61. A River of Golden Bones by A.K. Mulford: the review is over at Wordpress and Patreon
...with apologies, as they say, for the cross-posting
60. Plans and News
Maybe I'm moving this newsletter off Substack anyway, plus good news for those of you interested in my captivity in antiquity posts
Admin update:
I’ve been doing some poking around at other newsletter-type options. I’ve come to the conclusion that I might actually be best served by taking my toys and going back to my Wordpress.com site. It offers the benefit of cutting down how much manual cross-posting I’ll need to do.
Downsides: the UI is less smooth.
Upside: lower cross-contamination with disinfo and outright fascism on recommendation algorithms. (I went and explored some of Substack’s app’s features after reading some more reportage and, ah. I was already not exactly comfortable.)
I won’t be moving quickly, since I need some time to muck around with settings and site layout and other things, but at this point I think it’s a matter of when, not if, I move to primarily posting over there.
Other news:
Happy New Year! There’s good news for those of you who were interested in my captivity in antiquity posts: I finally found a listing for THE GREEK STATE AT WAR PART V on Blackwell’s, and ordered it. It’s allegedly been shipped, so we’ll find out when it arrives if I’ve actually acquired the volume to which everyone I’ve read on this topic in English has referred. Then I can try to figure out where I left things off and pick up the threads again.
Hopefully book reviews will resume when I recover from the incredibly hectic experience of December in constant company with a small child, too.
59. Substack, Rhetoric, Nazis, and Money
Or: the internet is full of horrors and fascist fellow-travellers, and I'm not happy about it
It’s become clear that Substack means to profit from Nazis and their fellow-travellers just as much as it has profited from the anti-trans brigade. Substack’s attitude to transphobic and bigoted writers is part of why I turned paid subscriptions off almost as soon as I’d turned them on: Patreon has its own, multiple problems, but it’s… better?
I think so, anyway. For now.
Using the privately-owned infrastructure of the internet is a series of bad compromises. I don’t have the spoons to manage my own website and newsletter solo, so this newsletter will be staying on Substack, and staying, as it has been, entirely free to read. (Aside from everything else, I find myself mostly talking about history, and I feel pretty icky about putting that behind a paywall without a lot more polish on the essays.)
If you want to support my endeavours, Patreon will continue to be the place to do that, at least until Patreon too goes sideways in the way of every useful thing on the internet. Remember Livejournal? (People a little older than me would say, “Remember Usenet.”)
58. Captivity in antiquity: hostages in the Greek world
Oh look, she's at it again. A fifth part of the ongoing series
Let’s start by returning to the Spartans taken captive at Sphacteria during the Peleponnesian War.
"regarding those… who had been taken prisoner on the island [Sphacteria] and who had laid down their weapons, it was fear that, impelled by the dread of being reduced to an inferior condition because of what had happened, they would, as long as they retained their full rights (or: although they still possessed full rights), start thinking up some plan of revolution. For this reason they were pronounced atimoi, even though some of them by now held magistracies. The effect of this atimia was such that they could not hold office, nor were they allowed to buy or sell. After a certain period, their full rights were restored to them."
Jean Ducat in "The Spartan 'tremblers'" (in Sparta and War, 2006) discusses this incident in light of his treatment of the Spartan attitude towards cowards or defaulters, the so-called "tremblers," and the legal/social status that such men enjoyed (if that is the word) in Sparta. In brief, it seems that Spartans who were recognised as cowards or otherwise in default of their responsibilities suffered social exclusion and (probably, and probably variable) legal disabilities. The question at hand here is whether the recovered prisoners from Sphacteria, or indeed whether recovered surrendered prisoners in general, qualified as cowards to be subject to such penalty.
Per Thucydides, it seems that returned prisoners were not automatically subject to penalties. Rather that it was a decision taken by the Spartan state as a whole after a small delay, for what amount to psychological reasons. (Ducat discusses this on pp41-42 of his article.) The Spartans as a government considered that the returned prisoners would continue to fear that they would be judged cowards and subject to a potential punishment involving a significant loss of civil status (atimia), and would therefore plot revolution. In consequence of this governmental wariness, they imposed a less severe and temporary loss of status, to head off any such revolution at the pass. This is the only case where this kind of sanction was imposed by the Spartans on recovered prisoners (not that we have a lot of evidence for recovered prisoners in general, much less in Sparta, and Ducat points out the infrequency with which the status of "being a trembler" emerges into historical reality), so it's impossible to say whether this was ever a standard measure. Clearly surviving a defeat and social disgrace were very closely linked in Sparta, however, given the mutual fear and distrust that led to this limited atimia being imposed.
