https://doi.org/10.37815/rte.v34n1.870

Original paper - English

Ancient Refugee Policies reviewed with the International Law Acquis of Today

Políticas
de Refugiados Ancestrales revisadas con el Acervo de Derecho Internacional de
la Actualidad

Florian
Bikard1 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7335-0878,

Benjamin Edward Karp2 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2616-2254

1MA Maastricht University, MA-IR Geneva School of Diplomacy, Geneva, Switzerland

[email-masked]

2MIR Geneva School of Diplomacy, Geneva,
Switzerland

[email-masked]

Sent:               2021/09/20

Accepted:       2022/02/26

Published:      2022/03/15

Abstract

The article revisits the
refugee policies of Ancient Athens and Ancient Rome and highlights how
exploring them reveals the value of the contemporary acquis of international
law for actively addressing refugee crises triggered by military invasion. The
nexus between refugee flows, the undermining of ancient civilizations, and the
value of legal corpuses has long been overlooked by contemporary literature. It
is a gap that the article intends to fill by inquiring possible explanations
for Athens’ and Rome’s failures in managing the Attican and Gothic refugee
crisis. The article offers a historical analysis of the abovementioned refugee
crises. The contribution of this article is two-fold: the article not only
calls attention to the unpreparedness and lack of foresight in the refugee
policies of the Ancient Athenians and Romans, but it also highlights how
certain mistakes could have been avoided and why these failures remain relevant
to modern society from an international law perspective. The results of the
analysis are supported robustly by the triangulation of ancient testimonies
with modern academic references.

Summary: Introduction,
Ancient Refugee Crises and the Undermining of Two Ancient Civilizations, Assessment
of the Findings: Some Lessons on the Value of the Contemporary Legal
Acquis and Conclusions.

How
to cite: Bikard, F. & Karp, B.
E. (2022). Ancient Refugee Policies reviewed with the International Law
Acquis of Today. Revista Tecnológica - Espol,
34(1), 136-153. http://www.rte.espol.edu.ec/index.php/tecnologica/article/view/870

Keywords: Refugees, Ancient Rome, Ancient Athens, Gothic Refugee Crisis, Attican Refugee Crisis, Valens, Pericles, Past Experiences,
Modern Society, International Law.

Resumen

El artículo reexamina las
políticas de refugiados de la Antigua Atenas y de la Antigua Roma y resalta
cómo su exploración revela el valor del acervo contemporáneo del derecho
internacional para abordar activamente las crisis de refugiados provocadas por
una invasión militar. La literatura contemporánea ha pasado por alto durante
mucho tiempo el nexo entre los flujos de refugiados, el socavamiento de las
civilizaciones antiguas y el valor de los corpus jurídicos. Es un vacío que este
trabajo pretende llenar investigando las posibles razones de los fracasos de
Atenas y Roma en la gestión de la crisis de refugiados de Godos y Áticos. Este
estudio ofrece un análisis histórico de las crisis de refugiados mencionadas
previamente. La contribución de esta investigación es de dos aspectos: el
artículo no solo enfoca la atención en la falta de preparación y la falta de
previsión de las políticas de refugiados de los Antiguos Atenienses y Romanos,
sino que también destaca cómo dichos errores podrían haberse evitado y por qué
estos fracasos siguen siendo relevantes para la sociedad moderna desde la
perspectiva del derecho internacional. Los resultados del análisis se apoyan
sólidamente en la triangulación de testimonios ancestrales con referencias
académicas modernas.

Palabras
clave: Refugiados, Antigua Roma, Antigua Atenas, Crisis de
los Refugiados Godos, Crisis de los Refugiados Áticos, Valente, Pericles,
Experiencias Pasadas, Sociedad Moderna, Derecho Internacional.

Introduction

“How can it be right to drag the
suppliant away by force?”

-Euripides, 2009-

In
Euripides’ play “Heracleidae”, the Athenian King Demophon comes to the rescue of the children of Heracles,
refugees who have been driven from their homes in the Peloponnese by the
vengeful King Eurytheus of Argos. By portraying a
merciful and hospitable Athenian King, Euripides markets Athens as a
cosmopolitan hub where the interests of the rabble and dispossessed are
championed over that of the strong and the violent. This comes to the extent
that the King Demophon is ready to risk the blood of
his own kind to protect the life of the refugees.

