In Our Time - The Oath

Episode Date: January 5, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of the oath in ancient Greece and Rome, The importance of oaths in the Classical world cannot be overstated. Kings, citizens, soldiers, litigants all swore oaths, inviting divine retribution if they proved false to their word. Oaths cemented peace treaties, they obliged the Athenian citizenry to protect their democracy, they guaranteed the loyalty of the Roman army to its Emperor and they underpinned the legal systems of Athens and Rome. And in Homer's epic poem, The Iliad, it is a broken oath to settle the dispute between Menelaus and Paris that leads the Greeks to storm Troy in pursuit of Helen. But how did the Classical world come to understand the oath? Why did oaths come to occupy such a central place in the political, social and legal life of the Athenian State? And what role did oath-making play in the expanding Roman Empire? With Alan Sommerstein , Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham;Paul Cartledge , Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge; Mary Beard , Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the importance of oaths in the classical world can't be overstated. Kings, citizens, soldiers, litigants all swore oaths inviting divine retribution if they proved false to their word. Oaths cemented peace treaties. They obliged the Athenian citizenry to protect their democracy. guaranteed the loyalty of the Roman army to its emperor, and they underpinned the legal systems of Athens and Rome. And in Homer's epic poem, the Iliad,

it's a broken oath to settle the dispute between Menelaus and Paris that leads the Greeks to storm Troy in pursuit of Helen. But how did the classical world come to understand the oath? Why did oaths come to occupy such a central place in the political, social and legal life of the Athenian state and what role did oath-making play in the expanding Roman Empire? With me to discuss the oath is Mary Beard, Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge,

Alan Somersstein, Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham, and Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge. Alan Somerstein, you say that an oath can best be understood as a conditional self-curs. Could you develop that? Yes, it's an oath, really, if you pick it apart, consists of three things.

Firstly, there's a declaration, you're asserting, that something is the case or that you're telling the truth, or you're promising to do something in the future. And in the trade, they talk about assertory oaths and promissory oaths. Secondly, you specify the superior powers whom you're invoking as witnesses to punish you if the oath is false, normally gods, but sometimes you'll be swearing by or on sacred or cherished objects.

And thirdly, you specify the curse that you're calling down on yourself if the oath is violated, though often that's left to be understood. Can you tell us when the idea of an oath heaved up into ancient history? You mentioned, Melvin, the oath which is taken in the Iliad by both sides in the Trojan War to settle it by single combat. But as so often, Homer doesn't begin everything, and we're even more conscious of that now than we used to be. Ancient Greece is one of the later phases of a civilization

covering the East Mediterranean and the Near East, which goes back a very long way indeed. And I'd like to quote the oldest example I've come across, which actually also has to do with Troy. The date of it is about 1,280 BC, and it's a treaty of vassalage between the... the king of the Hittites and the king of a place called Wilusha, which is now generally taken to be Wilios or Elios or Troy.

The Hittite king promises, he only promises he doesn't swear. As he charmingly puts it later in the treaty, this wording is by no means based on reciprocity. He promises that he and his successors will recognize only Alakshandu or Alexandros and his successors, as kings of Wilusha. And in return, he places on Alexandu extremely detailed obligations of loyalty and cooperation. And then at the end, we have an enormous list of divine witnesses, who are referred to collectively as the thousand gods.

And it is added that if Alexandria transgresses anything in the oath, anything in the treaty, these thousand gods will destroy him and everything that belongs to him, and erase his seed from the dark earth. But if he keeps his oath, these same gods will graciously protect him. And that sort of combined curse and blessing is something that appears over and over again in later Greek oaths. Paul Gardledge, can you tell us how oaths in the ancient world,

maybe in the hit ice, but when we come and be closer like 7th century BC, how they were reinforced by ritual and what rituals are there were? Ritual action is repeated action conventional within a specific space, traditional, and so on. So oaths fit in very nicely into that sort of pattern. That's to say one does it according to a certain order as Alan set out. There is a typical distribution of the different actions, the different self-cursings and what have you.