While they were in Athens, these one hundred and twenty prisoners served a hostage function, in that the Athenians threatened to put them to death if the Spartans invaded Attica again. So let's move on to consider hostages in general in the ancient Greek world. Though how much we can say about Greek hostages really depends on whether we include the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic period, and Greek interactions with Rome. M. Amit disposed of Greek hostages from the Classical period in a 20-page paper in 1970 (Amit, M. "Hostages In Ancient Greece," Rivista Di Filologia V. 98: 1970), and there does not appear to be a more recent or more comprehensive treatment. There is, let’s be clear, not an enormous amount of evidence on the matter.
The Greek word for hostage is ὅμηρος, and Amit gives us the Greek definitions of this word as they appeared in Hesychius and the Suda. Unfortunately Amit, like many Classicists of that vintage, prefers not to translate the original Greek, so I'm going to offer my fairly inept attempt below:
Hesychius:
omeroi, the ones given in regard to peace, a pledge in regard to peace.
Suda:
omeroi, according to Thucydides a pledge, given in regard to peace, in reference to an agreement/treaty. Omeroi are those who are given in an agreement, to omerise (omerosai) is to make a contract/agreement/lend on bond.
It occurs to me that I should perhaps qualify the modern image of the hostage with the historic purpose of hostage-taking and hostage-exchange.
We associate hostages today with terrorism and violence. The modern hostage-taker seizes victims and threatens their lives and safety in order to exchange the safety of the hostages for something the modern hostage-taker wants, for the modern hostage-taker is not generally in a position of relative state or military power and can only achieve their goals by gambling that a relatively powerful state will value the lives of their citizens highly enough to negotiate. Often in fictional portrayals, the modern hostage-taker either kills (some of) the hostages(s) or is killed during a violent rescue of the hostages, or both. (The extent to which this reflects reality is variable: governments and powerful corporations tend not to publicise negotiations with hostage-takers where the hostage-takers get something that they want, lest it encourage the phenomenon.)
I think it's quite clear in what we've previously discussed that what we consider terrorism and war crimes forms a large part of warfare in Greek antiquity. The lives of hostages are still at risk in antiquity: the hostage is in the hostage-taker's power. The difference between then and now is, broadly speaking, as follows:
1. The hostage-taker is in the position of relative state and military power;
2. Hostages were a normal tool in the arsenal of states and generals to enforce compliance, and hostage-taking was understood as a normal practice. The execution of hostages is rarely reported. (I think any examples of this that we have are from the western Mediterranean, and from Roman-period sources.)
When hostages are taken by states or state representatives, the hostages frequently form part of an agreement whereby a weaker party subjects itself to a stronger. The lives and bodies of the hostages act as a living security bond that said weaker party will do as it is told. This "agreement" is rarely negotiated between peers or near-peers, however -- hostage exchange is very rarely mutual, though there are some anecdotes (I think in sources dealing with the Romans, I need to track things down a bit more comprehensively) where a mutual exchange of hostages guarantees a temporary truce -- but extracted by the stronger party with the threat of worse consequences if the weaker party fails to comply.
The experience of Philip of Macedon (later the father of Alexander the Great) as a hostage in Thebes (4th century BCE) and Demetrios I Soter of the Seleucids in Rome (2nd century BCE) suggest that hostages taken under treaty agreement could enjoy a privileged lifestyle in keeping with their elite status. Most of our evidence for the treatment of hostages as opposed to the taking of hostages is late, though, and Roman. By comparison to Roman practices and to practices from other times and places in history, we can hazard a guess that the more illustrious the hostage, the better the conditions of their confinement, but that conditions of confinement might vary based on status, the hostage-taker's opinion of how well the hostage's home polity or relatives were keeping the terms of the agreement, or whether or not the hostage was considered a risk for escaping.
Amit (p130) considers that "the institution of hostages was a stage in the passage from war to peace, and afterwards for keeping peace." If peace is the cessation of active fighting, this seems like an accurate view. We may see hostages as security for the compliance of their communities or relatives: a mortgage against hostile action.
