Читать книгу The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State - Jonathan Wright - Страница 7

I swear by Zeus, Gê, Helios, Poseidon, Athena, Ares and all the gods and goddesses. I shall abide in peace and I shall not infringe the treaty with Philip of Macedon. Neither by land nor by sea shall I bear arms with injurious intent against any party which abides by the oath, and I shall refrain from the capture by any device or stratagem of any city, fortification or harbour of the parties who abide by the Peace. I shall not subvert the monarchy of Philip and his successors…If anyone perpetrates any act in contravention of the terms of the agreement I shall render assistance accordingly as the wronged party may request and I shall make war upon him who contravenes the Common Peace…and I shall not fall short.

The oath of the Greek city states when joining

the League of Corinth, 338 BC¹

In the eleventh century BC, during the reign of Ramesses XI, an Egyptian envoy named Wen Amun travelled to Lebanon to buy timber for the sacred barque of the god Amun-re. Much like Iosip Nepea, his journey was plagued with bad fortune. At the port of Dor in the Nile delta he was robbed of all his money, although he quickly made good his loss by seizing an equivalent quantity of silver on board a ship bound for the Syrian port of Byblos.

The prince of Byblos was distinctly unimpressed by the arrival of an Egyptian envoy. He lacked written credentials, he had brought no gifts, so there was little incentive to provide him with precious timber. Wen Amun sent word to his superiors and they quickly despatched four jars of gold, five jars of silver, five hundred ox-hides, twenty sacks of lentils and thirty baskets of fish. The gambit was successful, and Wen Amun purchased his timber from a suddenly much more amenable ruler.

Just before departing from Byblos, the men from whom Wen Amun had seized the silver arrived at court demanding justice. The prince took the night to mull over the envoy’s fate, though he was sure to treat Wen Amun courteously during his temporary captivity – providing him with wine, food and an Egyptian singer. The following morning the prince announced that, wince Wen Amun was an official envoy, he was immune from arrest.

Wen Amun embarked upon his homeward journey only to encounter a storm that forced him to put ashore on Cyprus. The startled local people were intent on massacring the envoy and his crew, but Wen Amun begged for the right to plead for his life with the local princess, Hatiba. Mercifully, one of the locals could speak Egyptian, and he set about translating the envoy’s threatening words. Wen Amun insisted upon his ambassadorial immunity, and warned the princess that killing a Byblian crew would be a calamitous error of judgement. If she killed his crew, the ruler of Byblos would hunt down and kill ten of hers. Once again, Wen Amun skirted disaster and continued on his trek home.

His story is exceptional – a detailed ambassadorial adventure that just happened to survive on a roll of Egyptian papyrus. The sources are rarely so generous. In the centuries since the Amarna period, the work of envoys, messengers and ambassadors had continued, just as it always would. All of the civilizations of the ancient world – whether Vedic India, the Cretan Minoans and the Greek Mycenaeans of the Mediterranean, the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Near East, or the tribes of Bronze Age Europe – had need of envoys. They fostered trade, brokered alliances, carried tribute, and the rest. But, almost without exception, they did so locally, with immediate or none-too-distant neighbours. The era of the continent-traversing ambassador had not yet dawned.

Across much of Eurasia, however, the second half of the first millennium BC can be understood as an era of consolidation. The first great, stable Chinese empires were emerging, coming to dominate the politics of East Asia. In India, by the fourth century BC, the first empire to genuinely hold sway across much of the subcontinent had appeared. In the Near East the bridge between the two continents, the Assyrian empire, had fallen at the end of the seventh century BC, to be replaced by a series of redoubtable Persian empires – the Achaemenids, the Parthians and finally, in the first centuries AD, the Sassanids. The links between these civilizations were fragile, their knowledge of one another limited – but this was soon to change. As in much else, Greece led the way.

Hermes, lover of Persephone and Aphrodite, protector of Perseus and Hercules, was the father of all ambassadors. God of gambling, trade and profit, he traversed the earth like a breath of wind, carrying Zeus’s messages, shepherding all travellers, escorting souls to the underworld. He would announce the weddings of the gods and execute their punishments, binding fire-thieving Prometheus to Mount Caucasus with iron spikes. He would visit all the communities of man to offer rewards for the return of Psyche, Aphrodite’s errant handmaiden: ‘seven sweet kisses’ from the goddess herself ‘and a particularly honeyed one imparted with the thrust of her caressing tongue’. Ancient heralds, aspiring to his eloquence and cunning, would claim to be his offspring. They would carry his caduceus, his serpent-entwined staff, and it would grant them safe passage. Earnest and yet mischievous – stealing Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born – Hermes was to be the ambassadors’ archetype and paragon.²

The caprices of diplomacy in classical Greece often demanded the talents of a Hermes. In southern Europe, Greece had enjoyed something of a resurgence from as early as the eighth century BC. New cities had sprung up, literacy and architecture had blossomed; colonies had been established throughout the Mediterranean, as well as along the coasts of North Africa and the Black Sea. Political life was rooted in the polis, the proud, fiercely independent city state. There was much that united the hundreds of communities across the Greek world – ties of religion, of kinship and, above all, of language – but there was just as much that divided them. The mightiest states – Athens, Corinth, Thebes and Sparta – were inevitable rivals, and while ancient Greece was not quite a theatre of constant war (as is sometimes supposed) it was most certainly a place of shifting leagues, squabbles and intrigue. The states were often willing to unite in the face of a common enemy – most often the Persian Empire – but diplomacy was just as likely to be concerned with territorial disputes, jurisdictional squabbles or cultural rivalry. It was fertile soil for the exploits of ambassadors. As so often, political rivalries and tensions provided the spark for diplomatic endeavour.

