alternatehistory.com
Laws of Empires
There are few things to truly bring together the great nations of antiquity besides their power and prominence as a quality of its own. One could list the ten largest Empires of such times and find twenty different cultures, thirty different philosophies of governance, forty ideas as to what nationhood and an ordered society should be. An exception to this rule is the matter of their legal basis, their justification to the world and to themselves as to why they should exist, what right they had to exert their dominion over others. With some notable exceptions these powerful nations based their existence on one of two principles; the idea of spear-won land, and the belief that the Gods had ordained their actions.
The notion of spear-won land is that the act of conquest bequeathed the right of governance to the conqueror in question. For example, by conquering the Achaemenid Empire Agnimitra asserted the legal right, obligation even, to govern the domains he had seized. Likewise the competing petty-kingdoms of the Hellenes justified their existence, upon the collapse of the Amavadatid dynasty, on this basis.
Divine ordination, on the other hand, was based on the principle that the Gods always showed their hand by determining the victor of a contest for power, or by a lack of opponents to a course of action. By Cyrus the Great’s acquisition of the throne, his conquest of multiple other kingdoms, and his creation of the Kingdom of Asia, he demonstrated the will of the Gods. His successors, the rest of the Achaemenid dynasty, were acting by accordance with the Gods’ wishes by attempting to expand their domains further, and by ruling Asia.
There is certainly some overlap between these two ideas. One could argue that the Gods were the source of authority over spear-won land, or that ultimately the wisdom of the Gods was shown by matters of direct conquest. What truly differentiates these two principles is their emphasis- the one on rights to authority derived from human action, the other as authority passed on from a divine source. When the Tinians claimed that all was as fate decreed, for better or ill, they were stating the primacy of divine agency. When Lycaon declared all that he had won by arms to be his territory, he was asserting rights he believed himself to possess as a human being.
Neither approach has concern for written, codified law. They appeal to innate qualities to the universe, and fundamental principles of ownership that go beyond a constitution or a law inscribed on stone. But there has always been consequences for those great conquerors who chose to ignore ordinary law entirely. Not even the earliest of the great Achaemenid kings were above codified law entirely. The earliest assertions of spear-won land or divine right were usually, sooner or later, intruded upon by more codified restrictions, rights, and responsibilities, but never without contest.
This uneasy relationship between innate right to lordship and prescribed laws persisted throughout the ancient era. Some emergent nations simply wiped the slate clean upon their arrival, treating the great transitions as a moment of renewal for all laws. Others asserted continuity between themselves and their predecessors, gaining ownership of an entity they recognised with defined boundaries and institutions. The Achaemenids did not assert a body of law to accompany the King’s divine authority, the King’s command was enough. Nor did they claim to be an extension of a past state, but a new and particular state to Cyrus’ descendants that was also the legitimate ruler of all in its aegis. But there was enough of a codified framework that Agnimitra was able to legally claim a continuity of Asia that he had taken ownership of. He was not creating an Empire of Agnimitra in the same way that Cyrus had created an Empire of Cyrus, he was asserting rights of conquest over that which Cyrus had already built.
It was from these moments of definition that notions of precedent, definition, and boundary began to really intrude into the two great laws of ancient conquest. The most well known was the creation of Asia, whereby a series of conquerors were not truly creating things of their own but taking command of something that had come before. Asia even began to build the procession of conquerors and the march of dynasties into its legal basis by establishing the principle that impious dynasties would naturally be replaced over time, and that a successful rebellion or conquest would demonstrate the passage of one legitimate Asian dynasty to another. One can claim that this is simply a version of the ancient notion of divine ordination, and it is. But with Asia the principle was written down, made official policy, and tamed. No more was this something to be asserted over the lands of Asia but something that Asia would declare, could choose to acknowledge or to reject.
Neither was this the only part of the world where codified practice intruded. One of the earliest examples might in fact be Amavadatos. Despite his widespread (and deserved) reputation as a conqueror who created his realm by the sword, he did not justify his rulership with his conquests or by the authority of the Gods; he simply asserted the continued legality of his rule based on his position as satrap, whilst simultaneously asserting that his previous overlord was no longer worthy of holding this kind of authority over Hellas. His coronation as King was one resulting from acclimation by his Hellenic subjects, and his further conquests of Achaemenid land were notably asserted on the basis of his membership of the Achaemenid dynasty. It was not only Agnimitra who had come to recognise an Achaemenid state as having come into a defined existence.
Likewise the Italiote Leagues were constituted on the basis of confederation and its members’ territories. The Gods were invoked by all of the oaths binding these poleis together, but they were the guarantors of an otherwise human creation brought together by willing association. Any territories brought into the League by conquest, outside of treaty or negotiated submissions, had to be justified by their stated principles and basis for existence. This need to reconcile conquest with their stated limitations would drive much Italiote political and legal development.
