32 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)raids, each side sent envoys to the other to demand the return of stolen
property. Tullus’s team, however, acted with the greater dispatch, making
their request immediately on arrival in Alba. As expected, the request was
refused, so the envoys promptly declared war, to take eff ect aft er thirty days.
Th e Alban negotiators, in contrast, had tarried in Rome, enabling Tullus to
claim that Alba was the party in the wrong, because it had been the fi rst to
refuse satisfaction. “Our prayer,” he proclaimed, “is that the guilty nation
may suff er all the misery of the coming war.” Lawyers may quibble over
whether guilt should really be determined by the matter of timing rather
than by the substance of the accusations. But the incident is a revealing indi-
cation of the existence of at least some concern for having right (of some
kind at any rate) on one’s side in going to war.
Questions of just causes of wars arose again about twenty years later,
when confl ict broke out between the Romans and Sabines. Again according
to Livy’s account, each side claimed a grievance against the other. Th e
Romans alleged that some of their citizens, on a peaceful pilgrimage to a
religious shrine in Sabine territory, had been abducted. Not to be outdone,
the Sabines alleged that the Romans had arrested Sabine refugees who had
taken sanctuary in Rome. Livy’s account of Rome’s later war against
Veii in the wake of a violation of diplomatic immunities has already been
noted.
To Tullus’s successor as king, Ancus Marcius, Livy attributed the estab-
lishment of a regular procedure for declarations of war (borrowing the idea
from a nearby tribe). Cicero, the famous orator, author, and politician,
would later disagree on this point and give the credit to Tullus. But in all
events, a priesthood of persons known as fetials was established in Rome at
an early period, and a ritual introduced for inaugurating war. Briefl y, it i n-
volved the sending of an envoy from Rome to the frontier of the would- be
enemy state, where redress of some injury would be publicly demanded ac-
cording to “religion and justice.” If satisfaction was refused (as was expected),
the envoy would return to Rome to seek the opinions of the fetials as to
whether war should be declared. If the fetials expressly approved of the wag-
ing of “just and righ teous war” over the issue in question— and it would ap-
pear that they always did— then one of their number would himself go to
the enemy’s frontier, bearing a spear. He would make a formal announce-
ment of the war— including the just cause that had given rise to it— and then