There is a ritual of place. That's to say typically one does it within a sanctuary, a sacred space. Typically one does it with certain invocations and so on. so forth. Ritual, of course, though, isn't always precisely followed. So, as Alan has already said, there are variations, but variations on a common theme. But the rituals seem to, that I've read about, seem to employ blood and wine. I somehow thought you might get onto these substances quickly. Yes, absolutely. I mean, in the most sort of severe cases, there are, there's human blood involved as well as animal blood, but typically within the Greek and Roman context, you're

going to have a sacrifice of an animal. And this will be an important part of the making sacred of the whole ritual. And in the case of wine, you won't actually drink it, but you will pour it out into the earth. And the earth is often one of those divinities imprecated, invoked, to both witness and to, if there is a transgression, to reinforce the punishment of the oath. Can we get some idea of the importance of the oath in these early stages in the scheme of things? Was it the most important thing?

Was it the most important contract? Before, as it were, very formal written law. For example, you're talking about societies where interpersonal transactions are very much on an individual basis and not regulated by a formal contract. Yes, indeed. And, of course, it raises, therefore, the issue of responsibility. Who, for example, is really going to be guilty if a transgression happens?

Is it that a god has failed the person who's swearing the oath? Is it the God that will actually bring about the punishment of the oath taker? Absolutely right. This is an early, if you like, a pre-legal form of contract and a particularly strong one. with elements of what I suppose we would call magic. So it's partly straightforwardly religious, but partly deep psychology of various sorts is involved. Mary Beard, how did the Romans differentiate between a promise and an oath?

It's a good question, and there's a simple answer and a better, more complicated one. And I think the simple answer would say something like an oath is a statement, validated by some superhuman power with the threat of punishment from that superhuman power if that statement whether a fact or future action proved to be false or not carried out and that a promise by and large doesn't include that sense of divine retribution built into it. And Romans like us could actually be. split up statements and call something's oath and something promises.

But actually, of course, on the ground, it's always much harder to distinguish when someone's swearing something, when something promising something. And I think you have to see that this whole definitional problem is related to a bigger question in Roman and I think Greek culture, both of which much more heavily oral cultures than our own, which is how on earth do you ever know whether you can believe what someone says or not, or whether they're going to do what they say. We have, by and large, are committed to doing that in writing.

I will turn up, and I've, you know, on the 29th of whatever it is, and I've signed to say that I will. So in a culture where you're not using writing as your primary form of validation, then you've got a big problem about how you believe what you say. And there are various ways of believing what you say and listening to other people, and promises merge into oaths all the time. So, for example, if you say, by Hercules, I'll come tomorrow, does that count as an oath because it's a superhuman divine power in vote?

Or is it just the bit of extra emphasis put onto your statement? If you say, I swear that I'll come, but I don't swear by any gods in particular, is that a promise or it's an oath. and Romans are, I think Greeks too, were as interested in we are, as we are, in how you actually defined what counted as an oath and what didn't. If you say, you know, I resolve to give up alcohol in the new year. I promise to give up alcohol.

I swear by Almighty God to give up alcohol. Which of those counts most? Can you tell us the part of the word Fido is played in this in the era? Well, Rome partly explores the idea of trust and the essential necessity to be able to have some circumstances in which you can trust someone else's statement. By the idea of Fides, trust, believability, truth validation. And Fides is both an abstract concept as we might have trust. And it's also a deity. And it's also a word that you can use for oath.

so in fact from early Rome so the Romans believed there was a nice little temple to Fides up on the capital line just next door to the temple of Jupiter providing a kind of divine overview of what it was to believe someone's word

but often when you're reading what Romans wrote about this it's very very hard to know whether they're talking about some kind of abstract concept small F or big threatening deity Bigger, but it's certainly the idea that truth claims had a divine, there was a divine input into truth claims is terribly important for Rome.

How was the potency and the legitimacy of oath sustained? By the gods, Cicero makes a very clear and probably slightly erroneous statement because of its very clarity when he's writing the middle of the first century BC saying it's the gods business to perjury is punished by the gods. What you get for breaking your oath within the human world is you get shame. It's dishonorable and shaming to break your oath, but the punishment comes from up there.

Is there anything more to say about the place it played? Was it the instrument of control of the way society kept itself in order, as it were? Paul? In terms of democratic Athens, I think you could make quite, a strong case that that is so because the most fundamental political actions, for example being a juror or serving as a

counsellor and these are all year actions. In other words, once you're enrolled as a juror or as a counsellor, you take an oath right at the beginning and indeed your credentials are tested that you are who you are and that you are a proper

citizen in good standing and so on but then what you first of all do, before you do anything as either a council or as a juror, is swear an oath. And therefore that does suggest that it was not purely formulaic, that it really was very, very important at that high political level. I think it's also the case that in Rome, it's a terribly important part of Rome's own self-cultural identity.

