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NOTES TO LECTURE VI.

NOTE I.: PAGE 174.-" According to the ancient theory of war, the captor in his treatment of the captive was not bound by any rule of right; the relation between them was one of mere force: if that force was used to take his life, the captive could not complain of a rigor which in the opposite case he might himself have exercised. If he received life, even under the conditions of slavery, it was more than he was entitled to claim."-[Hadley: "Introd. to Roman Law"; New York ed., 1880: p. 110.

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Even his humane and accomplished hero, Cyrus, is represented by Xenophon as again and again saying to his soldiers: "The conflict is at hand, for the enemies are approaching: the prizes of victory, if we conquer, are our enemies themselves, and their possessions; and so, on the other hand, if we are conquered, the property of the conquered stands exposed as the reward of the conquerors. You ought to be sensible that there is nothing more gainful than victory; for the victor possesses himself of everything at once, men, women, treasure, and the whole country. . . It is a perpetual law among all men that when a city is taken from an enemy both the persons and the property of the inhabitants belong to the captors."-[Cyropædia: II.: 3: §2; IV.: 2: $26; VII. 5: §73.

II. p. 174.-"Nicias and Demosthenes they [the Syracusans] put to the sword, although against the will of Gylippus. For Gylippus thought that to carry home with him to Lacedæmon the generals of the enemy, over and above all his other successes, would be a brilliant triumph... No one of the Hellenes in my time was less deserving [than Nicias] of so miserable an end: for he lived in the practice of every virtue."-[Thucydides: VII.: 86.

Niebuhr, in his Lectures on Roman History (Lect. LVI.), following Palmerius and Beaufort, discredits the story of the death of Regulus by barbarous tortures at Carthage, principally on the ground of Polybius' silence about it. But the general modern opinion accepts the statement of the ancient authorities.

III. p. 175.-At Cannæ, forty thousand foot soldiers, two thousand seven hundred cavalry, are said to have beer slain, of Romans and

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their allies, with quæstors, military tribunes, eighty senatorial men, and a consul. One Numidian is mentioned, who, unable to reach his weapon, had died tearing his antagonist with his teeth.-[Livy: Histor.; XXII.: 49, 51.

In regard to the Samnites it is said: "They [the Romans] slew, without distinction, those who resisted, and those who fled, the armed and unarmed, slaves and freemen, young and old, men and cattle. Nor would a single animal have survived, had not the consuls given the sig. nal for retreat, and, by commands and threats, forced out of the camp the soldiers greedy of slaughter." The consuls immediately explained to the indignant soldiers that they had stayed the slaughter only in consideration of six hundred Roman youth confined at Luceria, as hostages, on whom the enemy, if driven to utter despair, would take vengeance.-[Livy: Histor.; IX.: 14.

When Melos was invested by the Athenians, Thucydides reports that there was treachery among its citizens. "So the Melians were induced to surrender at discretion. The Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age, and made slaves of the women and children. They then colonized the island, by sending thither five hundred settlers of their own."-[V.: 116.

When the fortified camp of the Persians was taken, after the battle of Platæa, Herodotus says that 'the barbarians no longer kept together, or in any array, nor thought of making further resistance': and he adds, "With such tameness did they submit to be slaughtered by the Greeks, that of the three hundred thousand men who composed the army-omitting the forty thousand by whom Artabazus was ac. companied in his flight-no more than three thousand outlived the battle."-[IX.: 70.

"Cæsar distributed the impatient legions into four wedge-shaped divisions, that the devastation might be a wider one: he wasted a space of fifty miles with sword and flame; neither sex, nor age, found any mercy; places sacred and profane alike, and the most famous temple of the tribes, were leveled with the ground. The soldiers remained unwounded, who had slain men half-asleep, unarmed, or straggling about... Germanicus, that he might be more easily recognized, pulled the helmet from his head, and exhorted his men that they should 'pur sue the slaughter; there was no need of captives; only the extermination of the people would put an end to the war.'"-[Tacitus: Annal.; I.: 51; II.: 21.

IV.: p. 176.-"The commander of the French chivalry, the Count de Nevers, had been taken in the battle. Bajazet ordered that he should be spared, and permitted him to select twenty-four more of the Christian nobles from among the prisoners, whose lives were also

granted. The Sultan then gave the signal for the slaughter of the rest [10,000] to commence... The Sultan sate there from daybreak till four in the afternoon, enjoying with inexorable eye the death-pangs of his foes, when at last the pity or the avarice of his grandees made them venture to come between him and his prey, and implore that the Christians who yet remained alive might be made slaves of, instead of being slain. Bajazet assented; and the surviving captives, after the Sultan had chosen his fifth part from among them, were given up, each to the Mahometan who had taken him in battle."-[Creasy: "Hist. of Ottoman Turks"; New York ed., 1877: pp. 39-41.

The ransom paid for the captives spared, was 200,000 ducats.— [Menzies: "Turkey, Old and New "; Vol. 1: p. 90.

V.: p. 176.-"King Xerxes had sent no heralds either to Athens of Sparta, to ask earth and water, for a reason which I will now relate. When Darius some time before sent messengers for the same purpose, they were thrown, at Athens, into the pit of punishment [in the side of which iron hooks were inserted, to tear in pieces those thrown in], and at Sparta into a well, and bidden to take therefrom earth and water for themselves, and carry it to their king."-[Herodotus: VII.: 133.

Pausanias says that it was Miltiades, the son of Cimon, who proposed the putting to death of the heralds at Athens, and that a Divine vengeance fell upon his family in consequence.-["Descript. of Greece "; III.: 12.

