A state's attitude and conduct towards other states can depend on the actions of those states and on their perceived status, in rough terms, on what they do and on what they are. One can order foreign policies based on the extent to which they incorporate one or the other of these criteria. One end of this spectrum is the view that two states for reasons of religion, ethnicity, or political system are natural enemies or natural friends and that no other grounds for war or, conversely, peace and alliance are necessary. An extreme example of this way of judging a state on its status rather than its actions is reported from Tsin China when the Tartars asked for a peace treaty: “‘Amity,’ the prince exclaimed, ‘what do they know of amity? The barbarous savages! Give them war as the portion due to our natural enemies.’” This story, whether accurate or typical or not, illustrates the status-based extreme of our spectrum: a case where no particular action was required to provoke war and where even the request for a peace treaty could not avert “the portion due to our natural enemies.” In contrast, a foreign policy that considered other states' actions only and took no account of political differences or similarities, putative superiority or inferiority, ethnicity or religion would occupy the opposite, action-based end of the spectrum.

One of the main themes of this book is the way that relationships between states were conceived of in terms of those within a society. Four aspects of this tendency deserve emphasis. First, it was quite natural: the abstract realm of relations between states – which only developed in the archaic period – was mapped onto the more concrete and long-established realm of relationships between individuals or families. Second, these analogies or metaphors allowed speakers on foreign policy to evoke the emotions and values associated with the internal relationships. Third, they seem to have been effective, to judge from their frequent use by expert orators. Finally, the ubiquitous application of internal metaphors to interstate conduct – like the influence of the economy and militarism – represents a path by which internal factors affected how Athens thought about and conducted itself in the world of states.

The most direct, simple, and emotional appeals of Athenian war rhetoric, the topic of this chapter, were based on the intimate and emotionally laden relationships within the house. Aristotle lists three relationships as constituting the Greek household: those between master and slave, between husband and wife, and between parents and children. The relationship of master and slave was metaphorically applied to the relationship of states in a class of arguments that encouraged intransigence in foreign policy: “fight for your freedom” or “to give in, even a little, would be slavish.

When Demosthenes, in On the Liberty of the Rhodians, distinguished between the equal justice within Athens and the anarchy and amorality among states, he distanced himself from those engaged in critiques of all morality. His argument also implied a rejection of another way of conceiving of internal and interstate relations: they might both be subject to the same moral code. This equivalence is usually due to the application of individual morality to the interaction of states. A central part of the moral code that the Athenians applied to the actions of states was the ideal of reciprocity.

Reciprocity requires that people or states requite the treatment they have received. The requital can be of favors or gifts (positive reciprocity) or of injuries (negative reciprocity, retaliation). Although we shall see significant differences between the roots and consequences of the two types of reciprocity, both require requital for past actions. The use of identical vocabulary for paying back favors and injuries confirms the unity of the Greek concept of reciprocity.

The obligation to pay back good and bad was strong, but was not enforced by law. So, the requirement of requital was on a different plane from the obligation to pay war taxes or not to murder. Its enforcement was not dependent on a central state power. Rather a person's sense of honor, closely linked to his reputation in the community, required reciprocity. It was shameful rather than illegal either to abandon a friend or to allow an injury to remain unavenged.

This book has aimed to treat the totality of Athenian feelings and thoughts about war, peace, and alliance, based primarily on the evidence of the assembly speeches of the fourth century bc. My basic methodological assumption has been that the skilled and successful orators whose works we possess did not waste their time with arguments or emotional appeals that were not likely to be persuasive. That they made such a variety of arguments strongly suggests that Athenian decisions were complex: no single consideration or system of thought seems to have dominated Athenian decision-making to the exclusion of others. This conclusion may, in part, be due to the nature of our evidence. We possess the arguments, but we can rarely tell whether some were decisive and others not. Notwithstanding this limit on our knowledge and the inclusivity it enforces, three salient attributes of Athenian thinking have emerged repeatedly.