Who are the Romans? Well, one of the things the Roman are the people who keep their word. And so it's ingrained, as the temple on the Capitolite Hill next to the biggest temple of the Lot show, Rose, Rome is a culture which values, brackets, unlike other cultures, close brackets, question mark, it values sticking to what you say you'll do. Can we just go back to Greece, back to ancient Greek, back to Athens, Paul, which you brought in, and then I'll turn to Alan here.

Can you tell us about, I think this is a pronunciation, the Epheic oaths, which is supposed to have been taken by all Athenian youth at the age of 18. This would be the first oath that an Athenian citizen, becoming a citizen at the age of 18, would take in a public capacity. There is debate among scholars as to when precisely this mode of, well, I suppose it's sort of like national service was first introduced. Some put it quite early, that's to say, in the 5th century BC, others put it relatively late. That's to say not till the early part of the 4th century or even later in the 4th century BC. but these were probably all Athenians. There's debate about that,

whether actually every 18-year-old would be enrolled as an Epheb, which means, by the way, on the threshold of feudal adulthood, Hebe, who was a goddess, meaning youth or age, is reached, adult maturity is reached at the age of 20. So for two years, these guys are in packs, they're in troops, they're in various forts, camps, if you like, dotted around the countryside,

and we happen to have a very long inscription which contains more than one document, and one of them is the oath sworn by the members of this particular effiebic group. It comes from a place called Akhanai, which is famous, and Alan is the expert here, for being the setting or the origin of a particular play by Aristophanes, the Akhanians,

and its very elaborate oath begins, not surprisingly, my swearing in the name of Arias, God of war, because these guys are doing military service, and Athena, who is the city goddess as Aries. So she has an epithet, Aryan, Ares-like Athena. Yes, I mean, this oath is primarily a military one. I think it begins, I shall not disgrace these sacred arms, but it also includes civic obligations

and a particularly interesting one regarding obedience. The young citizen swears to three kinds of obedience. He's to obey the established laws. He's to obey any laws that may be established reasonably or sensibly or sanely in the future. And similarly, to obey the reasonable or sensible or sane commands of the authorities of the day. In other words, we're not talking here about unconditional blind obedience. The commands and also the new laws have to be reasonable. And these provisions showed an interesting light on one aspect of Sophocles' play, Antigone,

which is, of course, so much about the possible conflict between civic obligations, or what are deemed to be civic obligations, and other duties. King Crian, who's forbidden the burial of Antigone's brother because he's a traitor, is confronted with his son, Hyman, who is Antigone's fiancé, And at one point he tells him, Creon tells his son, that the man whom the city appoints must be obeyed in matters small and great. He is in fact demanding absolute unconditional obedience, a kind of obedience which the oath did not warrant, the kind of obedience, in fact, which a tyrant would insist on. Indeed, it's interesting that, if we go back to the Athabic oath, it also said that if anyone tried to abolish the esthetic,

established laws, then, to the best of my ability, and with the help of all, I will not allow him to do so. Now, did Creon's decree forbidding the burial of Polynices, violate the established laws? Well, actually, we know it did, and the person who tells us that is Creon himself, because later on, when he changes his mind, he says, I now realize it may be better to obey the established laws. and although the matter is controversial, I would regard that as pretty much proving that by Athenian standards, Antigone is the one here

who has been behaving in the way a good citizen should behave and Creon has not. In the state, though, was the oath as powerful as it was in the state prepared for war? You can understand it more when you've got people who are going to go out there and fight that they're dream.

drilling them and into the basic obedience and discipline which will make them rush at other armies or whatever they're supposed to stand against other armies. So is this, Paul Gardner, is this in Athens, is this particular intense kind of oath and detailed, as Alan explained, is this aside from the main thrust of Athenians? No, not at all, because I think it's important to realise that war was more normal than peace.

In other words, they didn't really have such a positive notion of peace as we ideally would like to have, and they were at war in, on average, two years in every three during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. So it's not the case that there might be a war, but statistically and on average there is likely to be one. And though the effibs are not themselves going to be, of course, front-line fighters, they are border guards.