"At the time of their arrival [i. e., of the Lacedæmonian ambassadors, in Thrace] two Athenian envoys chanced to be at the court of Sitalces; and they entreated his son Sadocus, who had been made an Athenian citizen, to deliver the envoys into their hands. He consented, and seized them as they were on their way through Thrace to the vessel, in which they were going to cross the Hellespont; they were then handed over to the Athenian envoys, who conveyed them to Athens. On the very day of their arrival, fearing that Aristeus would do them still further mischief if he escaped, they put them all to death without trial, and without hearing what they wanted to say; they then threw their bodies down precipices."-[Thucydides: II.: 67; (abridged.)

VI.: p. 177.-"If I decide this case in favor of my own Government, I must disavow its most cherished principles, and reverse and forever abandon its essential policy. The country cannot afford the sacrifice. If I maintain these principles, and adhere to that policy, I must surrender the case itself. It will be seen, therefore, that this Government could not deny the justice of the claim presented to us in this respect upon its merits. We are asked to do to the British nation just what

we have always insisted that all nations ought to do to us. . . They will be cheerfully liberated. Your lordship will please indicate a time and place for receiving them."-[Letter of Secretary Seward: 20th December, 1861.

There was a wide feeling at the time that Mr. Seward's discussion of the subject had been rather ingenious than ingenuous; that he had been chiefly intent from the outset on releasing the nation from all peril of a war with Great Britain, if this could be done on any ground not humiliating to it. But the point on which his concession turned was certainly one of material importance: that by releasing the offending ship, after taking from her the envoys, Com. Wilkes had lost his claim to the exercise of belligerent rights over her, or anything on board of her; chat his action in removing the envoys then became, on his own interpretation, an attempt to exercise police power over a neutral vessel on the high seas-against the right of any power to do which the United States had protested, negotiated, and fought; that the ship should have been released altogether, or else have been seized altogether, and sent into port for adjudication. This doctrine appears to be henceforth established.

VII.: : p. 179.-"The more varied and more active intercourse be tween different nations, by which the rougher contrasts of nationalities were necessarily removed, chiefly contributed to this result [removal of limitations of law by nationality]. But the influence of Christianity must least of all be overlooked, which, as a common bond of spiritual life embracing the most diverse nations, has thrown their characteristic differences more and more into the background."—[Savigny: "Private International Law"; Edinburgh ed., 1880: p. 59.

"If there is anything that can unite men and nations of the most discordant characters, it is the profession of the same religion; especially a religion, the very essence of whose morality is to consider all mankind as brethren. . . The Law of Nations being founded in a great measure upon the systems of morality, good or bad, pursued by certain sets or classes of people, and Religion being everywhere the ground-work of the morality observed, the Christian Religion, as we have mentioned in a former chapter, may be supposed not merely to influence, but to be the chief guide of the Christian Law of Nations."[Ward: "Enquiry into Law of Nations"; London ed., 1795: Vol. 2: pp. 33, 1.

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VIII. p. 179.-"In that stage of civilization where every man has his own personal deity, and no two perhaps the same, the bond that unites man to man is exceedingly slight. Each man's hand is, in some measure, against his brother's. Opposition, or unlikeness, among the

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gods, leads to hostility among men. Thus family is arrayed against family, tribe against tribe, nation against nation, because the peculiar God of the one family, tribe, or nation, is deemed hostile to all others. A stranger, whom accident or design brings to the devotee, is a choice offering. The saint is a murderer. War is a constant and normal state of man, not an exception, as it afterward becomes; the captives are sacrificed as a matter of course."-[Theo. Parker: "Discourse of Religion"; Boston ed., 1842: pp. 60, 61.

IX.: p. 180.-The discussion by Mr. Grote of the origin, purposes, and general effects of the Amphictyonic Assembly, is clear and suf ficient. It will be found in his "History of Greece "; London ed., 1872: Vols. I. pp. 169–177; VIII.: 192–4; IX.: 238–253; 412-416; 456, et seq. "These are first attempts at procuring admission for the principles of humanity in a land filled with border feuds. There is as yet no question of putting an end to the state of war, still less of combining for united action; an attempt is merely made to induce a group of states to regard themselves as belonging together, and on the ground of this feeling to recognize mutual obligations, and in the case of inevitable feuds at all events mutually to refrain from extreme measures of force."-[Curtius: "Hist. of Greece"; New York ed.: Vol. 1: p. 128.

X.: p. 181.-"When Hellenes fight with barbarians, and barbarians with Hellenes, they will be described by us as being at war when they fight, and by nature in a state of war; but when Hellenes fight with one another, we shall say that they are by nature friends, and at such a time Hellas is in a state of disorder and distraction; and enmity of that sort is to be called discord."-[Plato: "Republic": V.: 470.

"To the barbarians he [Alexander] carried himself very haughtily, as if he were fully persuaded of his divine birth and parentage; but to the Grecians, more moderately, and with less affectation of divinity, except it were once, in writing to the Athenians about Samos."-[Plutarch: "Lives"; Boston ed., 1859: Vol. IV.: p. 195.

Yet among these "barbarians" were the Persians, of whose royal pavilions, with their golden vessels, exquisite perfumes, and altogether magnificent furniture, Alexander on entering had said, "This, it seems, is Royalty"-[p. 184.

It is perhaps still more remarkable, as showing how ingrained was this feeling in the Hellenic mind, that Eschylus, in the "Persæ," represents the chorus of Persians, the messenger of Xerxes, and the Queen Mother Atossa herself, as constantly and familiarly describing themselves as 66 barbarians."

XI.: p. 181.-" And the equitable rule of war has been fully de

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