War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris

clever men who ran the empire did what such men always do. They subverted the counterculture. Instead of fighting it, they brought its best and brightest young men into the establishment. They picked and chose among its ideas, rewarding former radicals who said things the ruling class liked while ignoring those who didn’t. Little by little, they turned the critiques of empire into justifications for it. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” Jesus urged good Christians, “for,” Saint Paul added, “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”
    Stoicism and Christianity assured the empire’s subjects that unauthorized violence was wicked, which was good news for Leviathan, and the empire then vigorously exported these intellectual systems to its neighbors. Yet for all the contagiousness of the new ideas, they did not by themselves persuade anyone to join the empire. Only war or the fear of war could do that. Soft power worked its magic later, binding the conquered together and giving the empire a degree of unity.
    As so often, it is the apparent exceptions to the war-first principle that prove the rule. The little city-states of ancient Greece, for example, had lots of reasons to forget their differences and come together in a larger community. Within each city, Greeks generally pacified themselves very well: by 500 B.C. , men no longer went about their daily business armed, and around 430 one upper-class Athenian even complained that he could no longer go around punching slaves on the street (it was, in fact, illegal). When cities were at peace, their rates of violent death must have been among the lowest in the ancient world. Most, though, went to war roughly two years in every three. According to Plato, “What most men call ‘peace’ is just a fiction, and in reality every city is fighting an undeclared war against every other.”
    No surprise, then, that dozens of squabbling Greek city-states agreed to surrender much of their sovereignty to Athens in 477 B.C. But they did not choose this course out of love of peace or even admiration for Athens; they did it because they were frightened that the Persian Empire, which had tried to conquer Greece in 480, would gobble them up if they stood alone. And when, in the 440s, the Persian tide receded, several of the citiesthought better of their submission to Athens and decided to go it alone—only for the Athenians to use force to prevent them.
    In the third and second centuries B.C. , a new wave of city-state amalgamations swept Greece. This time, groups of cities bundled themselves into koina (literally “communities,” but usually translated as “federal leagues”), setting up representative governments and merging their arrangements for security and finance. Once again, though, their prime motive was fear of wars they could not win by themselves—initially against the mighty Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great and then against the encroaching Romans.
    The most peculiar stories may be those of Ptolemy VIII (nicknamed Fatso) and Attalus III, kings of Egypt and Pergamum, respectively. Ptolemy had been kicked out of Egypt by his brother (also named Ptolemy) in 163 B.C. , and in 155 B.C. the dispossessed Ptolemy drew up a will leaving his new kingdom of Cyrene to the Roman people if he died without heirs. Attalus, though, went further; he actually did die without heirs in 133 B.C. , whereupon his subjects discovered—to their astonishment—that they too had been bequeathed to the Roman Empire.
    We do not know how the Romans felt about Ptolemy’s will, since the overweight monarch in fact lasted another four decades and, after seducing his own stepdaughter, left rather a lot of heirs. We do know, though, that the Romans were as surprised as the Pergamenes by Attalus’s bequest, and with self-interest strongly to the fore, competing