In a couple of years, the age groups from 20 to 29, these are the elite, these are the most vigorous, the fittest in every sense, presumably fighters, and they will probably be fighting in the front line. And so this is a real preparation and the oath is therefore taken very, very seriously. Whether it has the same implication as the sacramentum, which Mary will no doubt want to talk about for Roman soldiers, that's another question.

Can we talk about the analogy with Rome there? In terms of the prevalence of oath and the oath as rooting citizenship in some way, I think Rome is a bit different, particularly when it comes to the empire. I mean, like most cultures, Rome looked back to its primitive early days and thought that was a great hunky-dory time and everybody kept their oaths and swore them, just like we do, nobody broke their word. But we know much more about Rome when it's got a vast territorial extent.

And that puts a different kind of spin on what an oath is doing. Now, it is clear that there isn't an essential. sense and oath of citizenship in the same sort of way that there is in Athens. Heaven knows what happened in other Greek states. But when you get autocracy, when you get emperors ruling the show, there are clear signs that you have oaths of allegiance renewed to the emperor himself in person. Now there are a rather kind of optimistic views that historians put about about this, that every inhabitant to the Roman Empire every year went and swore their oath of allegiance in public to the Roman Emperor. This must be bonkers.

I mean, there's millions of people, and I'm sure they weren't doing that. But the Roman Empire probably is working partly to ensure loyalty by at least getting elites in its provinces and getting the local bigwigs to come in and swear. an oath to uphold the power and to fight for the emperor himself. One little bit of evidence about how seriously they took oath-giving in the Roman Empire was a perjury. It was a capital offence. Well, perjury is a capital offence if you go back to their mythical law code of the 12 tables, which does say anybody who gives false witness is going to be thrown off the tarpean rock.

Whether this actually happened is somewhat unclear. And it's not that Romans didn't take legal purport, because what the 12 tables are talking about is testimonium, about giving witness statements. They take it as seriously as any law legal system does, which is you can't run a legal system if people can come and, you know, fib their pants off basically. So you always punish perjury very hard. But it does compete that idea of legal, of legal false witness with a very strong idea that actually, this is a divine matter.

And who you are going to get zapped by is Jupiter up there. He's going to come and get you with his Thunderbolt, if you don't do what you say. There's a famous case under the Emperor Tiberius when one guy is arraigned because he's apparently sworn an oath and broken it. And he's sworn the oath on the power of the previous now deified, now therefore, a god, Emperor Augustus. And some probably private enemy of his says, Tiberius,

you ought to punish this guy because this is treason to swear an oath on the emperor now dead and break it. And Tiberius extremely wisely says, the God will punish the poetry himself. We don't need to intervene.

That's remarkably the same pattern as in Athens, where perjury as such was not punished at all. False witness was, but then the witnesses in most Athenian trials did not swear. But breaking an oath, that was a matter for the gods. But it does reveal this kind of fuzzy boundary. What's the difference between false witness and perjury? Well, you can make one, but in daily life,

these kind of swearings are seeping into each other all the time and making it very difficult for us to have. understand quite what's going on, and also the ancients themselves are renegotiating all these things all the time, just as the Tiberius anecdote shows. Paul, the best known oath, I think, that he's the Hippocratic Oath. We're back in ancient Greece now, we're just hopping quite nicely between the two. Can you just tell us a bit about that? Yes, as you say, it's probably the best known partly, because until very recently it was

actually valid. I mean, it really still had a bite in modern society. There have been recently attempts to revise it for modern doctors, in other words, to take account, obviously, of changes in technology. But what most people probably don't realize is that actually the Hippocratics were a school. That's to say, within the ancient world, there were more than one schools of medicine. And so if you're a Hippocratic, you've signed up to a particular set of doctrines or dogmas. and rules, but if you're, for example, a member of the Canadian School of Medicine,

then you're not committed to the same set of rules. So the Hippocratics, who took their name from a real person, Hippocrates, from the island of Koss in the 5th century BC, they swore by Apollo, the healer, by Asclepius, by health, and all the powers of healing, and they called to witness all the gods and goddesses that they would keep what they then were going to swear and promise to keep. But it will come as a bit of a surprise that, for example, they were not ever going to

