The first agression: a case of justified war in Valerius Flaccus
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14198/hexis.30870Keywords:
Argonautica, Argonauts, war causality, conflict, just war, epic poetry, Valerius FlaccusAbstract
The idea that a war is just is driven by various factors and motives. A narrative containing a first aggression narrative, understood as the first act of unjustified violence that generates a conflict, fosters the idea that a war is justified in order to suppress or counteract such aggression; the emphasis, under this notion, is on war causality. This theory of the justice or injustice of a war cause is traditionally known as ius ad bellum (right to war). This article will study a specific case, manageable from the ius ad bellum perspective, to establish how a first aggression obeys a causal dynamic in the development of an epic narration, whose rhetorical substratum follows an order linked to a chronologically linear dispositio. The case under study is found in the Argonautica by the Latin poet Valerius Flaccus (1st century AD): it is the Bebricia episode, one of the stops the Argonauts make on their journey to Colchis, where the monstrous king Amycus, who by custom mercilessly murders those who come to his lands in boxing duels, is killed by the Argonaut who confronts him. To study this case, we resort to the theory of just causes of war, specifically to the chapter De poenis, by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, since his doctrine is largely based on classical authors and an analysis of the Argonautic episode based on it offers interesting opportunities for interpretation. It is concluded that the Bebricia episode in Valerius Flaccusʼ version constitutes a clear model of a just cause of war provoked by a first aggression; besides that, the story in general is a poetic representation of the ideal outcome in this type of conflict.
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