Amit draws attention to a word that occurs in Demosthenes, ἀνδροληψία. This word also appears more than once in the Roman writer Appian, where it seems to mean something like "arrest," but in Demosthenes it appears to have a more specific meaning. (This is in Demosthenes Against Aristocrates: Dem 23.82-84, Dem 23.218.)
ἐάν τις βιαίῳ θανάτῳ ἀποθάνῃ, ὑπὲρ τούτου τοῖς προσήκουσιν εἶναι τὰς ἀνδροληψίας, ἕως ἂν ἢ δίκας τοῦ φόνου ὑπόσχωσιν ἢ τοὺς ἀποκτείναντας ἐκδῶσι. τὴν δὲ ἀνδροληψίαν εἶναι μέχρι τριῶν, πλέον δὲ μή.
"If someone should die in violent death, on account of this to his relatives belongs the ἀνδροληψίας (man-taking), until either they pay the penalty of the law of murder, or they surrender the killers. It is a man-taking of up to three [people], and not more."
(Murray's 1939 translation gives this, more fluently and undoubtedly more accurately, as: If any man die a violent death, his kinsmen may take and hold hostages in respect of such death, until they either submit to trial for bloodguiltiness, or surrender the actual manslayers. This right is limited to three hostages and no more.)
There is some question as to whether this is a seizure of foreigners for a murder that took place abroad, or a seizure of the (suspected or actual) killer's fellow-householders when the killer has fled: ἀνδροληψίας is an uncommon word and Demosthenes is both concise and speaking to an audience already most likely familiar with the practice. Either way, this seems to be speaking of a private seizure of hostages -- at the level of individuals and families, not armies and states -- to compel a third party to surrender himself to the processes of Athenian law. If the third party fails to surrender, presumably the hostages are subject to the penalties of the Athenians' laws in his stead, whether or not they did any actual killing.
It's probably important to mark here that the seizure of foreigners and travellers, either to hold for ransom or to sell into slavery, by individuals or small groups, is a regular hazard in the Greek world. You'll remember a previous speech of Demosthenes in these posts, where an Athenian citizen had been ransomed. Piracy (with the pirates most likely sponsored by or in a relationship with elites in their home towns or regions) is a widespread and continuing issue throughout antiquity, and capture by pirates and brigands shows up as a regular route into slavery in the Greek novels. (More on captives in the Greek novels in a later post: the novels are pretty much all 2nd-century CE or later, if I recall correctly.)
Of the legal texts remaining to us from the Greek world, none give a definition of the ὅμηρος. No text from the ancient Greek world, Amit says -- and as far as I can tell no more recent epigraphic discovery contradicts this -- literary or otherwise, appears to describe the giving or taking of hostages in a formal way, as opposed to the brief "took hostages" or "gave hostages." As far as I can tell (though my knowledge is far from exhaustive) there is no unequivocal depiction of the giving or taking of hostages in Greek or Roman art, though there are images of prisoners and figures in Roman art that have been identified as hostages in Roman possession. Amit says that there is no detailed description of the release of hostages (p131), and that is correct. But that is not to say there is no description at all: certainly in Plutarch's life of Pelopidas (Plut. Pel. 29) the Theban general Epaminondas receives back Pelopidas and Ismenias, hostages of the tyrant Alexander of Pherae, on foot of truce negotiations. But hostages are certainly mentioned as "taken" more often than released.
It seems from the texts that no particular ceremony attends the taking of hostages in the Greek world, except perhaps to make sure that they're useful: in parallel, then, it would be surprising if any particular ceremony attended their release.
In later history, hostages are sometimes exchanged between peers as part of an agreement. No such official exchange of hostages is attested for the ancient Greek world, though sometimes one party that has been forced to give up hostages manages to seize hostages of their own (and so trade one for the other). Sometimes this comes about, as in Thucydides 1.89-92, when there is no official mention of hostages at all, merely a question of ensuring the safe return of envoys or ambassadors from a potentially unsafe situation.
Giving up hostages on the part of a community or an aristocrat is a sign of subjection. It’s worth reiterating this point and supporting it with evidence: Lysias, the Athenian orator, makes this clear (Lysias 12.68) when he rhetorically opposes "saving the city" with "destroying the city," "freedom" with "slavery." Saving the city, freedom, is defined by not "giving any hostages or demolishing the walls or surrendering the ships." Destroying the city and "slavery," is defined by giving up hostages, ships, and walls, and in consequence having to obey the demands of a foreign power (the hostage-holder) thereafter.