First, the use of domestic analogies was pervasive. The different internal practices and values that were applied to the relations of states ranged from the simplest and most intimate, the household metaphors, whose application to states served mainly to evoke emotional responses, to the more complex and distant relations of reciprocity and law, which allowed for a more complex and analytical approach to issues of foreign relations. Of course, most orators wanted to win both the “hearts and minds” and deployed arguments derived from a range of domestic analogies in their speeches.

In the Republic Plato argues for a purely materialist and internal explanation for war: states attack their neighbors to gain their possessions, especially their land. He can imagine a city fighting such a war to escape poverty: the people in the Republic's original, self-sufficient city will not have too many children “lest they fall into either poverty or war.” But the main thrust of his argument is that the “unlimited acquisition of wealth, disregarding the limit set by our necessary wants” drives cities to war.” In the Phaedo Plato specifies the reason why people want “wealth and luxuries” and sums up the entire causal chain:

Plato thus attributes the drive to war to the desires of the body and links it with a deplorable lack of individual self-restraint. These attitudes find parallels among critics of Athenian foreign policy such as Isocrates.

Aristotle does not provide an overarching theory of the cause of war, but he too mentions material motivations for war.

Scholars agree that our nineteen core speeches were written by fourth-century orators. But do they reflect what the orators actually said in the assembly? A strong prejudice against written speeches meant that Athenian speakers did not read from a text either at a trial or in the assembly – nor did stenographers record their words as they spoke. A perfect fit between our texts and the words of a speaker is improbable. In addition, several scholars have suggested the possibility that the texts of speeches were revised after they had been delivered. These issues make the relationship of our oratorical texts and the actual words spoken a complex and disputed one. A full treatment is fortunately not necessary here. The crucial issue is not whether our texts are different from actual speeches, but whether they are systematically different in such a way that would jeopardize our use of them as evidence for popular Athenian thinking – both topics treated by a variety of scholars.

Professional speech-writers drafted law-court speeches for clients to memorize. These drafts were close to what was actually said – insofar as the client succeeded in memorizing them. Written versions of these speeches were circulated as advertisements for the speech-writer and some have survived to this day. Such texts may have contained revisions and thus not have duplicated exactly the client's pre-trial version, but the goal of such revision was not to appeal to a different audience.

The two most important twentieth-century movements to limit or eliminate war have been pacifism and the “peace through law” movement that gained strength in the early twentieth century and resulted in the League of Nations and then the United Nations. This chapter and the next do not aim to find an International Court of Justice of Greece, much less an Athenian Gandhi, but rather to examine two related issues: the extent to which the Athenians thought about the relationship between states as something that was, or should be, governed by law; what sorts of objections to war in general were voiced in Athens and how these differed from those common today.

Athens conceived of itself as a particularly lawful society. In the Clouds Aristophanes whimsically imagines a person objecting to a map of the world, because it does not show the jury courts in Athens; the whole play revolves around a man's attempt to escape from his debts by learning tricky arguments to use in court. The humorous premise of his Wasps is that an old man needs to be cured of his addiction to jury service. More seriously, in the Eumenides Aeschylus celebrates the law court's ability to put an end to cycles of vengeance. Evidence from the forensic speeches themselves confirms that the Athenians were proud of their system of law and especially of the fact that it resolved conflicts without violence.

Two beliefs were fundamental to Athenian moral thinking about war: first, starting a war without provocation was unjust and, second, states had a right to defend themselves. These judgments seem simple and familiar. When we examine the details of what counted as provocation, what it could justify, and how the argument for self-defense was deployed the picture becomes more complicated and more dependent on its specific historical and social context. We will examine condemnations of aggression in a variety of contexts, but here I will briefly preview a few of the relevant issues. I then turn to the elaborations of the argument for self-defense, the main subject of this chapter.

