “Hoplites and the gods: the dedication of captured arms and armour”, in Hoplites: the classical Greek battle experience, V. D. Hanson (ed.), London-New York, 1991, p.228-49; Sinn 2000; A. Jacquemin in this collection. War booty funding the Zeus temple: Pausanias 5, 10, 2.
35 Ager, no. 159.
36 Plutarch, Solon, 4.
37 This was particularly the view of V. Bérard, De arbitrio inter liberas Graecorum civitates, Paris, 1894. Bérard’s interpretation is probably unwarrantedly cynical.
38 On the ambivalence of Greek views on the morality (and in a narrower sense, the “justice”) of the gods, see, int. al., E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational, Berkeley-L. A.-London, 1971 (reprint); A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and responsibility, Oxford, 1960; K. J. Dover, Greek popular morality in the time of Plato and Aristotle, Oxford, 1974; E. Sagan, The lust to annihilate: a psychoanalytic study of violence in ancient Greek culture, New York, 1979; Lonis, p.189-95; H. Lloyd-Jones, The justice of Zeus2, Berkeley-L. A.-London, 1983; P. Karavites, “Greek interstate relations and moral principles in the fifth century bc”, La parola del passato, 216, 1984, p.161-92; J. M. Bryant, Moral codes and social structure in ancient Greece, New York, 1996; J. K. Davies, “The moral dimension of Pythian Apollo”, in What is a god? Studies in the nature of Greek divinity, A. B. Lloyd (ed.), London, 1997, p.43-64; M. Detienne, Apollon le couteau à la main, Paris, 1998.
39 Burkert, p.82.
40 Thucydides 7, 77.
41 Thucydides 7, 18.
42 The Lydian Alyattes’war on Greek Miletos, which he pursues year after year, does not appear to bother the gods of the Greeks until he accidentally burns down the temple of Athena: only at this point do the gods take action against him (Herodotos 1, 19).
43 The victory inscription set up by Selinus at Olympia makes an interesting counterpoint to the Athenian acknowledgement of guilt before the gods in the Sicilian affair, if Calder is right in his tentative suggestion that this victory is connected to the Athenian defeat in Sicily (W. M. Calder, The inscription from Temple G at Selinus, Durham NC, 1963, p.54-62; R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, A selection of Greek historical inscriptions2, Oxford, 1988, no. 38). Selinus proclaims loudly for a Panhellenic audience that its victory (whoever its opponents were) was due to Zeus, Herakles, Apollo, Poseidon, Athena, and a host of others.
44 Plutarch, Mor 403b; Nikias, 13.
45 Hesiod, Theogony, 901-2; Pindar, Pythian 8.
46 Lonis; Burkert; Pritchett (above, note 32); P. Ducrey, Warfare in ancient Greece, New York, 1985; A. J. Holladay and M. D. Goodman, “Religious scruples in ancient warfare”, CQ, 36, 1986, p.151-71; M. H. Jameson, “Sacrifice before battle”, in Hanson (above, note 34), p.197-227.
47 See Lonis, p.83-4.
48 Bauslaugh (above, note 8), p.77.
49 Lonis, p.136-42 (building on an idea of Picard).
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