Euripides’
embrace of hospitality and solidarity were not unheard of at the time: both
Ancient Athens and Rome believed their strength to be rooted in the successful
integration of refugees of all kind. In Athens,
officials such as Plutarch and Pericles praised their city for her free
liberality and sophisticated ability to “teem with people constantly migrating
to Attica from all over the Mediterranean, seeking refuge” (Plutarch, n.d.; as cited in Garland, 2020;
Brown et al., 2002, pp. 38–41).
Its borders were kept open in peacetime and welcomed predominantly males in
their primes whose skills and resources beneficiated the host community (Rubinstein, 2018, p. 8). Rome,
similarly, built its empire around the notion of universality, glorifying itself
as a migrant foundation (i.e., founding tale of Aeneas, the refugee from Troy).
However, Rome went even further than Athens through its legalistic premise of
transforming human diversity into unity by the generalization of the Roman
citizenship (Moatti, 2006, pp. 116–117).
Eventually, the integration of refugees would turn Rome into a powerhouse over
much of the known world, with many of these migrants joining the Roman army
with the hope of elevating themselves in the Roman society (Nowrasteh, 2018).

Building on
this cosmopolitan image, modern literature has commonly described Ancient
Athens and Ancient Rome as models for modern societies to cope with refugee
crises (Beard, 2015; Schumacher, 2019;
Swift, 2015). Yet, although it is true that the two cities were remarkably
cosmopolitan for their time, they both poorly managed major refugee crisis,
namely the Attican and the Gothic refugee crisis.

The Attican and Gothic crisis share many characteristics.
First, they both fall in line with the definition of refugee under
international law[1],
insofar as they involved hundreds of thousands of people unable to return to
their country of origin, fleeing a conflict, and seeking a refuge somewhere
safe: in the first case within the walls of Athens, in the second case within
the limes of the Eastern Roman Empire. Second, the two refugee crises
disrupted the local balance of power in similar proportions, with the Athenian
and the Eastern Roman authorities of the time both being caught off-guard by
the number of refugees they suddenly had at their gate. This begs to a third
point: unpreparedness resulted in poorly managed migration policies in both
situations, in turn precipitating the decline of the two empires. In the case
of Athens, over-crowdedness would pave the way for one of the deadliest
epidemics in the city’s history, in turn causing massive civil unrest and
turning the population against Athens’ open-door policy. In the case of Eastern
Rome, corruption, self-interest, and the lack of foresight turned a poorly
managed refugee crisis into one of the biggest military disasters of Roman
history, with the Goths establishing themselves as the first foederati barbarian
nation of the late Roman Empire.

The complete
failure of both civilizations is puzzling, as Athens and Rome both successfully
handled similar refugee crises in the past. While Athens withstood the
integration of waves of refugees during the Dorian invasions and stood up to
the invading armies (Wade-Gery, 1948), Rome had an
experience in dealing with the tribes living across the Danube. Back in the
first century AD, a senatorial governor, even displayed pride in bringing “over
more than 100,000 of the people who live across the Danube to pay tribute to
Rome” (Eaton, 2020, p. 58). Then,
how can Athens’ and Rome’s failures at managing the Attican
and Gothic refugee crisis be explained? What do these failures reveal regarding
the value of the contemporary acquis of international law?

The article
demonstrates that despite their very different contexts, both empires faced
similar problems in refugee crisis management, and these problems resulted in
similar outcomes: (1) structural weakening, (2) the erosion of their model of
society, and (3) a sense of irreversible decline. While reviewing these aspects
and establishing a pattern, the article shows the value of the contemporary acquis
of international law in effectively addressing refugee crises triggered by
military invasion.

The history
of international law has come a long way, and as the article will demonstrate,
looking back at the past can
help us better understand the value of contemporary legal corpuses. For
contemporary lawyers, history constitutes indeed “a rich reservoir of both
successful and failed ideological, theoretical, practical, institutional, and
methodological experiments” (Rasilla, 2021).

