Sur la violence de guerre en Grèce ancienne. Anthropologie, histoire et structure

Abstract

The study of war in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome has remained untouched by the dialogue between history, anthropology, and sociology which originated in the 1950s. The exception is Jean- Pierre Vernant’s long introduction to Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne. How can we explain this anomaly in the field of historical anthropology as defined by Marcel Mauss and Louis Gernet? That the problem of violence has been the sticking-point is the central thesis of this paper. On the one hand, war became a civic institution for the Greeks, a duty of every citizen which helped to define him as one. One could even say that the collectivity of citizens was never so plainly manifest as when they were under arms. On the other, though, the Greek city could never go so far as to consider war a good thing, because violence was an element in it which could never be successfully neutralised. War was linked by Herodotus with the worst example of violence, the killing of the son - when the natural order was for the father to die first. Thucydides saw war - the biaios didaskalos, ‘violent teacher’ - as the basis of all conflict, including civil strife, stasis. Already in the Iliad, Achilles may be ‘best of the Achaeans’, but is also the hero who is most detached from society, because of the unleashing of violence which transforms him in combat and makes him resemble Ares, god of the mêlée and the most hated of the Olympians, as Zeus himself says. So war is clearly one of the foundations of social order, but cannot be separated from the violence which disrupts its ordering. From this point, then, how did the Greeks themselves work out the relations between the two categories, war and violence. Can another analysis succeed in bringing out some helpful generalisations to match the diversity of confrontations and wars, each in its own historical context? How do the large categories of conflicts recognised by the Greeks, war and sedition, polemos and stasis, respond to the necessity, repeated on each occasion of conflict, to proceed either with or without violence? How, indeed, could a conflict without violence be conceived or carried out? What would it look like in reality? Part of the answer is to be found in comparing the decisions of the Greeks, or the ‘inventions’ of the Barbarians, as Herodotus calls them, with ethnological data (such as the Jivaro Indians studied by Philippe Descola) or with the history of modern warfare. Putting these two bodies of data together shows that violence is, in the phrase of Françoise Héritier, ‘always constructed’. It is not an irrational or uncontrollable release. Anthropologically, violence emerges as a universally available strategy of conflict-resolution, and it is perfectly logical that the Greeks could cite cases, albeit rare, when violence was not the strategy of choice. ‘War’ and ‘violence’ are thus conceptual categories which can be classified in four ways - through historical and ethnographic description, and also in the choice of discourses and narrative constructions made by historians or philosophers, or in the political subject-matter of public decrees. Links between war and violence in human society, as the Greeks understood them, fall under four headings which can be tabulated like this: [For the table see Article "Synthèses/Abstracts"] Conflict is always controlled by conventions, norms covering how violence is deployed. These can be seen in the ‘decree’ submitted to a city-assembly to decide for or against war with a neighbouring city, or (as at Nakone in Sicily) to work out a procedure for domestic reconciliation. They can be seen in the choices made by the nomadic Scythians which made it possible to defeat a conqueror on the scale of Darius, without coming directly into conflict with him. Conversely, and to take a twentieth-century example, the rape of enemy womenfolk - which might seem to be wholly irrational violence - was the product of a deliberate plan to wear down the enemy. This analysis shows that human societies are constrained to make its association with violence central to their thinking about war. Societies therefore made both violence and war intellectual categories as well as types of action, and can appear, as the Greek cities themselves do in particular, to be more or less normally at war, though they do not at all resemble the warrior societies of essentialising visions of the past. The analysis shows in particular that levels of violence also vary according to the different perceptions of them held by those involved, and here another crucial distinction appears, between those inflicting and those suffering the violence. This question of perceptions of violence is a field for future investigation, and one clearly linked to the anthropology of emotions.