The Rights of War and Peace

by Hugo Grotius

We find it some where said by Aelian, that our common nature calls upon us to cover the dead, and some writer, in another place, observes that all men are reduced to an equality by returning to the common dust of the earth. Tacitus informs us, in b. vi. of his Annals, that, when Tiberius made a general massacre of all, who had been connected with Sejanus, and that he forbad them the rites of burial, every one was struck with horror to see the last offices of humanity refused; offices, which Lysias the orator calls the common hopes of our nature.

As the ancients measured the moral character of every people by their observance or neglect of these rights, in order to give them a greater appearance of sanctity, they ascribed their origin to the authority and institutions of their Gods; so that in every part of their writings we meet with frequent mention of the rights of ambassadors, and the rights of burial, as founded upon divine appointment.

In the Tragedy of the Suppliants, Euripides calls it the law of the Gods, and in the Antigone of Sophocles, the heroine makes the following reply to Creon, who had forbidden any one under pain of death, to give the rites of burial to Polynices, "A prohibition, like this, was not revealed by the supreme will, nor by that heaven-born justice, which has established those laws of respect for the dead: nor did I think that you could command mortals to transgress the unwritten and inviolable laws of God. They were not established to-day, nor yesterday, but from all eternity and will for ever be in force. Their sources are unknown. Am I through fear of a mortal, and by obeying his unjust commands, to incur the wrath of Heaven?"

The authority of Isocrates, and of Herodotus, and that of Xenophon, in the sixth book of his Grecian History, may be appealed to in support of the honours, that have at all times been paid to the dead. In short, these offices of humanity are recommended by the conspiring testimony of the orators, historians, poets, philosophers and divines of all ages, who have dignified them with the names of the most splendid virtues.

II. There seems to be no general agreement of opinion upon the origin of funeral rites, and the variety of ways, in which they were performed. The Egyptians EMBALMED, and most of the Greeks BURNED the bodies of the dead before they committed them to the grave. Cicero, in the 22d chapter of his second Book on Laws, speaks of the interment alone, which is now in use, as the most ancient method, and that, which is most congenial to nature, and in this he is followed by Pliny.

Some think that men paid it as a VOLUNTARY debt of nature, which they knew that, AT ANY RATE, they would be obliged to discharge. For the divine sentence, that the body should return to the dust, from which it was taken, was not passed upon Adam only, but, as we find it acknowledged by the writings of Greece and Rome, extended to the whole human race. Cicero, from the Hypsipyle of Euripides, says, "Earth must be returned to earth," and in the twelfth chapter of Solomon's Ecclesiastes, there is a passage to the same purport, that "the dust shall return to the earth as it was, but the spirit to God, who gave it." Euripides has enlarged on this subject in the character of Theseus in his Suppliants, "Suffer the dead to be laid in the lap of the earth; for every thing returns to its original state, the spirit to heaven, and the body to the earth: Neither of them is given in plenary possession, but only for a short use: The earth soon demands back the bodies, to which she had given birth and nourishment." In the same manner Lucretius calls the earth "a prolific parent and a common grave." Pliny also describes the earth, as receiving us at our birth, cherishing our growth, supporting us to the very last, and, when all the other parts of nature have forsaken us, taking us to her maternal bosom, and covering us with a mantle.

There are some, who think that the custom of burial was bequeathed to us by our first parents as a testamentary hope of a resurrection. For we are instructed by Democritus to believe, that our bodies are preserved in the earth under the promise of a restoration to life. And Christians in particular have frequently ascribed the custom of decent burial to the same hope. Prudentius a Christian poet says, "What can be the meaning of hallowed rocks, or splendid monuments, except that they are the depositories of bodies, consigned not to death, but to a temporary sleep?"

But the most obvious explanation is to be found in the dignity of man, who surpassing other creatures, it would be a shame, if his body were left to be devoured by beasts of prey. It is an act of compassion then, said Quintilian, to preserve the bodies of men from ravages of birds and beasts. For to be tore by wild beasts, as Cicero observes in his first book On Invention, is to be robbed of those honours, in death, which are due to our common nature. And the Roman Poet, makes a lamentation over one of his heroes, that he had no pious mother to lay his body in the grave, but he would be left a prey to birds, or thrown into the river as food for fishes. Aen. x. 557–560.

But to speak from still higher authority, God, by the mouth of his prophets, threatens the wicked that they shall have burial like that of the brutes, and that the dogs shall lick their blood. Such a menace denounced against the wicked, as a punishment, shews that it is an indignity done to our nature, when, in the words of Lactantius, the image of God is cast out, to the insults of beasts of prey. But in such indignity if there was even nothing repugnant to the feelings of men, still the nakedness and infirmities of our perishable nature should not be exposed to the eye of day.

Consequently the rights of burial, the discharge of which forms one of the offices of humanity, cannot be denied even to enemies, whom a state of warfare has not deprived of the rights and nature of men. For, as Virgil observes, all animosity against the vanquished and the dead must cease. Aen. xi. 104. Because they have suffered the last of evils that can be inflicted. "We have been at war, I grant, says Statius, but our hatred has fallen, and all our enmity is buried in the grave." And Optatus Milevitanus assigns the same reason for reconciliation. "If there have been struggles among the living, your hatred surely must be satisfied with the death of an adversary. For the tongue of strife is now silenced."