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5 Peace and War in Plato and Aristotle* Among the few generalizations that one can safely make about the ancient Greeks as well as about us moderns is that none of us, with the exception of some certified lunatics, loves war for its own sake and prefers it to peace. But when it comes to the question of what war is and why human nature is susceptible to it, there are rather profound differences between their perceptions and ours. The best way to observe these differences is to raise a question that is probably most central to our thinking about war and peace: is war a necessary evil with which we must live, for better or for worse, or can war be eradicated from among mankind? The generations which, in our twentieth century, created first the League of Nations at the end of World War I, and then the United Nations at the end of World War II must have had some measure of faith in the possibility that war can be avoided. Yet the events that followed the upheavals of 1989 in many parts of the world have, to say the least, undermined this faith. They have rather raised the question why the demise of autocratic régimes—external in the case of colonial powers and internal in the case of such totalitarian states as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and others—which we should have expected to homogenize different cultures and different populations and bring them under one political system, failed to keep together what had been united, brought old hostilities to the fore again, and often resulted in war. Hope in the efficacy of the United Nations has, at best, shifted from the avoidance of war as such to the avoidance of “unjust” wars, *This paper originally appeared in Studies in Memory of Abraham Wasserstein, vol. 1, ed. H. M. Cotton, Scripta Classica Israelica 15 (1996): 102–18, reprinted by permission of Scripta Classica Israelica. It is dedicated to the memory of Professor Abraham Wasserstein, a much-missed friend and respected colleague, whose contributions to scholarship are living proof that the present cannot be understood without some knowledge of the past. I am happy to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to my colleagues, Professor James R. Kurth, who helped give this paper direction, and to Professor J. William Frost for bibliographical advice. I alone remain responsible for its shortcomings. 70 Chapter 5 in which the terms “just” and “unjust” are left undefined.1 If war cannot be avoided, we seem to believe, the factors that produce it on any given occasion can, nevertheless, be manipulated and regulated in such a way that only wars “justifiable” in the eyes of a majority of peoples are waged. While this may be a fair way to define our own crucial concerns with war, I do not think that any Greek before the advent of Christianity would have posed the problem in these terms. What views we find expressed in Greek literature and philosophy on war and peace universally take it for granted that war is as much part of the human condition as is disease or death. Some moderns seem to share this general view, for example Reinhold Niebuhr in his thesis that the sinful nature of man is the cause of war.2 For if sin is part of human nature, war can only be avoided if, as is unlikely to happen , the nature of man changes. Still, to show how far removed even this kind of thinking is from that of the Greeks, we have only to recall the statements of some Greek thinkers who actually welcomed the inevitability of war as part of a creative process in mankind. Heraclitus attributed to war the differentiation between gods and man, free and slave,3 and with his keen sense of the paradoxical he called it a ̪̰̩ң̩.4 And for Empedocles, Strife is one of the two principles at work among the elements without which cosmic change could not be explained. In other words, Niebuhr’s view of the ineradicability of war is premised on a Judaeo-Christian view of the sinfulness of human nature. There is, as far as I can see, nothing analogous to this in Greek thought or action. The Greeks regarded war as part of a cosmic process and tended to accept it as a given fact of human existence; there may have been an age of Kronos in the distant past...

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