Of course,
the purpose of the article is not to promote a retroactive application
of international law. As jurist Kenneth Howard Anderson stated, “International
law could hardly develop if states believed that by accepting newly developed
norms of international law, the result would be to hold them liable under
today’s norms for behavior acceptable under yesterdays”
(Declaration of Kenneth Howard Anderson JR., 2005, pp. 16-17). The article
holds the same position as this quote and solely uses international law as a
conceptual bridge for understanding the value of present legal corpuses.

The article
conducts a qualitative content analysis of relevant sources. Qualitative
content analysis identifies core consistencies and meaning from the different
textual data that is collected (Bengtsson, 2016). This aligns well with the
article’s objective of categorizing the data of different historical settings
to make sense of it and reveal a pattern regarding the management of refugee
crises. There is, however, an evident lack of testimonies contemporary to the Attican and Gothic refugee crises. Many simply did not
survive history. A number of those which did are too ideologically one-sided
for being treated as reliable sources: romanticizing history was a common
practice among the historians of the time (e.g., Herodotus, Zosimus, Socrates,
Scholasticus). Consequently, the article chooses to base its historical
analysis on the testimony of Thucydides and Ammianus.

Both authors
were not only contemporary to the crisis in question but also demonstrated a
commitment to stay away from mythology and other forms of mystification in
their narration of the events, embracing instead historiography;
i.e., the critical investigation of past events (Eisenberg, 2009; Hoffman,
2016). Thucydides and Ammianus were also similar in that they were both on the
forefront of the political scene. Also, they both served in the military and
were familiar with the key statesmen of the time: Thucydides was a friend of
Pericles and Ammianus spoke as an alleged eye-witness
of imperial court plots in the Roman East (Fornara,
1992; Hoffman, 2016). The two were therefore particularly knowledgeable of the
technical details that surrounded the politics of their time. Thucydides was
even present in Athens when the city was overcrowded and the epidemic hit: he
caught the illness but recovered (Martínez, 2017, p. 139). Lastly, it is worth
noting that Thucydides and Ammianus have enjoyed significant visibility in the
modern literature, and while some contemporary historians have underlined that
the ancient authors’ narration of past events was not flawless (e.g., Duff,
1999; Eisenberg, 2009), a vast majority has continued to give tribute to the
two ancient authors for providing the most comprehensive historical account
about the era (Barnes, 1993; Gibbon, 2011; Hoffman, 2016; Wolpert, 2014).

The research starts by providing a
historical analysis of the Attican and Gothic refugee
crises. This analysis paves the way for a conclusive discussion in which Rome
and Athens’ refugee policies are reviewed with the international law acquis
of today.

Ancient Refugee Crises and the Undermining of Two Ancient Civilizations

Athens and the Attican
Refugee Crisis

“In war, the way is to avoid what is
strong and to strike at what is weak”

-Sun Tzu, 2000, p. 23-

Several
scholars have mistakenly portrayed the Periclean war strategy against the
Spartans as defensive; thus, they have overlooked Athens’ broader strategy of
striking where its enemy, Sparta, was the weakest, namely in naval battles (de Wet, 1969; Spence, 1990; Westlake,
1945). In the thinking of its general Pericles, Athens could afford to let
go of its land possessions in Attica, retire behind its walls, and replace the
subsequent loss of agricultural products by imports. With only its capital and
a handful of forts to protect in the mainland, Athens would be able to divert
all its attention to her empire and naval supremacy “to feed herself while
avoiding a major hoplite engagement” (Spence,
1990, p. 91). Tactically speaking, the strategy was at least partially
successful: the numerically superior Peloponnesians failed to subdue Athens
through the plunder of her Attican crops, despite
mobilizing two thirds of their forces for their repeated invasions of Attica.
In the meantime, Athens was able to focus her war strategy on far-off theatres,
engaging in offensive wars as far afield as in the west coast of Greece,
Macedonia, Chalcidice, and Sicily (de
Wet, 1969, p. 118). What the Athenian general overlooked was the
consequences of his war strategy on the peasants of Attica. Many had settled in
this land for generations and were forced to evacuate in order not to face off
the invading armies.