Giving up hostages is not a particularly voluntary move. It's usually part of an agreement to surrender to a greater military power rather than be sacked (with consequences that previous posts touched on), and can be a face-saving move: Xenophon Hellenica 6.1.18 describes the giving of hostages in this light, in an incident taking place in Thessaly:
"And he [Polydamos] begged Jason not to force him to give over the Acropolis of the Pharsalians, his wish being that he might still keep it safe for those who had put it into his hands; but he gave his own children to Jason as hostages, with the promise not only to win over the city and make it his willing ally, but also to help in establishing him as Tagus. When, accordingly, they had exchanged pledgeswith one another, the Pharsalians at once observed peace."
(This is Jason of Pherae, father of the Alexander mentioned in the Life of Pelopidas: this incident takes place in the early 4th century BCE. “Exchanged pledges” here need not imply that Polydamos received hostages in return, or anything more than Jason’s word not to garrison (or sack) the acropolis.)
We can see the same process at work during the Peloponnesian War more than once, but let's take Thuc. 3.101 as an example case:
"The army [of the Spartans and their allies] having assembled at Delphi, Eurylochus [leader of that army] sent a herald to the Ozolian Locrians; the road to Naupactus lying through their territory, and he having besides conceived the idea of detaching them from Athens. [2] His chief abettors in Locris were the Amphissians, who were alarmed at the hostility of the Phocians. These first gave hostages themselves, and induced the rest to do the same for fear of the invading army; first, their neighbors the Myonians, who held the most difficult of the passes, and after them the Ipnians, Messapians, Tritaeans, Chalaeans, Tolophonians, Hessians, and Oeanthians, all of whom joined in the expedition; the Olpaeans contenting themselves with giving hostages, without accompanying the invasion; and the Hyaeans refusing to do either, until the capture of Polis, one of their villages."
Ozolian Locris was a small region lying between the Parnassus mountains and the Corinthian Gulf. Their neighbours of Phocis appear to have had ambitions in the region at this time, and were allies of the Athenians. It seems that the small town of Amphissa was worried both about the Spartans and the Phocians. They picked the Spartans as more likely to be locally dominant, and -- undoubtedly worried that the Spartans would just march straight through their lands -- gave up hostages before that could happen, and joined in with the army of Sparta and its allies. A number of other small settlements and their hinterlands (these are small settlements, not urban centres on the scale of even Naupaktos/Naupactus, much less Corinth or Athens: considering that at the turn of the 21st century the total population of Amphissa was less than 10,000 people, the area doesn't support a huge population even today) also gave up hostages.
The threat of coercion towards those who refused on the part of the Spartans is made obvious here: Hyaea/Hyaia (for which we don't have a secure location) did refuse until the Spartans forcibly seized (εἷλον, from αἱρέω) the κώμη (country town, unwalled village, possibly district) called Polis (here perhaps a placename with a sense of "citadel" or communal centre?). Bad things happen when populated places are seized by force, and this is the threat lurking behind Eurylochus's diplomacy. The hostages function to assure the Spartans that these new and partly-coerced allies won't suddenly switch sides.
Hostages taken in war are sometimes returned in peace. This is the case at Thuc. 5.77 (which refers to events and hostage-taking described at Thuc. 5.61):
"The assembly of the Lacedaemonians agrees to treat with the Argives upon the terms following:
1. The Argives shall restore to the Orchomenians their children, and to the Moenalians their men, and shall restore the men they have in Mantinea to the Lacedaemonians.
2. They shall evacuate Epidaurus, and raze the fortification there. If the Athenians refuse to withdraw from Epidaurus, they shall be declared enemies of the Argives and of the Lacedaemonians, and of the allies of the Lacedaemonians and the allies of the Argives.
3. If the Lacedaemonians have any children in their custody, they shall restore them every one to his city."
Argos, formerly an Athenian ally, is here making a separate peace with the Spartans (Lacedaemonians). Another separate, local peace, this time in western Greece, is described in Thuc. 3.114:
"The Acarnanians and Amphilochians, after the departure of Demosthenes and the Athenians, granted the Ambraciots and Peloponnesians who had taken refuge with Salynthius and the Agraeans a free retreat from Oeniadae, to which place they had removed from the country of Salynthius, and for the future concluded with the Ambraciots a treaty and alliance for one hundred years, upon the terms following. It was to be a defensive, not an offensive alliance; the Ambraciots could not be required to march with the Acarnanians against the Peloponnesians, nor the Acarnanians with the Ambraciots against the Athenians; for the rest the Ambraciots were to give up the places and hostages that they held of the Amphilochians, and not to give help to Anactorium, which was at enmity with the Acarnanians. With this arrangement they put an end to the war."
