Further moralization of the doctrine of Nemesis
There was a still further evolution of Greek ethical thought along the line traced above. The mutations and tragedies of life,—terrible reverses of fortune, sudden loss of reputation and friends, irremediable ruin following great prosperity,—these things are by a truer moral insight recognized as the sign neither of the envy nor of the righteous anger of the gods, but of the divine pity and love.[483] “The wholesomeness of punishment for the wrongdoer himself is the crown of Æschylean ethics.”[484] Phidias taught the same lofty truth through carving the myth of Prometheus Unbound on the throne of his Olympian Zeus. It spoke, as no other scene wrought there, of the moral significance of suffering, of divine mercy and deliverance.[485] And Plato’s philosophy accords with the Æschylean teaching that “Zeus has put in suffering sovereign instruction.” “Then this must be our notion of the just man,” he says, “that even when he is in poverty or sickness or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death.”[486]
In this ethical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human life, of the miscarriage of ambitious plans, the wrecking of high hopes, the Greek thinkers reached at last the same elevated point of view that was attained by the great prophets of the Hebrew race.[487]
The amelioration of war rules and practices
In the ethics of war a similar though less marked development in moral feeling is traceable. Aside from the relapse into the practices of savagery under the malign influence of the Peloponnesian War, there was throughout Greek history a slow but steady amelioration of the primitive barbarities of warfare. In the Homeric Age moral feeling had hardly begun to exercise its influence in humanizing war and in setting limits to the rights of the conqueror. The Greeks of Homer were in some respects almost on the level of savages in their war practices. The life of the captive was in the hands of his captor, and he might be slain without offense to the common conscience. Women and children were, as a matter of course, appropriated by the conqueror or sold into slavery. Homer relates as something to be gloried in, how his hero Achilles dragged the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. Such an act of savagery evidently stirred in the poet’s listeners no feelings of reprobation.[488]
In the historical period the mitigation of the barbarities of war was, after the protection of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a chief object of the celebrated Amphictyonic League. The oath taken by the members of the league included the following engagement: “We will not destroy any Amphictyonic town, nor cut it off from running water, in war or in peace.” This was one of the most noteworthy efforts in antiquity to lay restraint upon the primitive license of war. Limits are set to the rights of the conqueror. War begins to have rules.
From the words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Platæans at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we gather that at that time the common sentiment of Hellas condemned the slaughter of prisoners of war.[489] At Athens this sentiment had found embodiment in the laws, which forbade the slaying of war captives. But under the demoralizing influences of the long and bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens, the little gain which had been made in the humanizing of war during the preceding centuries was lost. Prisoners of war were sold into slavery or killed without the least offense being given to the numbed conscience of Hellas.[490] Even the terrible massacre, toward the end of the war, of the four thousand Athenian prisoners at Ægospotami, by the Spartan Lysander, awakened no protest in Greece at large.[491] Never has “the moral damage of war” had a more tragic illustration.[492]
During the century following the Peloponnesian War, however, there seems to have been a positive advance in this domain. In this period the grosser atrocities of war were in a measure mitigated by a growing humanitarian sentiment. But all efforts to humanize war seem to have been limited to wars between Greek and Greek. From first to last in Greek history war against barbarians was waged practically without the least mitigation of its primitive barbarities. It was the practice of Alexander the Great in his campaigns in Asia to massacre the men of non-Greek cities taken by assault, and to sell the women and children as slaves. We hear no protest, even on the part of the philosophers, against these atrocities so long as it is non-Greeks who are the victims of them.
But though the efforts of the Greeks to regulate and limit the rights of the conqueror were confined to wars of Greek against Greek, still these efforts are significant as a sign of an awakening ethical sentiment in this domain. This is a prophecy of a future day, distant though it be, when the growing conscience of mankind shall have rendered wars between civilized nations an impossible crime.
Efforts to prevent war by arbitration