In the end we can say that the Italiotes, Amavadatids, and inheritors of Asia pointed the way. History has never entirely escaped from conquerors solely justifying their actions by their power to achieve them. But the trend has been that even the most powerful nations of the world have developed complex legal justifications for their existence, however spurious their genesis might have been.
But we must also recognise how much of our history has been shaped by those operating on these simple but potent justifications for mass conquest. When peers express admiration for these larger than life figures they are partially expressing admiration for such unapologetic appeals to might and sagacity. We have never entirely escaped their legacy. Go back far enough and, for many of us, our current states and cultures owe their current locations and possessions to such legality as this. Untamed force and civilization, paradoxically, go hand in hand, but not in the way that many have suggested. It is the fearful legacy we must acknowledge. Much blood and ink and thought has been spent on the matter of taming the instinct to conquer. For good or ill, there is a reason for that.
It is a fierce and dreadful thing to take land as spear-won. It speaks of a time when arms were wielded and wars were fought by the sons of Gods, when spears were the length of a ship’s mast and shields were as heavy as anvils. We are a people of constitutions, and laws, and oaths. To take only those oaths between yourself and your followers as valid, to recognise only your strength and those of your battalions as your master, it a commitment to dominion by whatever means. These mighty men are using the heroes of ancient days as models for behaviour, and probably see themselves as those heroes reborn into mankind. But who would really choose to live their life as Herakles or Perseus?
To be Herakles in our times is to take that which has been constructed by hard labour and smash it to pieces in the hope that your boundless strength allows you to remake it to your liking. And imagine knowing that your sole recourse is to potency of arms and will, with no other means of protecting yourself and your family, no lines of defence when you are wronged or attacked by the wicked. There are no archontes for the spear-plunging conqueror, no courts to shield him, no laws to restore that which has been lost, no guarantee that an enemy will be punished by justice beyond hoping for some divine sanction. You have taken by the spear, and so you shall inevitably perish.
And to think what must be done to free men to create and hold such lands. Entire nations under arms, musters pulling farmers from fields not through defence of fatherland but to defend the honour and prowess of their master. All are reduced to followers, those that aid the hero on his quest to glory, usually with their lives cut short at the hand of some monster or another.
When we gather together and assent to our nations and our leaders, we are gathered together in a cause that will outlast ourselves and outlast those whom we serve. The purpose of policy and the purpose of the poleis are one, and we will always know why we fight and that it is our fight in service to our brotherhood of citizens. We are not followers but confederates, in service to one another as much as we are in service to the metropolis. This is the proper order of things.
One day you set yourself up in your high palaces with painted walls and tall towers, master of all you surveyed. How your delight must have shone like the shimmering sea. Your triumph was perhaps short-lived, however, as other strong men sought to contest your newfound stature. In your struggles we eventually caught your eye. You placed your grim, bronze-coated men among us, and you told us that you were come to govern as the Gods had decreed, and it was their wish that we should be governed. You put your mark on gold and silver pieces, our fingers grasping for the tokens you made to pay for our needs and wants, the idea of you and your power seeping into our lives. You took the good wheat and the fine fruit and the best cows. You told us our God-given land was now owned by your servant, in lieu of your own presence and name of course. Your servant who never once saw these fields and houses with his eyes, but who made sure his share of our treasures was paid in full at the arranged times. He was guaranteed never to spare us any displeasure or criticisms over the particulars of our lives. Then, at the time of your greatest need, you gathered our young, strong men together as your harvest, told them to come with spears and bows and to come to war to defend their king. Off they marched with their songs and their laughter, boasting and thinking little of the fear that seized us as we saw them disappear from sight. You ground these boys, our boys, under the stone of battle. They were milled, mercilessly, together with the boys of a hundred other places gathered together to protect your royal dignity. Those that returned to us bore broken husks, the very life of them threatening to spill out. Such was the harvest that you cast aside and left to us. So we take such treasures as we still possess, we bundle up our lives, we take our families and our leave. We quit our lives as your subjects, we relieve you of your responsibility as our guardian. We go to find lands where the Gods shall find our voices without need for an intermediary, where a crown is gauche and unnecessary, where we are considered dull and unworthy of interest. We shall dance in the fields, laugh without cause, and spend the deep hours singing our songs to the heavens above for our own pleasure. Farewell.
