Alexander was almost the only ancient warlord to have had ethical doubts about this, exercised only when he met abject surrender. Tyre had the misfortune, along with the Melians against Athens, to put up a tough resistance. Other ancient warlords showed similar mercy on practical grounds, generally after letting the troops sack the city and rape the women. Alexander seems, according to Arrian, to have had something like a moral qualm about it. A little bit, anyway.
Btw, the practice continued through modern times. Here is Shakespeare's Henry V, threatening the Governor of Harfleuer if he does not surrender the town. Note that Henry has the chutzpah to blame the threatened massacre of innocents on the Governor if he does not surrender. OK, Henry V is a morally ambiguous character; there's a case to be made (Auden makes it effectively to my mind) that WS really thought him a creepy lowlife, but of course he couldn't present him that way in any obvious manner, so the way Henry V was taken was as a hero, glorious ancestor, wise, kind, and virtuous; also the events WS is recounting are 200 years previous to the play, but nonetheless WS is describing a moral attitude totally recognizable to and I think widely accepted by his late 16th-early 17th century European contemporaries. WS has Henry pull no punches, he sugar-coats nothing, he portrays the fate of Harfleuer's civilians, rape, babykilling (heads on pikes!),
slaughter of the aged (smashing their heads against the wall), the works, in red and black.
The Governor and some Citizens on the walls; the English forces below. Enter KING HENRY and his train KING HENRY V How yet resolves the governor of the town? This is the latest parle we will admit; Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves; Or like to men proud of destruction Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier, A name that in my thoughts becomes me best, If I begin the battery once again, I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur Till in her ashes she lie buried. The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants. What is it then to me, if impious war, Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends, Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats Enlink'd to waste and desolation? What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause, If your pure maidens fall into the hand Of hot and forcing violation? What rein can hold licentious wickedness When down the hill he holds his fierce career? We may as bootless spend our vain command Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil As send precepts to the leviathan To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur, Take pity of your town and of your people, Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command; Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds Of heady murder, spoil and villany. If not, why, in a moment look to see The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; Your fathers taken by the silver beards, And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls, Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen. What say you? will you yield, and this avoid, Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
GOVERNOR Our expectation hath this day an end: The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated, Returns us that his powers are yet not ready To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king, We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy. Enter our gates; dispose of us and ours; For we no longer are defensible.
KING HENRY V Open your gates. Come, uncle Exeter, Go you and enter Harfleur; there remain, And fortify it strongly 'gainst the French: Use mercy to them all. For us, dear uncle, The winter coming on and sickness growing Upon our soldiers, we will retire to Calais. To-night in Harfleur we will be your guest; To-morrow for the march are we addrest.
Flourish. The King and his train enter the town
Henry V 3:3
(Interestingly, though, another turning point in the play is where the minor character Fluellen, the Welsh captain, and then Henry, become outraged at Agincourt when the French kill the baggage boys, it's "against the laws of war." Probably because the French had lost and their slaughter of the defenseless is inexcusably cowardly, whereas if they had won it would have been all in a day's work.)
A final curiosity. A relative modern, General Sherman, often credited as an architect of total war, was so outraged by the Confederates' use of primitive landmines on the March to the Sea that he used Confederate POWs as sort of primitive minesweepers, driving them ahead of Union forces -- a sort of mixed reaction. Landlines, very bad. Abuse of POWs because of the misconduct of their army, fine. Sherman, and the Union Army in general, for the most part considered civilians off limits, though not their property, at least if appropriated for military rather than personal use.
--- On Sat, 4/19/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] What Have We Learned, If Anything?
> To: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com, lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, April 19, 2008, 11:30 AM
> I leafed through a copy of Tamerlane's autobiography a
> while ago at my local bookstore. I didn't know he was
> even literate. Anyway he's quite upfront about the
> whole terror/looting/annihilation thing. "And then we
> gloriously slaughtered them."
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Or what Alexander did to to Tyre, the Athenians to
> > Melos, Ghengis Kahn or Tamerlane to just about
> > anything? OK, all of the named were colonialists in
> > some sense, but they were not capitalists. And the
> > practice of razing your enemy's city, killing the
> > men, and enslaving the women and children was
> > standard and old in Homer's day: Hector says to
> > Andromache:
> >
>
> Mataiotes mataioteton, eipen ho Ekklasiastes,
> mataiotes mataioteton, ta panta mataiotes.
>
>
>
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