In the fifth century BC, Athens had led resistance to the threat of Persian invasion and won famous victories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). She could now claim not only cultural superiority (it was the age of Euripides and Sophocles) but ever-expanding dominion. Her leaders could be boastful. Pericles (495–429 BC) declared: ‘Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer…for our adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every land; and everywhere we have left behind us everlasting memorials of good done to our friends, and of suffering inflicted on our enemies.’³ Here was a rare example of a politician’s swagger being both justified and prescient.

Athenian hegemony was offensive to her rivals. One of the sacred tasks of Greek diplomacy had always been to prevent any one city from becoming unduly powerful. While the comparison may be clumsy and anachronistic, the situation bore some resemblance to that of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe, when nations began to strive for a balance of power. Just as the great European states would frown at the pugnacity of Louis XIV’s France so, centuries earlier, the Greeks had acted upon their resentment of Athens and, led by the Spartans, inaugurated the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). By its end, Athens’ dominance had been shattered and her empire all but dismantled. The city states of Greece embarked upon yet more decades of destructive feuding, marked by periods of Spartan and then Theban dominance, but most of all by political chaos.

To the north, in 359 BC, Philip II ascended to the throne of Macedon. With consummate timing (peppered with bribery and assassination) he set about spreading Macedonian influence across a confused, divided Greece, conquering lands and amassing tributaries (many of them former Athenian allies). It was now the turn of Athens to grumble at the rise of an overambitious rival, and it fell to Demosthenes, the greatest orator of antiquity, to articulate his city’s mounting trepidation.

In a speech before the senate in 351 BC, Demosthenes lambasted the arrogance of Philip II, and the indolence of the Athenians who sat inactive as Philip was ‘casting his net around us’. He was now ‘drunk with the magnitude of his achievements and dreams of further triumphs when, elated by his success, he sees that there is none to bar his way’.

Demosthenes had a simple solution: Athens should recall its glorious past, cast off the marks of infamy and cowardice and raise new and mightier armies to fend off the Macedonian assault.⁴ Many of his fellow Athenians were less hawkish. They thought it wiser to negotiate with Philip, and so it was that Demosthenes found himself a reluctant member of an embassy to Macedonia in 346 BC.

Athenian diplomacy was remarkably transparent. Tactics were debated in political assemblies before embassies actually set out, and negotiations (usually a series of set speeches and replies) were generally conducted in public meetings, although, as so often in the history of diplomacy, it was common for more private discussions between ambassadors and ministers to carry on behind the scenes. If agreement was reached there would be a formal exchange of oaths, and terms would be engraved on stone tablets. If the news was especially important, copies of such tablets would be displayed beyond the territories of the states most directly involved. After Athens and Sparta reached an accord in 421 BC, copies of the treaty were set up at both Olympia and Delphi.

Given its importance, Greek diplomacy was astonishingly extemporaneous. There was no notion of a distinct arm of government dedicated to foreign affairs, nor of a permanent diplomatic establishment. Men were simply chosen for ambassadorial errands – usually bearing the title of angelos (messenger) or presbeis (envoy or elder) – as and when the need arose. There was scant financial reward, and envoys – typically drawn (as in many cultures) from the political classes – were obliged to bear all the expenses of their retinues, although service as an ambassador did tend to enhance a politician’s reputation. There were few successful Athenian statesmen who had not, at one time or another, carried out diplomatic missions. Demosthenes, by the end of his career, would be a veteran of missions to Thebes and the Peloponnese as well as to Macedon.

Greek diplomacy was also riddled with dissent. Unwilling to trust important errands to individuals, Athens generally favoured the larger embassy, of three, five or ten men. Although envoys were furnished with specific, detailed instructions, the potential for bickering between them was a perennial danger. Within the embassy of 346 BC, Demosthenes was predictably hostile to Philip, insisting that any agreement with Macedon would have to be in the Athenians’ best interests; stringent conditions would have to be met before any treaty could be ratified. Some of his colleagues, notably the orator Aeschines, were more sympathetic to the Macedonian cause, and Demosthenes believed they were willing to give way on too many important points of negotiation. Some sources report that the rival factions even refused to sleep under the same roof during their journey. Upon returning to Athens, a furious Demosthenes charged some of his fellow ambassadors with receiving bribes from the Macedonian king.

One of the accused, Aeschines, sought to counter this threat by launching his own attack on the man expected to lead the prosecution: the politician Timarchus. If he could damage Timarchus’s reputation sufficiently, then Aeschines’ own trial would, at the very least, be postponed. Aeschines opted for a spectacular strategy, accusing Timarchus of having been a gay prostitute. One of the most sensational jury trials in the ancient world would reveal, all at once, how seriously the Greeks took the business of embassy, and just how vulnerable their diplomacy was to the selfish machinations of individual ambassadors. Beyond all that, it furnished an extraordinarily intimate example of an ancient ambassador desperately struggling for political survival.