Despite the condemnation of unprovoked aggression, wars of self-defense were not the only type of just war: the Athenians did not believe in defensivism, the idea that only defensive wars were justified. Indeed, Athenian morality was offended as easily by staying at peace as by going to war: wars of revenge were perfectly just; staying at peace when an ally required support was morally indefensible. So one state might invade another's territory with complete justification. Unprovoked aggression, on the other hand, was generally condemned. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that none of the moral argumentation of deliberative oratory makes sense without reference to this basic assumption: Why would Athenian orators justify a war if war required no justification? Why would they accuse rival states of aggression if aggression were not generally condemned?

Few live in a Golden Age. Fewer still ever know that they do. Even Cicero thought eloquence in short supply among his contemporaries, and complaints and regrets over oratory's diminishing quality mounted among his successors. The laments usually came embedded in a wider discourse of decline that tied oratory's downward trajectory to the indolence, greed and intellectual laxity of a grasping and complacent world: Romans were not inclined to fault their political system for the problem. Seneca the Elder, the first imperial author to address the question of decline, shrugs off a political explanation, and a century later the Greek author of the famous treatise On the Sublime flatly rejects what he calls 'that old cliché' that oratory flourishes with freedom and withers under tyranny. The cliché as he knew it derived from the Attic canon of orators, which implicitly identified great oratory with the death struggles of the independent polis, but the treatise reveals its Roman orientation by preferring a familiar Roman reason for oratory's plight, namely, undue love of wealth and pleasure. Romans of the first century AD may well have hesitated to follow the political thread of the argument to their emperor's door, but intimidation was not the only reason to hesitate. Those of a historical bent might conclude from the Republic's demise that not liberty but licence had nourished the eloquence of its oratorical Golden Age, and they might well prefer other measures of oratorical success.

ROMAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS: AN OVERVIEW OF MECHANISMS AND TOOLS

The scholarship on Roman foreign relations, especially the process of Roman expansion and its impact on their understanding of the space they were conquering, is voluminous. Recently, emphasis was laid on Roman perceptions and misconceptions of space, their cognitive mapping of the ‘grossly distorted universe’ in which they lived. It was shown that Roman perception of space was directly related to the way they applied and organised their political and military power. The Romans perceived space in their political geography in two ways: as the space which was defined, measured, organised and administered and on the other hand, space that was dominated only through political power, but not formally administered. However, their political theory was used to unite both perceptions of space so that the imperium of the magistrate was applied and understood as either ‘power’ or ‘administration’, i.e. as ‘empire’. This is further reflected in the ambiguity of the word provincia, relating at the same time to the power of the magistrate over non-organised space, and the province as an organised space with definite frontiers, which we are more familiar with.

In fact, it seems that the way Roman power was projected over a certain space influenced their perception of that space. Claval argues that power has a geographical dimension but not a geographic continuum for the Romans – non-administered lands are not imagined as geographical areas with natural limits, but as spaces defined by the existence of those who inhabit them and which are not controlled by Roman power.

In this period Illyricum became an essential part of the empire, its inhabitants were slowly but certainly on the way to ‘becoming Romans’, and there was no more need to treat this region as part of foreign affairs, except of course for the Danubian frontier. The administrative and political unity of ‘Greater’ Illyricum was broken into two parts, creating an entirely new geo-political situation, although a certain level of unity was maintained through the administration of the mining district metalla Illyrici (see below). The northern part, soon to become Pannonia, was formed as a frontier province for defence against a potentially hostile army threatening from beyond Pannonia. The Dalmatian coast was geographically and culturally already in many ways a part of the inner Mediterranean cultural core, strongly affected by the global processes and acculturation inside Roman imperial templates. The Dinaric Alps region, rich in mining resources, but much less exposed to global Mediterranean influences, stood between these two, but for administrative purposes was joined to the coastal region. The Bellum Batonianum exposed all the weaknesses of the Roman political conduct in ‘Greater’ Illyricum, and the Romans were compelled to make decisive changes if they wanted to maintain their position and avoid further troubles. The most important elements of the new Roman solutions for Illyricum were extensive road-building, resettlement of certain indigenous groups, removal of some indigenous youth through conscription into auxiliary units, military administration of the most dangerous civitates, immigration of foreigners into Illyricum, opening of economic links and additional military measures.