conduct surgery. In other words, these doctors, in a time when there wasn't a sharp distinction between physicians and surgeons, are going out on the limb and saying, for example, I will not cut, I'll say I will not practice surgery, even for the stone. In other words, the kidney stone, which if for cute, that would be fatal. So they are really ultras on this distinction. So one has to remember, in other words, that there's a history behind this oath. It's not a general oath that all ancient Greek

and then Roman doctors swore. Alan Samistan, can I ask you, we'd be talking about Athenians with Athenians and presume the Romans inside the Roman Empire. What about, how were oaths used in dealing with foreign powers? Can you give us an example of that? Constantly, because it would happen every time two states made a peace or an alliance. Their representatives would have to swear to it.

And just as a modern treaty, I think this has already been mentioned, had a list of signatories. An ancient treaty might have and might have inscribed with it a list of those who swore to it. There was a difficulty, though. There are two things you can do with an oath. If you're an authority, like the Athenian state or the Roman Emperor, you can prescribe the terms of an oath which your subordinates are to take, and in that way you can make very sure that they swear in terms that allow for no loophole.

But in peace treaties or in alliances, the terms have to be agreed between the two sides. And afterwards it may well be convenient for each side to come away with a different interpretation. A good example is what's called the piece of Nykias in 421 BC, which ended what we now think of as the first phase of the Peloponnesian War. This treaty was sworn to in the usual way, and we have in fact a full list of the 17 men on each side. Within a year or two, each side thought that the other side had violated the treaty. Athens complained that the Spartans had allowed their allies to demolish a fortress,

which they should have handed back to Athens intact. The Spartans said, well, your enemies can't use the thought anymore, so what's the problem? Later on, the Spartans thought that Athens had broken the treaty by raiding Spartan territory and by refusing to refer disputes to arbitration. The Athenian reply to that was, well, you violated it. first, so all bets and all oaths are off anyway. Sometimes one can see and one can see in other contexts as well, for example, certain judicial procedures,

the main function of an oath in practice might be to serve as a debating point. Mary, can you, did the Roman Empire, did they equally use oaths in their treaties and dealing with other states outside the empire? Oaths, if anything, are more important in dealing with the outside world than dealing with internal Rome. issues. I mean, I think it's a bit of paradoxarily about truth-telling that somehow it's more important in a way to tell the truth to your enemies than it is to tell the truth to your friends,

because you can trust your friends anyway. But with... Friends weren't required to take-outs, were they? And so you've got a position in which, in a way, the key oaths that you have in the Roman world are oaths with those in a sense you can't trust. Really, some of the most interesting Roman stories which get told about oaths are told in relation to oaths with the enemy. There's a great example in the Hannibalit War when Romans have just had a terrible defeat at the Battle of Can I. And in the upshot of that, Hannibal sends 10 envoys back to Rome to try and arrange a swap, a prisoner swap. And he makes them swear an oath that if they don't arrange the prisoner swap, then they'll come back. And of course, there's all these kind of

Roman stories. They go off to Rome, and Rome says no deal, guys. The question is, what do the envoys do then? And there are various different stories about what happened to the envoys then. Some say they trotted off obediently back to Hannibal, perhaps one stayed behind. There's other stories that what these guys did is to say, hmm, I swore that I would go back to Hannibal to the camp if I couldn't get this deal arranged. In fact, what you don't know is that I'd forgotten something on the way. So as I got a mile or two outside the camp, I nip back to pick something I've forgotten. So I've obeyed my oath, actually.

Now, you could say sensible blokes, but this becomes an example of, even though the oath was sworn to Hannibal, an example of appalling dereliction of duty, And there are stories about these guys going around, never being able to go to the forum because otherwise people point and say those oath breakers. Just to spread it across society a bit, Paul. The oath was used in athletic and artistic contests. Yes.

Can you just describe a little about how it worked down? I mean, best known, I think, is probably the Olympics, where there were two kinds of oaths, that is, both the judges and the participants had to swear oaths. The competitors that they had been in training for a certain amount of time, the judges that the judges that the judges, they would judge uncorruptly. And we happen to know

there is physical evidence of judges being corrupt because the penalty for corruption was to pay for, a huge fine, a life-size statue, which is called in the local dialect, Zeus. So it's a representation of Zeus,

but it's actually a memorial to the corruption of a particular judge. And there are bases. As you, if you go to Olympia, today and you walk towards the stadium, which doesn't look quite, of course, today, as it once did, but there are a whole series of bases of such statues, which are a permanent memorial to the corruption of the judges. So it seems that that was both religious and, in a way, very secular. It was both political and ritual.

