The laws of war in ancient Greece

Law and History Review

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 470-489

  Lanni, Adriaan ^a  

^a HARVARD LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950595262     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0738248000002534     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. For references, see Simon Hornblower, Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2:81-92.
2. The most famous written convention is the treaty reportedly conducted between the archaic city states of Chalcis and Eretria banning the use of missile weapons (Polybius 13.3.2-4; Strabo 10.1.12). Herodotus (1.82; 9.26) also mentions a couple of bilateral agreements to limit the scale of war by specifying the number of combatants per side or providing for a battle of champions. The historicity of these treaties has been questioned by scholars. See, for instance, Everett L. Wheeler, "Ephorus and the Prohibition of Missiles," Transactions of the American Philological Association 117 (1987): 178-82;
3. Josiah Ober, "Classical Greek Times," in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, ed. Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 12.
4. Hans van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (London: Duckworth, 2004), 10 and 255 n.19.
5. Representative passages are collected in Coleman Phillipson, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome (1911; Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co., 2001), 1:58. Both nomoi and nomima are used to refer to "the laws."
6. Plato Republic 471a;
7. Euripides Medea 536-40.
8. Phillipson, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 1:59-60.
9. Rosalind Thomas, "Written in Stone? Liberty, Equality, Orality and the Codification of Law," in Greek Law in Its Political Setting: Justifications, Not Justice, ed. L. Foxhall and A. D. E. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 31.
10. Theodor Meron, "The Humanization of Humanitarian Law," American Journal of International Law 94 (2000): 249.
11. Thucydides 3.56 (trans. Rex Warner, History of the Peloponnesian War [Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1954]).
12. Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 126-30;
13. Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 210-14.
14. Clouds 398-402.
15. For discussion, see Robert Garland, Religion and the Greeks (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1994), 22.
16. Phillipson, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 2:246-49.
17. David J. Bederman, International Law in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 246.
18. Phillipson, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 2.269-71.
19. for discussion of this norm, see M. D. Goodman and A. J. Holladay, "Religious Scruples in Ancient Warfare," Classical Quarterly 36.1 (1986): 158-60;
20. Peter Krentz, "Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agon," Hesperia 71 (2002): 26-27.
21. Robert C. Stacey, "The Age of Chivalry" in The Laws of War, ed. Howard et al., 27-39.
22. Mary Whitlock-Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
23. David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61-86.
24. Peter Krentz, "Deception in Archaic and Classical GreekWarfare," in War and Violence in Ancient Greece, ed. Hans van Wees (London: Duckworth, 2000), 167-200.
25. W. Kendrick Pritchett (The Greek State at War. Part V [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991]) provides lists of massacres (218-19), enslavements (226-34), and ransom exchanges (247-71).
26. Krentz, "Fighting by the Rules," 31;
27. Van Wees, Greek Warfare, 135.
28. Pierre Ducrey, Le Traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Grèce antique, des origines à la conquête romaine (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968), 290.
29. Krentz, "Fighting by the Rules," 27.
30. The rape of women rarely merits mention in our historical sources. For discussion, see David Schaps, "Women of Greece in Wartime," Classical Philology 77 (1982): 193-213.
31. E.g., Harold Hongju Koh, "Why Do Nations Obey International Law?" Yale Law Journal 106 (1997): 2603;
32. Laurence R. Helfer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Toward a Theory of Efficient Supranational Adjudication," Yale Law Journal 107 (1997): 337-66;
33. Thomas M. Franck, The Power of Legitimacy amongs Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 183-94;
34. cf. Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks, "How to Influence States: Socialization and International Human Rights Law," Duke Law Journal 54 (2004): 621.
35. For discussion, see Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, The Limits of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14-17.
36. Goldsmith and Posner, The Limits of International Law, 3. Goldsmith and Posner's work has sparked debate in the legal academy: "Symposium on The Limits of International Law," Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 34 (2006): 253-484;
37. Oona A. Hathaway and Ariel N. Lavinbuk, "Rationalism and Revisionism in International Law," Harvard Law Review 119 (2006): 1404.
38. Victor Davis Hanson, "The Ideology of Hoplite Battle, Ancient and Modern," in Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience, ed. Victor Davis Hanson (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3-14.
39. For similar views, see Ober, "Classical Greek Times," and W. R. Connor, "Early Greek Land Warfare as Symbolic Expression," Past and Present 119 (1988): 3-29.
40. Ober, "Classical Greek Times," 13;
41. see also Ducrey, Le Traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Grèce antique, 334-36;
42. Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 14-18, 36, 223.
43. Ober, "Classical Greek Times," 15-17;
44. Connor, "Early Greek Land Warfare," 20;
45. cf. Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2005), 299-300.
46. Hanson, A War Like No Other, 146;
47. Hanson, The Western Way of War, 37;
48. Connor, "Early Greek Land Warfare," 27;
49. Krentz, "Fighting by the Rules."
50. Hans van Wees, "The Development of the Hoplite Phalanx: Iconography and Reality in the 7th Century," in War and Violence in Ancient Greece, ed. Hans van Wees (London: Duckworth, 2000), 146-56;
51. Van Wees, Greek Warfare, 116.
52. Krentz, "Fighting by the Rules," 30-31 (collecting examples);