Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The ancient writer Polybius relates Rome’s rise to dominance over the Mediterranean, an event which he called unprecedented. He is very concerned with the causes of war. He thinks that war and foreign policy events have definite causes, and he presents a method to understand those causes.
Tell me about your first book, Rise of the Roman Empire by Polybius.
The ancient writer Polybius narrates Rome’s rise to dominance over the Mediterranean within a 53-year period, an achievement that he calls unprecedented. He is very concerned with the causes of war. He thinks that war and foreign policy events have definite causes, and he presents a method to understand those causes. For example, he sees Hannibal’s attack on Italy as caused by Hannibal’s ambitious moral character, which was incited to action by the unfair conditions imposed by Rome after the First Punic War. Now I don’t think that Polybius is right about this. It is Hannibal’s ideas and those of his supporters that led to war, not his character. He thought that he could get glory for himself and his city through war, while avenging the earlier mistreatment by Rome: that was the real cause of this 20-year disaster. So the foreign policy of Carthage was led by this man’s ideas and the actions that followed from them. The warrior ideas that dominated both Rome and Carthage made war inevitable, even though Polybius does not quite see the cause this way.
Do you think he is one of the first people to pin down a theory about the causes of war?
Yes, he’s one of the first people to really lay out a method of approaching the causes of war. For example, were I to ask what caused World War II, some people would say Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. But Polybius would say no, that was the start of the war. The cause of the war has to be prior to that. So he lays out proximate causes as well as deeper, longstanding causes. Given this perspective, the cause of World War II would have to be something like Germany’s acceptance of a sacrificial war of conquest as a means to national aggrandisement, and their willingness to follow a dictator into such destruction. In other words, the ideas held by the Germans were the truest causes of the war. The attack on Poland would be the beginning of the war, and a consequence of the earlier causes.
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Dr John David Lewis is Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Programme at Duke University, North Carolina. He is also an Anthem Fellow for Objectivist Scholarship, a Senior Research Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, and a consulting editor for The Objective Standard. He is the author of Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History.
