34 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)manded compensation of fi ve hundred talents for the injuries and dispatched
military expeditions against Boeotia. (A talent was approximately about
thirty kilograms of silver.) But he also summoned representatives from two
of Rome’s allies, the city of Athens and the Achaian League, to confi rm that
he was waging a “lawful and rightful war.” As it happened, the two allies
ended up mediating a settlement of the dispute, with Flamininus accepting
a payment of only thirty talents instead of fi ve hundred.
Th ere is evidence, too, of palpable misgivings on the part of Roman po liti-
cal leaders when wars were launched without any credible justifi cation. Per-
haps the most striking example was the invasion of Parthia by Marcus
Licinius Crassus in 53 bc. Th is expedition was widely regarded as having
been undertaken without a just cause. It is perhaps all too appropriate,
then, that it ended in a disastrous defeat for Rome, with Crassus himself
among the dead. It was said by some that the victorious Parthians aft erward
poured molten gold down the corpse’s throat, as a form of posthumous tor-
ture befi tting a man of prodigious wealth.
Expanding Horizons
It was inevitably more of a challenge for lawlike behavior to spread outside
of regions where there was a preexisting degree of cultural unity. For a start,
there were practical diffi culties, such as the comprehending of foreign lan-
guages. Th ere was also an important conceptual barrier: the diffi culty of
accepting that peoples who were altogether beyond one’s cultural horizon
could or should be entitled to equal treatment, on some kind of objective
basis, with familiar neighbors.
Th ere was, in other words, a great conceptual leap to be made, to a belief
in the existence of a single font of justice or source of legal obligation that
would be recognized transculturally. Th e common belief was that rulers
could be placed under legal obligations only by their own deities, and not by
some transcendental, transreligious entity that had all the peoples of the
world under its watchful jurisdiction. Even the Jewish Yahweh was the god
of his chosen people only, not of the world at large. His power might extend
over the whole world, but his ability (or inclination) to impose binding obli-
gations was confi ned to his Chosen People.