Thucydides
wrote that the Atticans had long lived scattered in
independent townships and that down to the present war, they had been living in
the country with their families and households. They were consequently “not at
all inclined to move now” when they were ordered to do so by Athens (Thucydides, 2003, p. 88). “Deep was
their trouble and discontent at abandoning their houses and the hereditary
temples of the ancient constitution, and at having to change their habits of
life and to bid farewell to what each regarded as his native city” (p. 88).
Their discontent would grow into resentment and outrage after they moved to
Athens: only a few of them had houses of their own to go to. The rest “had to
take up their dwellings in the parts of the city that were not built over and in the temples and chapels of the heroes” (p. 88). With
the city of Athens proving to be too small to host them, law and order started
to erode, and many refugees settled unlawfully in holy sites, towers, and
parcels of the Long Walls (pp. 88-89).

The outbreak
of the epidemic in 430 B.C., one year after the beginning of the war, would
inflame the already explosive situation. Pericles, who was already “the object
of general indignation” for “not leading out the army which he commanded” (p.
90), started receiving severe criticisms for his poor management of the
capital’s health situation. The latter was getting untenable due to the siege
by the Spartans. In the overcrowded urban environment, Thucydides describes
that “[the refugees] had to be lodged at the hot season of the year in stifling
cabins, where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men
lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and
gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water” (p. 104). Anarchy
eventually followed after scenes of horrors in the
overcrowded streets. “Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain
them,” as Thucydides explains. It seemed to the population that “a far severer
sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever their heads, and
before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little” (p. 105).

Modern
historians believe that the disease killed between one fourth and one third of
the Athenian population. While it is difficult to number the casualties
(Thucydides did not indicate any number), there is a consensus in the
literature that the city’s over-crowdedness due to the poor management of the
refugee situation significantly aggravated the scope of the plague;
i.e., the other Greek city states were only marginally affected by the same
epidemic (Martínez, 2017; Morens & Littman, 1992, pp.
298–299; Soupios, 2004, p. 46). According to
modern estimates, which are themselves based on Thucydides’ military numbers[2], the Athenian population
trebled or quadrupled during the siege, from a prewar population of around
100-150,000 people to 300-400,000 people before falling sharply to 100-150,000
inhabitants again (Littman, 2009, p. 458; Martínez, 2017, pp. 138–139). The extremely high density of
inhabitants may have climbed up to 100,000 per square mile; hence exacerbating
the effect that a disease spread by person-to-person contact could have
(Martínez, 2017, p. 139). The
disease spread more among the poor and the refugees because of their precarious
lifestyle and greater person-to-person interactions, but the rich were also
affected. Pericles’ two sons, Paralus and Xanthippus, died of the plague in 429 BC and Pericles
himself perished shortly thereafter.

There are no
clear indications as to how far the social disruptions went, but it does seem
that Athens was able to withstand the unrest. Despite being briefly ousted from
his office of strategos in 430 B.C, Pericles
was reelected the following year and remained in power until the disease caught
him. Athens also continued the war against Sparta and equipped the great
expedition against Sicily, before being utterly defeated in 404 B.C. The
changes, therefore, were not immediately discernible, but they prepared ground
for greater problems.

First,
Athens was undeniably structurally weakened by the crisis. The epidemic spread from refugees to soldiers. For example,
1,050 hoplites of an expeditionary body of 4,000 died of the disease during the
Potidean expedition (Morens & Littman, 1992, pp.
294–295). The disastrous management of the epidemic led Athens on a path
of self-restraint. Athens resisted the idea of major military invasions
overseas to spare the manpower it had left. This even applied when Athens set
plans to invade the rebellious city-state of Mytilene in 428 B.C.: Athens would
react after much hesitation and only after all diplomatic channels were
exhausted. This timidity would outlive the epidemic and prevail in Athens’
foreign policy-making until Athens completely
recovered its manpower when the war resumed in 415 B.C.  (Couch,
1935, pp. 100–102). While therefore not a point of non-return, the
poor management of the refugee crises and of the health situation did exhaust
Athens’ efforts of achieving a quick victory against Sparta during the first
half of the war (431 B.C. – 421 B.C.).

