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Would Cicero Have Approved of Putins War in Ukraine?

I wonder what Marcus Tullius Cicero would have thought about Vladimir Putin. On one hand, the orator might not have disapproved. After all, “the land of the conquered belonged to the conquerors,” he once wrote. Cicero was writing well before late 20th century norms against territorial conquest had kicked in. Indeed, the parallels between the expanding Roman and Russian empires (at least in Putin’s imagination) are instructive. Even as Cicero condemned acts of injustice by Rome toward its empire’s subjects, he believed overall that Roman conquest and expansion was not a bad thing in and of itself and done “in justice.” Rule by Rome was preferable to rule by no one. In Cicero’s view, Greek Asia (today’s western Turkey) before Roman conquest was a wasteland of barbaric violence. As Stanford historian Ian Morris recounts in his recent book:

Fights, raids and battles were everyday activities, the Romans said, and every village was fortified. While a Roman gentleman might feel underdressed without his toga, a German felt naked without his shield and spear. The barbarians, Romans insisted, worshiped severed heads, which they like to hang outside their front doors (suitably treated with cedar oil to stop them from smelling). They sacrificed humans to their angry gods, and sometimes even burned them alive inside wickerwork statues. Tacitus was blunt: “Germans have no taste for peace.” Small wonder, then, that Cicero and his peers thought Rome was doing its neighbors a favor by conquering them.

Language by the Kremlin bears familiarity to its “civilizing” mission of Ukraine. Any country that sees pandemonium in the streets by protesters who literally chased out their president is unfit for self-rule, according to the Putin model of state-society relations, which builds off the ethos of Cicero during Roman times. As Putin said in a recent speech in Crimea, “The country has plunged into a bloody chaos, a fratricidal conflict, a humanitarian catastrophe has hit southeastern Ukraine. We will do all we can to stop this conflict as soon as possible and end bloodshed in Ukraine.” Like those uncivilized Greeks and Germans two millennia ago, such people surrender their sovereign right to exist. The victims, in this regard, are painted as “uncivilized, corrupt, and in general need of conquest,” writes Morris. Cicero also saw Rome as ruling by almost divine right, invoking God’s hand in protecting Italy from barbarians (Gauls, etc.) by creating the Alps. At its peak, Rome ruled over an area half the size of the continental United States, encompassing 60 million people that included Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews, as well as Celts and Germans. Putin similarly believes in the rejuvenation of a kind of tsarist-era Russian empire blessed by God, a landmass of Tatars, Chechens, and Cossacks, among others, that should rightfully stretch from Lvov to Vladivostok. Even Putin’s recent dalliances with the Russian Orthodox Church almost position him as a kind of interloper between the almighty and His flock.

 

Security-Insecurity Paradox

A number of commentators have remarked that Putin’s outward hostilities toward the West are a result of a deep-rooted insecurity, perhaps cultivated from decades of KGB service. Much as how after the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, the Romans would develop a kind of insecurity that would require them to constantly expand and pursue military glory, if nothing else than to keep subjects busy (never a bad thing for avoiding civil war), devour more lands and extract more resources. The Kremlin operates from a similar mindset of paranoia, whereby it sees itself as having fallen victim to and been disrespected by its Western peers – NATO enlargement, the Kosovo war, and so forth – and now is securing itself by taking lands (Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia), acquiring resources, and using more bellicose rhetoric. Cicero believed that war could be fought to protect the safety and honor of the state. In this way, Cicero sounds an awful lot like Putin, who believed the breakup of the Soviet Union was a major travesty. War is justified in Putin’s eyes if it means restoring the state. Borrowing from Greek philosophy, writes Alex Bellamy, author of Just Wars: From Cicero