Classical Warfare. Classical observers of primitive
warriors had stressed not their play acting but their
courage, treachery, and indiscipline. Greco-Roman
political and social institutions were partly based on
kinship groups, but “civilized” men saw few analogies
between themselves and barbarians, perhaps because
they had so largely overcome the restrictions which
tribalism places on political and military efficiency,
perhaps because the technological gap between civi-
lized and barbarian peoples, even in metallurgy, re-
mained relatively small. Barbarian incursions might
also spark slave or social insurrections, and their few
laws of war applied only to other civilized peoples.
War began with plunder. “Both Hellenes and Bar-
barians... were commanded by powerful chiefs, who
took this means of increasing their wealth and pro-
viding for their poorer followers” (Thucydides, Pelopon-
nesian War, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Book I. Chs. v-vi).
This fitted the facts of legend and history. The Spartans
“were virtually the first of the Greeks to feel... greed
for the territory of their neighbors” (Polybius, Histories,
trans. Mortimer Chambers, Book VI, Ch. xlix). To keep
her gains Sparta made every citizen a professional
soldier and mercenaries her main export. But Aristotle
saw her constitution as a true union of aristocracy and
democracy, though Polybius found Rome's less demo-
cratic one better for expansion. The Romans managed
the most efficient city-smashing, land-grabbing, slave-
catching machine of antiquity. As Montesquieu was to
note of this “city without commerce, and almost with-
out arts, pillage was the only means individuals had
of enriching themselves” (Grandeur et décadence des
Romains, Ch. I).
Aristotle related constitutions to military systems.
Cavalry's replacement by infantry had been democ-
ratizing. But modern ideas of militarism came after
the technology which ended the dangers of barbarian
incursions had threatened to make civilized wars self-
destructive. Disciplined and efficient soldiers were
necessary for a state's survival in fighting barbarians
with very similar hand weapons. The Romans benefited
from “the abundance and convenient accessibility of
their military supplies,” but they also glorified war.
“Their customs” provided “many incitements to de-
velop... bodily strength and... personal bravery”
(Polybius, Book VI, Chs. 1, lii).
Soldiers often fought each other for political power,
but the social costs of ancient—and medieval—
armaments and warfare are difficult to estimate. Forti-
fications which protected capital, surplus food, and
occasionally a transportation network may have taken
most of the social surpluses which went to armaments.
Such public works usually used the seasonally un-
employed labor of a “backward” agricultural system.
Population pressures were relieved by more distant
ventures which might add to a state's land and labor
capital. And the disasters which overtook Rome were
too insidious (soil erosion, malnutrition, endemic dis-
ease, anomie) or too traumatic (plagues, barbarian
invasions, civil and foreign wars against equal enemies)
to be regarded as other than acts of God.
Images of pacifism mirror a society's images of vio-
lence. Most of the ancients whom the moderns were
to regard as rational saw internal and external political
violence in terms which were not too incongruent with
Clausewitz' view of “physical force (for no moral force
exists apart from the state and law)” (Book I, Ch. i)
as normal. Early Christians rejected as evil a society
founded on coercion rather than on love. An estab-
lished Church regarded those who felt that it should
not defend itself as naive and sinful. Greco-Roman
feelings of shock at Carthaginian child immolation—
which modern Tunisian historians try to explain
away—or at Christian pacifists are analogous to those
later feelings of hatred which the Faithful directed at
Peoples of the Book who were not True Believers. And
as long as the military and technological balance be-
tween civilized and barbarian remained relatively
even, both needed an enemy to be envied, feared,
hated, enslaved, and plundered.