Second,
Athens slowly turned its back on the model of society that had made its
glory prior to the war: its free liberality and overture to the world. With
Athens experiencing the worst from the epidemic and Sparta being largely
unscathed, many Athenians started giving credence to the legend that their gods
had favored a victory by the Spartans and therefore spared the Peloponnese from
the illness (Martínez, 2017, p. 140).
Athenians began questioning their overture to the world, accusing refugees and
foreigners for causing them misfortune, and metics
would become increasingly discriminated in society. These negative attitudes
would never recede and the Periclean law of 451 B.C., which restricted the
citizenry to Athenians born of two Athenian citizens, would be reenacted in 403
B.C., and this time more for ideological than economic reasons[3]. Many citizens died and to
fill the subsequent political vacuum, only the richer and more industrious metics
were naturalized (Martínez, 2017, p. 141).
The rest was denied citizenry, including the refugees who had survived the epidemic
and whom Pericles had promised concessions (Thucydides, 2003, p. 85). The epidemic also triggered a
survival spirit, and people went on to think more in individualist terms. They
preferred to live for the moment rather than living for the honored customs and
social restraints. In this connection, the demise of Pericles signaled the
ascension of self-interested Athenian politicians, more interested by their
selfish gains than by Athens’ virtuosity. They would renounce Pericles’ wisdom
and instead embark Athens on a path to recklessness (Alcibiades and the
Sicilian campaign) and ruinous fiscal policies (Cleophon,
Hyperbolus, and Cleon’s debasement of the Athenian
currency) (Soupios, 2004, pp. 50-51).

What would
inevitably unfold is the irreversible decline of the Athenian Empire,
Athens’ imperial strength was primarily rooted in the idea of a system in which
humans were political beings seeking honor and power for the common good. In
its golden days indeed, Athens was a patriotic society in which Athenians
formed a cohesive society: citizens were expected to help their friends and to
harm their enemies. It was also an inclusive society. The value of honor (or philotimia)
inspired all the inhabitants to serve the polis in the fullest of
their ability (Karatzogianni, 2012, p. 195). Metics, and even asylum-seekers, could ascend in society if
they were able to convince the Assembly of citizens and be granted the special
status of “equal rights”, through which they were exempted of the usual
liabilities of non-citizenship (Garland,
2020; Smith, 2012). After the refugee crisis and the plague, however, this
social mobility eroded as demagogues rose to power, basing their rule on
corruption and self-interests instead of the greater good. This stratified the
Athenian society and made Apollodorus, a fourth
century politician, seem uneasy over the prospect of one day being exposed as
the descendant of a metic in the lawsuits he was
involved in. This atmosphere of paranoia would generalize to the entire
Athenian society and while a male metic might still
be able to buy his citizenry, he would risk being reduced to slave status if
evidence of his bribery was found (Martínez,
2017, pp. 143–144).

The
stratification of the Athenian society would make Athens lose grip on the
social mobility that had made its appeal to many foreigners and traders prior
to the war. This loss of appeal in turn contributed to the breakdown of
innovation and to the eventual decline of Athens (Karatzogianni, 2012, p. 200).
Politically, Athens would be overshadowed by ascending regional powers such as
Thebes and Macedonia; in the economic and cultural realm, it would never
experience the same kind of blossoming that it had prior to the Peloponnesian
War. The refugee crises played an instrumental role in this transformation, as
it was largely Athens’ poor management of the refugee situation that led to the
humanitarian tragedy; this tragedy in turn demoralized Athens and caused the
ruling elite to rethink its model of society in more authoritarian terms. The
Athenian democracy would rapidly loose its prime: it experienced two oligarchic
coups in 411 B.C. and 404 B.C. before being definitively abolished after
Macedonia conquered Athens in 338 B.C.