A hostage, ὅμηρος, is clearly distinct from the war-captive prisoner, the αἰχμάλωτος or the ἀνδράποδον. In the lexicon of Hesychius, αἰχμαλωτίζοντα is connected with being enslaved through violence (εἰς δουλείαν ἄγοντα μετὰ βίας) and αἰχμάλωτον with capture at spear-point (αἰχμῇ ληφθέντα, τὸν ἐκ πολέμου λαμβανόμενον), while for ἀνδραπόδεσσι the αἰχμάλωτος and the slave are given as synonyms (τοῖς αἰχμαλώτοις, τοῖς δούλοις) and for the verb ἀνδραποδίζει, to capture, to do violence to, and to overpower (αἰχμαλωτίζει. βιάζει. καὶ ὑπεραίρει) are offered.
The war-captive is linked with the status of a slave, but this linkage does not occur for a hostage. Though - as we have seen! - a war-captive may be used as a hostage, and to be a hostage is to be a kind of prisoner as we understand it, in that a hostage's freedom of movement is constrained.
It’s worth noting that I cannot see a confirmation of a female hostage in hostage-taking between (rather than within) states and armies for the Greek world. The wives and children of employed mercenaries are sometimes threatened by their employers, hostage-fashion, and likewise wives and children are threatened between aggressively competing factions in a single polity. But in the Greek world, when it comes to hostages taken to secure alliance or compliance, we appear to be dealing with boys and men. Whether this is an artefact of the extremely brief mentions of hostage-taking, and whether women (wives, daughters) can sometimes be included in hostage-taking, or whether women are not considered to make good hostages in general — that’s not really something we can see from the available evidence. I’d hazard a guess that men were in fact preferred, though.
Here’s my reasoning:
In the period before the rise of Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Greek world is mostly a collection of polities with politically-active (male) citizen bodies, whether those citizen bodies have limited influence on the state's hierarchies (oligarchies, into which category we should put Sparta with its weird dual monarchy and ephorate) or whether they have a much wider influence (democracies). Taking male hostages leans on the levers of political power more effectively, because women are not part of the citizen body and have only limited connections with the men who do direct the course of the state.
Outside her immediate family (husband, father, son, brother), a woman's social connections are primarily to other women. Whereas for men, the cultures of male socialisation (“friendship,” in its much-discussed Greek forms) and male patronage relationships that we can see give men direct and frequently (at least rhetorically) affectionate relationships with each other. Only in an aristocratic monarchy, where a single figure directs the state for the duration of his lifetime and who might well have affectionate relationships with sisters, mother, or daughters -- and whose direct relatives have much more influence on the running of the state than they do in a polity with a wider field of political elite -- can a woman really wield significant influence, and thus be a hostage of more than limited use. But even with monarchies, as we can see with the Macedonians when Thebes is in the ascendant, or with the Hellenistic monarchies when Rome gains the upper hand, sons and brothers are the preferred form of royal hostage.
The major difference between a hostage and a war-captive prisoner seems to be that there is no question that a hostage remains a free person, albeit one with constrained freedom of movement, and should be treated as a free person (that is, not subject to corporal punishment during captivity, nor subject to sexual exploitation), while the war-captive prisoner may be restored to freedom but appears to be considered to have lost the assumption of a free-person status as a consequence of their captivity. Which is to say, they're not automatically enslaved, but no one considers enslavement in those circumstances unusual: rather it is freedom that is a gracious concession of the victor.
We still haven’t even done more than touch on Rome. There’s a lot more written about captivity and hostage-taking in Rome and the Western Mediterannean in English. (I’m trying to get access to two works in French on prisonners of war in antiquity, including Greek antiquity, one by Pierre Ducrey and one by Anne Bielman. Alas, as a visiting reader to my local academic library, I have no interlibrary loan privileges there.)
If you want to see more in this vein, subscribe here or at Patreon. If you want not just to see but to encourage more, join one of the paid membership tiers at Patreon: for as little as USD$12* a year, you can help me keep doing this.
*I expect most of my readers are in the US, given the profile of the Angophone internet.
Loading more posts…