heroic age of Greece, piracy was universally practiced. So late as the age of Solon, the Phoceans, on account of the sterility of their soil, were forced to roam the seas as pirates, which says the historian was considered in those times an honorable profession. That legislator tolerated, whilst he regulated the association of sea-rovers, which he found established by inveterate usage. The Etruscans, from whom the Romans derived their arts and institutions, were notorious sea-rovers who infested the Mediterranean

with their piracies.c And Polybius relates that the Romans imposed upon the Carthagenians, as a condition of peace, the stipulation that they should not sail beyond cape Pelorus, either for the purposes of trade or piracy. The extreme ferocity of the usages of war which prevailed among the Greeks of the heroic age is attested in the poems of Homer, which, whatever theory may be adopted as to their origin, must be considered as a faithful record. of the manners of the times to which they refer. Quarter seems never to have been given in battle except with a view to the ransom of the prisoner. Hostility was not satisfied with taking the life of an enemy and stripping off his armor the naked corpse became the object of an obsiinate struggle between the combatants; if it remained in the power of the adverse party, it was deprived of burial, and exposed to the beasts and birds of prey; and was not unfrequently mutilated. It was indeed only the chiefs that were subject to such barbarous treatment: an armistice was usually granted to the defeated party for the purpose of celebrating the obsequies of their friends.d But the indignities offered by Achilles to the body of Hector were not a singular example of hostile rage: for Hector himself intended to inflict similar outrages on the corpse of Patro

b Plerumque etiam latrocinio maris, quod illis temporibus gloriæ habebatur, vitam tolerabant. (Just. Hist. 1. xliii. cap. iii. n. 3.)

• Niebuhr, Römischer Geschichte, 1 B'ch, ss. 129, 132.

d Homer Il. vii. 409.

cluse and it is mentioned as a signal mark of respect paid by Achilles to Eetion, whose city he had sacked, that after slaying him, he abstained from spoiling his remains, and honored them with funeral rites. In the case of a captured city the sanctuaries of the gods sometimes afforded an asylum which was respected by the victors. Thus Maro, the priest of Apollo, was saved with his family from the common destruction in which the Cyconians of Ismarus were involved by Ulysses; for he dwelt within the precincts sacred to the god, and was therefore allowed to redeem himself by the payment of a heavy ransom. With this exception, all the males capable of bearing arms were exterminated the women and children were dragged into captivity to be divided among the victors as the most valuable part of the booty.f

With the ancient nations of Greece and Italy, law, both public and private, so far as depending on penal sanctions, was exclusively founded on religion. The guilty were condemned by devoting them to the infernal deities. This sentence was pronounced against a whole people as well as against individuals. War was the judgment of heaven. The heralds, by whom it was declared, devoted the enemy, and invoked his deities to desert the walls of the hostile city. The vanquished were considered as abandoned by the gods. Hence they might lawfully be put to death by the victors. To reduce them to slavery was consequently considered as a mitigation of the extreme right of war.g During the first Persian war, the heralds who were sent by Darius to Athens and Sparta to demand earth and water, ing the Perin token of submission to the "great king" were put to sian and Pelodeath with cruel mockery. This was, however, considered ponesian wars. as a breach of the international law acknowledged between

Laws of war

observed dur

Homer Il. xviii. 176.

f Thirlwall's Hist of Greece, vol. i. pp. 181, 182.

Vico, Scienza nuova, l. iv. c. 4.

the Greeks and Barbarians as founded on religion. On the side of the Persian invaders the war was carried on by ravaging the Grecian territory. The fields were laid waste, the cities with their fanes were plundered, burnt, and razed to the ground. The inhabitants, men, women, and children were swept into captivity. During the Peloponesian war the Spartans and Athenians rivalled each other in acts of cold blooded cruelty. This long protracted contest for supremacy between the two leading states of Greece partook of the ferocity and lawlessness which have ever characterized civil war. Even during a suspension of actual hostilities, the relations between the different Grecian communities were far from denoting a state of settled peace guaranteed by the sanctions of public law. The internal repose of each particular state was constantly disturbed by the deadly feuds of its political factions. "We find it difficult to comprehend and believe," says Niebuhr, "in the existence of the spirit with which the ancient oligarchies maintained the power they at all times abused; that spirit, however, is sufficiently manifest in the oath they exacted in some of the Grecian states from their members, to bear malice against the commons, and to devise all possible harm against them." This oath was still taken in the time of Aristotle by the members of the ruling body in some of the Grecian oligarchies. Their hatred was amply retorted in acts of vengeance inflicted by the democracy on those whom they justly considered as their mortal enemies. The Lacedemonian government was the avowed patron of the oligarchy in every city; and as the popular party naturally looked up to Athens for support, and there was no supreme federal authority adequate to check and control these rival powers, they kept every other state in continual commotions and furious disorders, which reduced them to

