Madam, - May I take issue with my former colleague Father Pat Hannon, when he writes (Rite and Reason, February 10th) that the "roots" of the doctrine of the "just war" are "in the thought of Cicero"?
In fact there is very little that is original in the thinking of Cicero and his Roman contemporaries. Writers such as Cicero and Horace - pre-eminently among the Romans of the first century BC - had the gift of synthesizing in supremely memorable terms the various and varied strands of previous Greco-Roman thought.
Unfortunately the destruction in A.D. 391 of the Library of Alexandria has robbed us, of the chance of identifying, in many areas, those earlier strands. But it would be possible, nonetheless, to write a small thesis on pre-Ciceronian references to the "just war".
Thus Livy, quoting from ancient records dating from long before Cicero's time, mentions war that is purum and pium ("pure" and "holy"). And one cannot read Thucydides's Peloponnesian War without being constantly aware that, however, painful he acknowledged the war to be on both sides, Athens was both justified and obliged to wage it. Even earlier, the Greeks regarded their war against Troy, to recover Helen, as "just".
None of this undermines in any way Pat Hannon's argument: it is merely that the basis for it goes back a long way before Cicero. - Yours, etc.,
Dr MARTIN PULBROOK,
New Meeting House,
Prince's Street,
Cork.