After the tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, there has been a renewal in discussion over the possibility that Congress might enact some kind of regulation on firearms to (hopefully) reduce the chances of another such shooting taking place. Obviously, the ancient Greeks did not have guns, so they could not have had “gun control” in the modern sense. Nonetheless, some people may find it surprising that the ancient Greeks actually had shockingly strict (some might even say “draconian”) restrictions on citizens bearing arms.
In most Greek city-states, every young adult male citizen was required by law to serve in the military – much like in Israel today. Greek soldiers- or hoplites – owned their own weapons, but they were not allowed to bear them in public unless they were heading into battle, training for battle, or taking part in certain martial ceremonies.
The Athenian historian Thoukydides boasts in a passage from Book One of his famous Histories of the Peloponnesian War that the Athenians were among the first people to enact laws forbidding the carrying of weapons in public. In fact, Thoukydides denounces the act of carrying weapons in public as tantamount to piracy, commenting (in J. M. Dent’s translation):
And even at the present day many parts of Hellas still follow the old fashion, the Ozolian Lokrians, for instance, the Aitolians, the Akarnanians, and that region of the continent; and the custom of carrying arms is still kept up among these continentals, from the old piratical habits.
Furthermore, although the young men in Athens had their own weapons, Aristoteles determines in his Politics 7.1329a that older men who were no longer in active service should not be permitted to own weapons, indicating that there may have been a tradition of laying aside one’s arms after reaching a certain age:
…but inasmuch as it is a thing impossible that when a set of men are able to employ force and to resist control, these should submit always to be ruled, from this point of view both functions must be assigned to the same people; for those who have the power of arms have the power to decide whether the constitution shall stand or fall. The only course left them is to assign this constitutional function to both sets of men without distinction, yet not simultaneously, but, as in the natural order of things strength is found in the younger men and wisdom in the elder, it seems to be expedient and just for their functions to be allotted to both in this way, for this mode of division possesses conformity with merit.
A nineteenth-century American paraphrase of the prevailing ancient Greek attitude towards weapons states: “Let the laws rule alone. When weapons rule, they kill the law.”
The gun lobby has extensively utilized the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ” (“Come and take them.”), which was allegedly spoken by the defiant King Leonidas of Sparta to the Persians at Thermopylai after they demanded that he and his soldiers lay down their weapons. Stephen Hodkinson, the director of the Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies University of Nottingham, however, has pointed out that this saying is only mentioned by the historian Ploutarchos, who lived roughly 700 years after Leonidas’s death, and that the contemporary historian Herodotos makes no mention of it. Furthermore, the statement was supposedly issued on the battlefield and would have had little or no bearing on everyday Spartan life.
ABOVE: Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814) by Jacques-Louis David
Hodkinson also notes that only the hoplites were permitted to own weapons, noting that a passage from the Athenian writer Xenophon describes an incident of a report claiming that the helots, or slaves, were planning to rebel using farm tools rather than weapons. Furthermore, the same passage from Xenophon states that the Spartans themselves went unarmed during times of peace, instead keeping their weapons stored safely in their homes, and that the only causes for bringing such weapons into public would have been military training and special ceremonies. Whether this restriction was upheld by law or only by tradition is unclear.
While most Greek poleis had some kind of laws regarding when and where a person was permitted to carry weapons, the poleis of Sicily and southern Italy were widely known for having especially strict laws on the issue. In antiquity, this was widely attributed to the influence of Pythagoras, who was said to have been a strong early advocate of governments placing restrictions on the possession of weapons.
ABOVE: Fictional portrait of Pythagoras, whom the ancient Greeks revered as an early advocate of laws against carrying weapons in public
Just how far the ancient Greeks were willing to go to enforce weapons regulation can be illustrated by a famous story about the renowned lawgiver Charondas, who lived in the polis of Katania in Sicily during the late sixth century B.C. Charondas was widely regarded by the ancient Greeks as the model of an ideal lawgiver and they particularly revered his dedication to the conviction that the law should apply equally to everyone.
In his Universal History 12.11-19, the Greek historian Diodoros Sikoulos reports that Charondas enacted a law stating that no citizen was permitted to bear any kind of weapon in any public area. The penalty for breaking this law was death. One day, Charondas went journeying out in the countryside and brought with him a knife to defend himself in case he was ambushed by robbers. When he returned to the city, he forgot that he was still wearing the knife at his belt and went to the Assembly meeting, where a heated debate was taking place.
After Charondas was spotted, the meeting burst into uproar and one of Charondas’s enemies accused him of violating his own law. Charondas retorted, “Not so, by Zeus, I will uphold it.” He took the knife from his belt and used it to commit suicide right there in front of the whole Assembly with no purpose other than to prove that even he was not above his own laws.
Hopefully, the United States will not follow Charondas’s extreme example; the last thing we need is more killing. Nonetheless, learning from the past and applying those lessons to the present is one of the most imperative goals of studying history. The ancient Greeks are valuable teachers, and they provide us with a source of historical precedent to draw upon in light of our own present situations.