10.

* Καὶ τῷ δημω κακόνους ἔςομαι, καὶ βουλεύςώ ὅ τι ἂν ἔχω κακόν. Arist. Pol. ν. 7,

misery, and thinned their population by continual proscriptions, banishments, and massacres.i

The superiority of the Hellenic race to all other nations was an axiom assumed by them as requiring no proof. The acutest of their philosophers infers from this axiom that the Barbarians were intended by nature to be the slaves of the Greeks, and that it was lawful to make them so either by force or fraud. The Greeks termed those who were connected with them by compact, 'EsTodo literally those with whom they had poured out libations to the gods. Those who were not entitled to claim the benefit of the alliance thus sanctioned by religion were called Exodol that is, what we should term out-laws. It appears to have been a received maxim among them that men were bound to no duties towards each other except in virtue of an express compact. Thucydides has stated the maxim constantly observed by his countrymen that "to a king or commonwealth nothing is unjust which is useful." A similar principle was openly avowed by the Athenians in their celebrated reply to the people of Melos. Aristides distinguished, in this respect, between public and private morality, holding that the rules of justice were to be sacredly observed between individuals, but as to political affairs expediency might be substituted in their place. He accordingly scrupled not to invoke upon his own head the guilt and expiation of a breach of faith which he advised the Athenian people to commit in order to promote their national interests. Plutarch indeed relates an apochryphal story of a design formed by Themistocles to burn the united fleet

International morality of the Greeks.

i Hume's Essays, xi. On the populousness of ancient nations: Arist. Polit. cap. viii.

* Mitford's Hist. of Greece, vol. i. ch. 15, § 7.

1 Thucyd. Hist. lib. vi. Αὐδρὶ καί τυράννω ἢ πόλις εχέση δὲν ἄλογον ὅ τί συμφέρον.

of the Grecian states allied with Athens after the retreat of Xerxes, which the Athenian people refused to sanction, because Aristides had declared that though highly advantageous, it was unjust. "Such regard," says Plutarch "had that people for justice, and such implicit confidence in the integrity of Aristides." The same account is repeated by Cicero, with this variation, that the design of Themistocles was directed against the Spartan fleet only; and he contrasts the conduct of his countrymen with that of the Athenians on this occasion. "The Athenians thought," says he, "that an unjust measure could not be expedient, and therefore rejected the proposition before they knew what it was, upon the authority of Aristides alone. They acted more wisely than we Romans, who grant impunity to pirates and oppress our allies with exactions." But this compliment, which Cicero pays to the Athenians at the expense of his own countrymen, is quite irreconcileable with. the uniform conduct of the former on all other occasions, and with the more trust worthy authority of Theophrastus quoted by Plutarch as to the distinction maintained by Aristides between private and political morality.

Conduct of The true nature of the laws of war practiced by the the Spartans Greeks towards each other may be illustrated by two reder of Platea. markable transactions selected from

on the surren

multitude of similar

cases which occurred during the Peloponesian war. The first of these relates to the conduct of the Spartans on the surrender of Platea. The Plateans were allies of Athens and enemies of Thebes, which last state was the ally of Sparta. We borrow from a modern historian of Greece. the account of the circumstances as abridged by Mr. Thirlwall, from the narrative of Thucydides.

"By this time the remaining garrison of Platæa was reduced to the last stage of weakness. The besiegers might

n Plutarch in Aristidem.

• Cic. de offic. lib. iii. s. ii.