WAR IN THE HELLENISTIC WORLD

THE DISCOURSE OF WAR
Seleukids (Bikerman 1938: 217–19), the dedication of war booty in sanctuaries,
and all the other forms of war memorial in the form of texts, images,
monuments, and rituals (see chapter 11) focused on the image of the
victorious warrior-king. Whether the war was justified or not could easily be
forgotten under the much stronger impression of success. In the late second
century, a prayer in Pergamon for the success of King Attalos III (I.Pergamon
246, line 31) expresses the wish that the gods give him victory and success
not only in his defensive wars (amynomenoi), but also in his offensive campaigns
(archonti).
9.6. Longing for Peace
Lists of annual civic magistrates survive from several Hellenistic cities. In
Tenos, the civic officials used to have their names inscribed after their term
of office, adding short notes at the end of each entry which commemorated
important events – for example, “during their term of office there was health,
good harvest, safe navigation” (hygieia, eueteria, euploia; IG XII.5 897),
or “during their term of office there was health and peace” (hygieia, eirene;
IG XII.5 902). Such “chronographical” notes show how relieved the officials
of small communities were when they left their office without associating
their names with any major disasters, but rather with the blessings of the
gods: peace, health, and safety. To the best of our knowledge, only positive
events are recorded, and there must have been magistrates who did not
have their names so noted, not because of modesty, but because of the
small or major calamities which had occurred during their time in office. A
victorious war was no less a cause of pride and a blessing of the gods than
a (rare) year of peace. Needless to say that when the magistrates of Tenos
referred to peace, they only had in mind their one small island in the Kyklades.
The notion of peace in the Hellenistic world is a relative one. Peace does
not appear as the ideal condition of mankind, but as the temporary relationship
between two or more communities which had signed a peace treaty (or
were not in a state of war), or as the geographically and chronologically
limited interval between two wars. A standard formulation in decrees and
treaties which asserts that the rights granted would be forever valid, under
all circumstances, reads “both in war and in peace” (kai en polemoi kai en
eirenei), and this expression implies that time is a succession of periods of
war and periods of peace. Consequently, the appreciation of peace presupposes
the reality of war. A speech of an anonymous envoy to Aitolia
(207 BC) describes the feelings many Hellenistic Greeks must have had as
regards the destructive power of war:
As with fire, once one has set timber on fire the consequences are not at its
discretion, but the fire spreads wherever chance directs it, conducted mainly
by the winds and by the destruction of the timber with which it is fed, often
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