TELEO or AKUNAVAM: END OF CHAPTER 6
Μηδίζω! THE WORLD OF ACHAEMENID HELLAS
CHAPTER 6: NOMOS or DATA
THE MATTER OF CIVILIZATION BY DAIPHANDIS OF SIRAKUSE (870 CE)
ANTIQUE EMPIRE
CHAPTER 6: NOMOS or DATA
THE MATTER OF CIVILIZATION BY DAIPHANDIS OF SIRAKUSE (870 CE)
ANTIQUE EMPIRE
There are few things to truly bring together the great nations of antiquity besides their power and prominence as a quality of its own. One could list the ten largest Empires of such times and find twenty different cultures, thirty different philosophies of governance, forty ideas as to what nationhood and an ordered society should be. An exception to this rule is the matter of their legal basis, their justification to the world and to themselves as to why they should exist, what right they had to exert their dominion over others. With some notable exceptions these powerful nations based their existence on one of two principles; the idea of spear-won land, and the belief that the Gods had ordained their actions.
The notion of spear-won land is that the act of conquest bequeathed the right of governance to the conqueror in question. For example, by conquering the Achaemenid Empire Agnimitra asserted the legal right, obligation even, to govern the domains he had seized. Likewise the competing petty-kingdoms of the Hellenes justified their existence, upon the collapse of the Amavadatid dynasty, on this basis.
Divine ordination, on the other hand, was based on the principle that the Gods always showed their hand by determining the victor of a contest for power, or by a lack of opponents to a course of action. By Cyrus the Great’s acquisition of the throne, his conquest of multiple other kingdoms, and his creation of the Kingdom of Asia, he demonstrated the will of the Gods. His successors, the rest of the Achaemenid dynasty, were acting by accordance with the Gods’ wishes by attempting to expand their domains further, and by ruling Asia.
There is certainly some overlap between these two ideas. One could argue that the Gods were the source of authority over spear-won land, or that ultimately the wisdom of the Gods was shown by matters of direct conquest. What truly differentiates these two principles is their emphasis- the one on rights to authority derived from human action, the other as authority passed on from a divine source. When the Tinians claimed that all was as fate decreed, for better or ill, they were stating the primacy of divine agency. When Lycaon declared all that he had won by arms to be his territory, he was asserting rights he believed himself to possess as a human being.
Neither approach has concern for written, codified law. They appeal to innate qualities to the universe, and fundamental principles of ownership that go beyond a constitution or a law inscribed on stone. But there has always been consequences for those great conquerors who chose to ignore ordinary law entirely. Not even the earliest of the great Achaemenid kings were above codified law entirely. The earliest assertions of spear-won land or divine right were usually, sooner or later, intruded upon by more codified restrictions, rights, and responsibilities, but never without contest.
This uneasy relationship between innate right to lordship and prescribed laws persisted throughout the ancient era. Some emergent nations simply wiped the slate clean upon their arrival, treating the great transitions as a moment of renewal for all laws. Others asserted continuity between themselves and their predecessors, gaining ownership of an entity they recognised with defined boundaries and institutions. The Achaemenids did not assert a body of law to accompany the King’s divine authority, the King’s command was enough. Nor did they claim to be an extension of a past state, but a new and particular state to Cyrus’ descendants that was also the legitimate ruler of all in its aegis. But there was enough of a codified framework that Agnimitra was able to legally claim a continuity of Asia that he had taken ownership of. He was not creating an Empire of Agnimitra in the same way that Cyrus had created an Empire of Cyrus, he was asserting rights of conquest over that which Cyrus had already built.
It was from these moments of definition that notions of precedent, definition, and boundary began to really intrude into the two great laws of ancient conquest. The most well known was the creation of Asia, whereby a series of conquerors were not truly creating things of their own but taking command of something that had come before. Asia even began to build the procession of conquerors and the march of dynasties into its legal basis by establishing the principle that impious dynasties would naturally be replaced over time, and that a successful rebellion or conquest would demonstrate the passage of one legitimate Asian dynasty to another. One can claim that this is simply a version of the ancient notion of divine ordination, and it is. But with Asia the principle was written down, made official policy, and tamed. No more was this something to be asserted over the lands of Asia but something that Asia would declare, could choose to acknowledge or to reject.
Neither was this the only part of the world where codified practice intruded. One of the earliest examples might in fact be Amavadatos. Despite his widespread (and deserved) reputation as a conqueror who created his realm by the sword, he did not justify his rulership with his conquests or by the authority of the Gods; he simply asserted the continued legality of his rule based on his position as satrap, whilst simultaneously asserting that his previous overlord was no longer worthy of holding this kind of authority over Hellas. His coronation as King was one resulting from acclimation by his Hellenic subjects, and his further conquests of Achaemenid land were notably asserted on the basis of his membership of the Achaemenid dynasty. It was not only Agnimitra who had come to recognise an Achaemenid state as having come into a defined existence.
Likewise the Italiote Leagues were constituted on the basis of confederation and its members’ territories. The Gods were invoked by all of the oaths binding these poleis together, but they were the guarantors of an otherwise human creation brought together by willing association. Any territories brought into the League by conquest, outside of treaty or negotiated submissions, had to be justified by their stated principles and basis for existence. This need to reconcile conquest with their stated limitations would drive much Italiote political and legal development.