The case of
the Attican refugee crisis therefore reveals a
pattern with dangerous political ramifications for the future of a political
entity. Many historians identify the plague, the refugee crisis, and the
Peloponnesian war as elements leading to Athens’ decline (e.g., Retief & Cilliers, 1998; Zaretsky,
2020). Can the same be argued for Rome and the Gothic refugee crisis?
This is explored in the next section of the analysis.

Eastern Rome and the Gothic Refugee Crises

“When the higher officers are angry
and insubordinate, and on meeting the enemy give battle on their own account
from a feeling of resentment, … the result is ruin”

-Sun Tzu, 2000, p. 42-

While the Attican refugee crisis stemmed from poor tactical planning
on the part of Pericles, the Gothic refugee crisis and the subsequent political
breakdown was caused by self-interest, greed, and the complete failure of
command of the Eastern Roman authorities. Despite the contexts and aggravating
factors being therefore very different, the bottom of the crises was
fundamentally the same: Tervingi Goths, just like the
Attican peasants, were fleeing an invading army, in
their case the Huns. This “race of men hitherto unknown”, described Ammianus
(1939), “was seizing or destroying everything in its way,” “like a tempest of
snows from the high mountains” (pp. 400-401). In desperation, many Goths
deserted the cause of their king Athenaricus and
decided to flee to a home “removed from all knowledge of the savages” (p. 401).
This new home was Thrace, a fertile land beyond the Danube that was then under
the domination of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 376 A.D., an official request
was sent to Eastern Rome, asking the Emperor for
permission to settle in the territory of Thrace.

Valens, the
Eastern Roman Emperor of the time, saw this movement of population with a positive
eye, believing that he could make use of the many Goths that were fleeing to
expand his Roman army with fresh recruits (Goldsworthy,
2014). The civil wars of the Third Century A.D. had also decimated the
northern provinces and vast areas needed to be repopulated (Russell, 1958, p. 78; Willard, 1851).
From the beginning, however, Eastern Rome appeared to be unprepared to deal
with such a large influx of refugees. First, Valens gave almost contradictory
orders to his officers, ordering them to let the Tervingi
cross the Danube while blocking the border to another Gothic tribe, the Greuthungi. The different orders could be explained by the
power politics of the time and the fact that Valens was sympathetic towards the
leader of the Tervingi, Friteger,
a converted Christian who had opposed the anti-Christian policies of Athenaricus (Atkinson,
2017, pp. 6–7).

Welcoming
the Tervingi alone proved to be a tremendous stress
to the infrastructure of Eastern Rome. Although the Empire had a strong
bureaucracy and a network of cities with storages of grain and other
essentials, the refugees were even more numerous than what Valens expected.
Ammianus does not give any specific number but modern
estimates place them between 10,000 and 200,000 fighting men and the whole body
of refugees may have included up to a million individuals (Goldsworthy, 2014; Merelli, 2016; Willard, 1851, p.
168). Simply put, the officers in charge were rapidly overwhelmed by the
enormous number of refugees.

Some proved
to be unwilling to do anything to improve the refugee situation. Corruption was
rampant in the late Roman Empire and instead of seeking solutions, Lupicinus and Maximus, two top Roman officers of the
region, sought to take advantage of the political impasse. They imposed on Friteger and his Tervingi an humiliating traffic, offering
them to “exchange every dog that their insatiability could gather … for one
slave each, and among these were carried off also sons of the chieftains” (Ammianus, 1939, p. 407). After signs
of revolt started to become apparent, Lupicinus
ordered his limetanei to bring the
Goths before his headquarters at Marcianopolis, where
he invited Fritigern and other Gothic chieftains for
a dinner-party. It is unclear what happened at the dinner-party, if Lupicinus deliberately tried to use the celebrations as a
pretext to capture and kill the chieftains (Goldsworthy, 2014), or if, as Ammianus
(1939) suggested, fights broke out between the inhabitants of the city and the
Gothic refugees who were pleading for food (Hughes, 2013, p. 151).  One thing that the evidence knows for sure is
that Fritigern was able to convince Lupicinus to let them go to “quiet the people” (Ammianus,
1939, p. 413). After this incident, Fritigern led his
people away and prepared them for battle against the Romans.

