Ancient Refugee Policies reviewed with the International Law Acquis of Today

Abstract

The article revisits the refugee policies of Ancient Athens and Ancient Rome and highlights how exploring them reveals the value of the contemporary acquis of international law for actively addressing refugee crises triggered by military invasion. The nexus between refugee flows, the undermining of ancient civilizations, and the value of legal corpuses has long been overlooked by contemporary literature. It is a gap that the article intends to fill by inquiring possible explanations for Athens’ and Rome’s failures in managing the Attican and Gothic refugee crisis. The article offers a historical analysis of the abovementioned refugee crises. The contribution of this article is two-fold: the article not only calls attention to the unpreparedness and lack of foresight in the refugee policies of the Ancient Athenians and Romans, but it also highlights how certain mistakes could have been avoided and why these failures remain relevant to modern society from an international law perspective. The results of the analysis are supported robustly by the triangulation of ancient testimonies with modern academic references.