Polybius' Views on Peace : Attitudes on Peace in the Ancient World

Abstract

It is the object of the present article to analyze and understand the characteristics of peace consciousness of Polybius who lived in the Hellenistic age of chronic wars and wrote a world history in the true sense. We can see in his book, especially in IV. 31. 3-8 and IV. 74. 3, what kind of attitude he took toward the problem of peace. There he wrote as follows: "That war is a terrible thing I agree, but it is not so terrible that we should submit to anything in order to avoid it. ......Peace indeed, with justice and honour is the fairest and most profitable of possessions, but when joined with baseness and disgraceful cowardice, nothing is more infamous and hurtful." Thus, Polybius insisted that liberty and justice were indispensable conditions for peace. We can also recognize the same idea of connecting peace with liberty and justice in many other Greek politicians and historians such as Thucydides. The Greek thought of peace, however, was metamorphosed gradually by historical conditions in the development of the ancient world. Thucydides advocated the war for justice and took a rather aggressive attitude against other city-states such as Sparta, putting stress on Athenian hegemony, although he admitted that peace was naturally desirable. His conception of peace could never depart far from the narrow idea of ομονοια within a πολι&b.sigmav;. The Greek idea of peace was widened by Isocrates to Panhellenistic homonoia, but he had a strong antagonism against Barbaroi. In the historical development of peace theory, the Hellenistic age played a very important role, giving birth to the cosmopolitan pacifism. This kind of pacifism, however, could not become a historical force to attain world peace, because it had a tendency to escape from reality. Though Polybius was influenced by Stoicism he was able to reach a sort of realistic pacifism and wanted to cooperate with Rome, cherishing the idea of a united and organic world consisting of the cultural Hellas and the political Rome, where the common freedom of Hellas should be fundamentally respected. Moreover, he evaluated highly the value of unions of city-states such as the Achaean league. He had not merely a Stoic, philosophic and abstract idea of cosmopolitanism, but a positive, ego-involving and realistic attitude of international cooperation. Thus, the freedom of Hellas as a condition of peace was connected by him with a kind of internationalism and with a Hellenistic idea of one organic world founded on the principle of equality among races and nations. In this sense, we may recognize that Polybius was indeed a pioneer of realistic pacifism, that is of internationalism, though of course in an ancient pattern, which has its limitations for us. It was regrettable after all that the ancient world could not develop this kind of pacifism, but had to seek for a key to solve its problems in Pax Romana and eventually in Pax Dei.