Unpreparedness
and greed had already turned an influx of refugees into a refugee crisis and a
refugee crisis into a military standoff, but the escalation of violence would
not stop here. With Lupicinus mustering all his
soldiers to supervise the movement of the Tervingi,
he removed his troops from the Danube border, thereby allowing the Greuthungi to cross in (Hughes, 2013, pp. 150–151). The Tervingi and Greuthungi would
eventually join forces. Together, they defeated the Romans of Lupicinus in an ambush. The victory of Fritigern
would deprive the province of Thrace from most of its Roman garrison and the
Gothic raids intensified. In the process, Fritigern
was able to convince many Goths who had been enslaved or who had been recruited
into the Roman army to switch sides. By 377 A.D., Fritigern
even recruited groups of Huns and Alans, paying them with plunder (Goldsworthy, 2014).

It took time
for the Eastern Roman Empire to deliver a reaction that was proportionate to
the growing threat, being the overstretched entity that it was. Furthermore, at
the time of the refugee crisis, Valens was based in Antioch and in the middle
of an indecisive war with the Sassanian Persians. Yet learning about the
worrisome developments, Valens was able to arrange a cessation of hostilities
with the Persians, and he returned to Constantinople, bringing with him some of
his Eastern troops (Goldsworthy, 2014;
Hughes, 2013, pp. 158–159). Several months passed during which the Roman
and Gothic armies stared at each other, mustering all the forces they could get
and delivering minor skirmishes. A rescue army from Valens’ nephew, the Western
Roman Emperor Gratian, was also on its way. However, the arrival of this rescue
army was delayed due to other commitments in the Western Empire (Atkinson, 2017, pp. 9–10).

Valens did
not have the patience to wait for his nephew’s army, and he decided to strike
at Adrianople with an army strong of 15,000 men in August 378 A.D. Ammianus
explained Valens’ recklessness from his excessive jealousy of better men,
namely Sebastianus, a general who had defeated the
Goths in minor encounters, and Gratian, who was only 18 and who had yet already
achieved victories against the ‘barbarians’ in Gaul on his own. Paranoid and
fearing competition from all sides, Valens refused to listen to his advisors
and decided to make the attack alone (Atkinson,
2017, p. 10). After receiving reports from his scouts that the Goths were
only 10,000 men strong, he led his army on the battlefield despite his situation
not to be as advantageous as anticipated[4]. Until very late in the
battle, Fritigern was willing to negotiate his
surrendering to Valens in exchange for lands where to settle (Eisenberg, 2009,
p. 116). However, while the
negotiations were ongoing, Roman archers started firing at the Gothic position
without orders, leading to a counterattack from the Gothic cavalry. The calvary
easily broke the Roman lines and routed the entire army of Valens. It was a hot
summer and the Roman soldiers were “exhausted by
hunger and worn out by thirst, as well as distressed by the heavy burden of
their armour” (Ammianus, 1939, p. 477). The battle was an unmitigated
disaster, as no less than two thirds of the Roman army died, including Emperor
Valens himself (Eisenberg, 2009; Goldsworthy, 2014). Ammianus (1939) would compare the
battle to the Roman disaster of Cannae during the Second Punic War (p. 483).

Despite his
outstanding victory at Adrianople, Fritigern did not
achieve significant strategic gains. His disorganized army was unfit to siege
fortified cities, let alone take over an entire empire (Goldsworthy, 2014). In the meantime,
the Western Emperor Gratian, more interested in settling the power vacuum in
the East than in suppressing a band of refugees, appointed one of his men,
Flavius Theodosius, as Eastern Emperor in 379 A.D. and returned to the West. As
a patient administrator, Theodosius would wage a war of exhaustion against the
Goths, raiding and ambushing isolated groups. Surrounded, poorly supplied, and
exhausted by the war, the Goths gradually surrendered to Theodosius and
achieved the terms they wanted in the first place: the permission to settle in
Thrace and to live with significant political autonomy, in return for which
they would serve in the Roman army (Hughes,
2013, p. 190). As a result, after a bloody defeat, the Gothic refugee
crisis was mostly resolved. Indeed, while the Empire appeared to have
recovered its imperial borders and to have subjugated the Goths, there were
massive repercussions to Eastern Rome’s failure at handling the Gothic refugee
crisis.