Can I move on to the validity of oaths now? And certainly with you, Mary Bid, Ciceroid, Cicero wrote, on the story of Regulus, who is a prime example of many things to do with oaths in the time of Rome. Can you briskly tell us about Regulus and why he became such a figure in Cicero's writing? Regulus is another one of these characters

who make an oath with the Carthaginians. This is in the middle of the third century BC, and the Carthaginians want some prisoners back from Rome. They've got Regulus in captivity. They say to Regulus, go to Rome, try and get our prisoners out. But if you don't, you're jolly well coming back here and you're swearing solemnly that you will.

Regulus goes off to Rome. He heroically advises the Roman Senate not to have any deals with the Carthaginians at all and nobly plods back to the Carthaginians to give himself up to captivity and torture and death. And it was one of the most famous, an uplifting moral tales that the Romans had. So how did Cicero handle it?

Cicero came in, he defended Regulus, didn't he? He thought this was a great example. Well, as well as being an uplifting tale, there were people, of course, at the margins, who not surprisingly said that there were problems with the story. And although Cicero, in the end, when he's writing in his book on duties, goes to enormous lengths to defend the behaviour of Regulus,

it's absolutely clear that it was, as all such stories are, I think, deeply contested at the margins. It became obvious that people were to say, look, A, this was stupid. B, if you swear a completely unreasonable oath with the Carthaginians, why should you be kept to an unreasonable oath? And that becomes quite a... Because the Carthaginians don't keep their oath. It's a definition of a Carthaginian, yeah.

And that becomes an absolute cliche in Roman moral debates about oathkeeping. If you swear an oath to somebody who somehow lies out really outside the bond of word, not a regular enemy, but someone who's completely other, then can you and should you be kept to your oath? But you've still got the gods, haven't you? Sorry, you've still sworn it to the gods world. That's a bit of a complication, isn't it? Well, I was going to say, if you're dealing with cultures which have different gods,

how exactly do you expect your partner in oath, who is an alien and recognises other gods, to be bound by your gods. I mean, I'll give you just one example that the Spartans, after beating the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War that we talked about earlier, they then thought, right, we'll take on the Persians. And one particular viceroy or satrap

was in negotiations with a succession of Spartan commanders. And the Spartans took the line that this man had broken what they had previously taken to be a regular oath. but since Tisophanes' gods were not the gods of the Spartans, it's not absolutely clear why Tisophoni should have felt that he was bound equally. And this is a problem, I think, with all treaties that go beyond cultural boundaries. And though they're all, to some extent, polytheists, the Persians were distinctly less polytheistic than the Greeks were.

I'm reminded of in these questions of different cultures and people who are not quite human of what Achilles says to Hector, when Hector tries almost at death's daughter to make a sworn agreement that Achilles should allow his burial, and Achilles replies, there are no sure oaths between men and lions. That's a bit of a showstopper, isn't it?

But the idea of the oath having any force of validity is in question, isn't it, from early days, as Mary's said, and from the evidence we have, quite know where we are sometimes, but Lysander, a Greek general, said, you cheat children with toys, you cheat men with oaths. Were oaths manipulated, as that implies?

Have we got lots of evidence for them being manipulated? Well, yes. I mean, as Mary said, in a way the whole time, systematically a problem and an issue. But Lysander was, if you like, at one end of the spectrum. He was extraordinarily crafty. And there is a paradox and an irony here

that he was probably the first Greek to receive divine. worship in his lifetime, extreme groups of oligarchic conspirators might swear an oath to the effect that this is preserved by Aristotle, I will do as much harm to the ordinary people, the masses, as I possibly can. In other words, a class oath. Well, a group of such oligarchs had been restored by Lysander to the island of Samos, which had previously had a very strongly democratic pro-Athenian government regime. So Lysander was deified in effect by them.