In the end we can say that the Italiotes, Amavadatids, and inheritors of Asia pointed the way. History has never entirely escaped from conquerors solely justifying their actions by their power to achieve them. But the trend has been that even the most powerful nations of the world have developed complex legal justifications for their existence, however spurious their genesis might have been.
But we must also recognise how much of our history has been shaped by those operating on these simple but potent justifications for mass conquest. When peers express admiration for these larger than life figures they are partially expressing admiration for such unapologetic appeals to might and sagacity. We have never entirely escaped their legacy. Go back far enough and, for many of us, our current states and cultures owe their current locations and possessions to such legality as this. Untamed force and civilization, paradoxically, go hand in hand, but not in the way that many have suggested. It is the fearful legacy we must acknowledge. Much blood and ink and thought has been spent on the matter of taming the instinct to conquer. For good or ill, there is a reason for that.
ON ETHICS BY LADIKOS OF DIKAIA
SPEAR-WON LAND
SPEAR-WON LAND
It is a fierce and dreadful thing to take land as spear-won. It speaks of a time when arms were wielded and wars were fought by the sons of Gods, when spears were the length of a ship’s mast and shields were as heavy as anvils. We are a people of constitutions, and laws, and oaths. To take only those oaths between yourself and your followers as valid, to recognise only your strength and those of your battalions as your master, it a commitment to dominion by whatever means. These mighty men are using the heroes of ancient days as models for behaviour, and probably see themselves as those heroes reborn into mankind. But who would really choose to live their life as Herakles or Perseus?
To be Herakles in our times is to take that which has been constructed by hard labour and smash it to pieces in the hope that your boundless strength allows you to remake it to your liking. And imagine knowing that your sole recourse is to potency of arms and will, with no other means of protecting yourself and your family, no lines of defence when you are wronged or attacked by the wicked. There are no archontes for the spear-plunging conqueror, no courts to shield him, no laws to restore that which has been lost, no guarantee that an enemy will be punished by justice beyond hoping for some divine sanction. You have taken by the spear, and so you shall inevitably perish.
And to think what must be done to free men to create and hold such lands. Entire nations under arms, musters pulling farmers from fields not through defence of fatherland but to defend the honour and prowess of their master. All are reduced to followers, those that aid the hero on his quest to glory, usually with their lives cut short at the hand of some monster or another.
When we gather together and assent to our nations and our leaders, we are gathered together in a cause that will outlast ourselves and outlast those whom we serve. The purpose of policy and the purpose of the poleis are one, and we will always know why we fight and that it is our fight in service to our brotherhood of citizens. We are not followers but confederates, in service to one another as much as we are in service to the metropolis. This is the proper order of things.
FAREWELL, O KING author unknown
One day you set yourself up in your high palaces with painted walls and tall towers, master of all you surveyed. How your delight must have shone like the shimmering sea. Your triumph was perhaps short-lived, however, as other strong men sought to contest your newfound stature. In your struggles we eventually caught your eye. You placed your grim, bronze-coated men among us, and you told us that you were come to govern as the Gods had decreed, and it was their wish that we should be governed. You put your mark on gold and silver pieces, our fingers grasping for the tokens you made to pay for our needs and wants, the idea of you and your power seeping into our lives. You took the good wheat and the fine fruit and the best cows. You told us our God-given land was now owned by your servant, in lieu of your own presence and name of course. Your servant who never once saw these fields and houses with his eyes, but who made sure his share of our treasures was paid in full at the arranged times. He was guaranteed never to spare us any displeasure or criticisms over the particulars of our lives. Then, at the time of your greatest need, you gathered our young, strong men together as your harvest, told them to come with spears and bows and to come to war to defend their king. Off they marched with their songs and their laughter, boasting and thinking little of the fear that seized us as we saw them disappear from sight. You ground these boys, our boys, under the stone of battle. They were milled, mercilessly, together with the boys of a hundred other places gathered together to protect your royal dignity. Those that returned to us bore broken husks, the very life of them threatening to spill out. Such was the harvest that you cast aside and left to us. So we take such treasures as we still possess, we bundle up our lives, we take our families and our leave. We quit our lives as your subjects, we relieve you of your responsibility as our guardian. We go to find lands where the Gods shall find our voices without need for an intermediary, where a crown is gauche and unnecessary, where we are considered dull and unworthy of interest. We shall dance in the fields, laugh without cause, and spend the deep hours singing our songs to the heavens above for our own pleasure. Farewell.
TELEO or AKUNAVAM: END OF CHAPTER 6
- Daeres
- Word Count: 2.1k