Reading and Misreading the Ancient Evidence for Democratic Peace
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343301038005003 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Eric Robinson |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
593
Introduction
The debate about ‘democratic peace’ – the
phenomenon that democracies never, or very
rarely, go to war with one another – has been
fully joined for over a decade now. Two ques-
tions have driven it: (1) is it really true that
something about democratic government
prevents or inhibits warfare with other
democracies; and (2) assuming that demo-
cratic peace is real, how exactly do we
account for the phenomenon? While the dis-
cussion of these issues has usually centered on
modern states of the last two centuries or so,
some studies have extended their inquiries
into the ancient Greek world. This is entirely
logical: the classical period represents the
only other era of history in which fully demo-
cratic states are known to have flourished. It
also had its share of warfare, and ancient
authors wrote many volumes of history
devoted to conflicts between rival states.
Thus there is the reasonable expectation that
scrutiny of the ancient Greek world will yield
additional evidence in the debate over demo-
cratic peace.
Naturally, some of the practices of ancient
and modern democracies have varied, but this
has not deterred scholars from looking to
Greece for possible insights about democratic
peace, nor should it. Divergences include the
tendency of ancient demokratiai to be smaller
and operate far more directly than most
modern counterparts, with ordinary citizens
© 2001 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 38, no. 5, 2001, pp. 593–608
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(200109)38:5; 593–608; 019468]
Reading and Misreading the Ancient Evidence for
Democratic Peace*
ERIC ROBINSON
Department of History & Department of the Classics, Harvard University
In the course of the debate over the existence and possible explanations for democratic peace (the ten-
dency of democracies not to fight wars with one another), some scholars have looked to the world of
Classical Greece to bolster their claims about the phenomenon. This article critiques the best of these
efforts, looking at the way the ancient evidence has been handled and the conclusions drawn therefrom.
It is argued that while the ancient world is an entirely appropriate era to investigate with regard to the
issue, the analyses offered thus far have not made a strong case for the existence of a Greek democratic
peace. Indeed, contrary to what investigators had hoped to show, the evidence from the period in and
around the Peloponnesian war indicates that not only did ancient democracies go to war with each
other, they did so with relatively high frequency. Both quantitative and more traditional literary analy-
ses support this conclusion. These results do not so much attack the general notion of democratic peace
as offer a more fruitful way of using ancient history to help explain it: by focusing on the differences
between ancient and modern democracies and their historical settings, future studies may be able to
identify the factors which encourage or discourage democratic peace.
* I thank the following people for their helpful comments at
various stages of this article’s composition: Andrew Grant-
Thomas, Nino Luraghi, Michael McCormick, Ernest May,
and readers for the Journal of Peace Research. Responsibility
for any deficiencies remains entirely my own.
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assembling to decide the issues of the day
themselves rather than leaving all governing
to elected representatives. The ancients also
practiced slavery and excluded women from
having a share in government. While these
and other factors are important to keep in
mind – and will be revisited later in this article
in regard to their potential impact on demo-
cratic peace – they need not dissuade anyone
from observing the tendencies of the Greek
examples. This is because the fundamental
kinship of ancient and modern democracy is
obvious when one considers the shared prin-
ciples visibly at work in both. These include
the notion that government is to be in the
hands of the many rather than the few or the
one; veneration of the ideals of freedom and
equality among citizens; and inclusion within
the political body of the broadest categories of
residents plausible given the social realities of
the era. Such characteristics unite democra-
cies ancient and modern and distinguish
them clearly from the perennial alternatives
(oligarchy, autocracy, theocracy, etc.). Even
the divergences noted earlier are not as drastic
as might be thought: ancient democratic
governments often employed councils of
elected or allotted citizens, so the principle of
representation was far from alien; and many
modern democracies exhibit a taste for direct
citizen action, as the increasing use of ballot
initiatives and referenda shows. Further,
slavery and the political exclusion of women
were not features of demokratia per se, but of
Greek civilization as a whole, and indeed of
most civilizations until very recent times. If
one refuses the name democracy to any state
that tolerated slavery or limited participation
on the basis of gender, one eliminates from
historical consideration almost all popular
governments prior to the very latest versions –
and even many of these, if continuously
evolving views of social justice are to be the
criteria, might well be eliminated on one
ground or another. In sum, when viewed
strictly as a political order and considered in
the light of contemporary alternatives,
demokratia’s essential similarity to modern
democracy is inescapable, justifying the
willingness of scholars of democratic peace to
reflect on what might be learned from Greek
events.1
The first question that must be addressed,
then, is whether the pattern noted in modern
history that democratic states tend not to go
to war – touted by some as coming ‘as close as
anything we have to an empirical law in inter-
national relations’2– is equally demonstrable
in the ancient world. Some have claimed that
the most absolute formulation of the pattern,
that true democracies have never fought each
other, applies to the ancient world just as it
does the modern. Spencer Weart (1998)
maintains as much in his book Never At War,
which examines the phenomenon in all eras
of history and devotes a crucial early chapter
to ancient Greece.3Other proponents of
democratic peace have been more cautious,
though they too find support for the hypoth-
esis in ancient evidence. Bruce Russett, who
has been at the center of the democratic peace
debate for years, closely examined the behav-
ior of ancient Greek states in his article, co-
authored by William Antholis, ‘Do
Democracies Fight Each Other? Evidence
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 38 / number 5 / september 2001
594
1This issue, of course, will bear discussion at far greater
length than the present occasion allows. For detailed treat-
ments of the ideals and definition of ancient democracy
(demokratia), with comparisons to modern versions, see
Robinson (1997: chs 1 and 2), Hansen (1989, 1996),
Ostwald (1996), and Murray (1995).
2This oft-quoted phrase comes from Levy (1988: 662).
While statistical analyses do show a low incidence of
warfare between modern democracies, not everyone agrees
that popular government itself is the cause. See the promi-
nent critiques of Layne (1994) and Spiro (1994), with
responses and further discussion in International Security
19(4): 164–184. More recent reactions, explanations, and
reviews include Farber & Gowa (1996), Chan (1997),
Gartzke (1998), Maoz (1998), Hegre (2000), and Russett
& Oneal (2001).
3Weart (1998). Chapter 2 is devoted to ancient Greece,
and classical examples crop up elsewhere in the book. Weart
(1998: 13, 20, 298) admits only that there may have been
some ‘doubtful’ or ‘ambiguous’ cases of ancient Greek
democratic wars. Similar views are expressed more briefly in
his earlier article (Weart, 1994).
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