He is therefore an extraordinary, strange guy and extremely successful, but nevertheless unscrupulous. But there is a bigger issue, isn't there, about what keeping an oath actually means. And it doesn't take the ancients very long to get to the point of the saying, well, if you say something you don't mean, even sworn by the gods with your fingers crossed, Does that then count? I think you're crossing gaming rather later, I think. You don't know, Wilming.

If it represents the cost. And there's a very famous line in one of Euripides' plays, The Hippolytus, where Hippolytus says, My Tongue swore, but my heart didn't. In fact, the whole of the rest of the plot of Hippolytus shows Hippolytus actually keeping this oath. What do you think the audience did when he said that? Oh, you're just about saying that.

Across their fingers. But the point I was going to make was how interesting it compares with Cicero because in Greek culture, as I understand it, these guys will know better about this than I do, that in a sense becomes a bit of a dangerous limit to say, I swore, but I didn't mean it. When it gets to Cicero talking on duties about regulars, he actually says, as Euripides absolutely rightly says,

you have to think about whether you meant it or not. He was a poor reader of Greek tragic texts. He clearly was. He's absolutely right in another way that what's important about an oath is not what comes out of the mouth, it's what happens in the heart and head. Was there a sense of breakdown happen with the oath?

Yeah, I thought it's the old issue, isn't it, of change or transformation? But it's not my sense that there was ever a dramatic, radical, either questioning of the validity of the ritual or a perception that the oaths were either being broken or were not thought any longer to have the old sort of validity they had. I mean, there's so much constant recurrence of the same sorts of issues right across both Greek and Roman history. There will be individuals.

Lysander threatens the institution. And then you've got the issues that Mary was talking about. I don't think there's a radical break, a disjuncture. It's such a nostalgia perspective, isn't it, that the ancients are terribly good at, saying, you know, we don't keep our oaths like they used to. And in fact, what we know is that there never been a culture that's had oaths that hasn't broken them. And in fact, we wouldn't want there to be a culture that didn't break their oaths sometimes because you need to. And the idea of, you know, the idea, as I think Cicero saw quite well, even though he came down on regular society, the idea that we lived in a culture which no oath was broken raises enormous. difficult is what happens if two oaths conflict.

So there's always negotiation about whether you keep an oath or not. So the earth is running right through the Greek and right through the Roman Empire and is still, let's try to conclude on this because we're coming to the end of the time we have. Again, can you just

tell listeners how important this was to the running of the state, to the living of the lives that people work through in those times? Well, my sense is just sticking to Greece that it was absolutely central because otherwise it would not keep recurring in crucial context. I just give one example I don't think we've mentioned yet. The first general amnesty

ever sworn happened at Athens after a very nasty period of civil war. And for once, one of these things seems actually, for the most part, to have worked. Well, if in such a situation it is thought this is the appropriate way to move forward. You swear an oath of mutual loyalty and of forgetting what people have done bad in the past. That seems to me to be pretty good evidence that it's still functional. Well, I'd like to refer to an instance

in which that amnesty was arguably evaded. Here we go on manipulation again. The trial of Socrates, who was prosecuted, it seems, partly for political reasons which however could not be acknowledged because of the amnesty. And therefore he was prosecuted for impiety, specifically for denying the existence of the gods. And this clearly had a tremendous resonance with the jury who of course convicted him. And one can see why.

If you deny the existence of the gods, then an oath becomes a... meaningless and a great deal of the structure of society, especially in the judicial field, falls to the ground. So the need to preserve the sanction of the oath was an important, in fact, a discouraging atheism. Finally, Mary. Well, I think you can see the centrality of the oath because people joked about and run off at them too. And we've been rather high-minded this morning about oaths. but one of the best known oaths in the ancient world actually comes from one of Aristophanes' plays, the Lysistrata, where the ladies of Athens and Sparta are getting together to try and stop these warmongers from going on with the Peloponnesian War,

and they notoriously decide they'll have a sex strike in order to bring the men to heal. And at the beginning of Aristophanes-Lystitrata, you have the most solemn oath being sworn, dictated, loads of panoply. of sacrifice, etc. And it's all saying, no, I will promise I do not. I will swear by Almighty God, I will not sleep with my husband, I will have no sexual contact, it's going to be terrible. Now, I think in a sense, the fact that you're laughing at this institution, as Aristophanes does, is probably the best way of seeing how important it is.

So thank you very much. Thank you, Ball Cartledge, Alan Somerstein and Mary Beard. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.