First, the
Gothic refugee crisis structurally weakened Eastern Rome in
proportions that were roughly similar to Periclean
Athens. The Empire lost some of its most valuable legions at Adrianople and the
need to fill in the gaps only accentuated the ‘barbarization’ of the Roman
legions, with in the present case the Goths replacing the fallen Roman
soldiers. This development did not only hint at relying on less Romanized and
therefore less reliable men (e.g., see Alaric) but also fundamentally changing
the structure of the Roman army, with the contemporaries of Adrianople
attempting to learn from the disaster by giving greater focus to cavalry and
overall mobility (Nickel, 1973, p. 150).

Second, the
Gothic refugee crisis exposed the decay of the Roman model of society.
Long gone were the days of Roman cosmopolitanism and the first reaction of the
Roman authorities after Adrianople was to disarm and massacre parties of Goths
throughout the Eastern Empire, including those who had stayed loyal to the
Roman army (Goldsworthy, 2014).
Aside from the growing xenophobia of the Roman society, the very fact that Lupicinus and Maximus were able to use bribery as blatantly
as they did is indicative of a decaying Roman order in which social mobility
had long since eroded. In a striking contrast with the Augustan Romans who
displayed pride in serving their Emperor, the Romans of the 4th
century A.D. thought about themselves first. Landowners, Brown (1967) explains,
“shared a common human wish to avoid high taxation and knew well enough how to
protect themselves against its incidence” (pp.
338–339). Valens’ jealousy and paranoia are also illustrative of the power
politics of the time, with the stature of the Roman Emperor losing its prestige
and a proven military record being enough of a reason for a general to
overthrow the Emperor and taking over his place.

This kind of
individualism is characteristic of the decay of the Roman social ladder and the
emergence of a “top-heavy” society (Jones,
1986). Due to its overstretched territory and the growing pressure at its
borders, the late Roman army and bureaucracy was so heavy that it ended up
absorbing all the wealth that traditionally came from landed ownership. This
negative development would encourage people to ‘play outside of the system’,
using bribery and hostile political takeovers to aggrandize themselves. These
opportunists would not only be found among the Romans themselves but also, and
increasingly, among the refugees migrating in the Empire, with warlords
emerging from their ranks. Again, the life of the Visigothic
King Alaric exemplifies this pattern very well: a soldier of Fritigern, Alaric rallied around him veterans of Adrianople
and caused massive devastation across the Empire, sacking Rome in 410 A.D., and
carving out a quasi-kingdom in Illyria. Ironically, it is through his
devastation that he was able to elevate himself and obtain various concessions
and political titles (he had joined the Roman army in 392 A.D. with the hope of
doing a career in the military but he had grown bitter
against the Empire after being denied a promotion in 395 A.D. (Smith, 2020)).

What the Gothic refugee crisis eventually
demonstrates through the ascension of warlords such as Alaric is the irreversible
decline of the Roman Empire of the classical era. By negotiating on an
equal footing with the Goths after a crushing defeat, Theodosius would upset
centuries of uneven dynamic between the Romans and the so-called ‘barbarians’
and encourage the latter to replicate the achievements of the Goths and to try
carving out their own domain within the Empire. In this sense, the Gothic
refugee crisis served as a dangerous omen for the weaker and less defensible
Western Roman Empire, which would soon be overrun by wave after wave of
Germanic tribes in the great migration of the 4th - 6th centuries culminating
in its collapse in 476 and the dissolution of the Western imperial court in
Ravenna by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in 554.

Assessment of
the Findings: Some Lessons on the Value of the Contemporary Legal Acquis

It is remarkable to see how these ancient
refugee crises mirrored each other in illustrating how seemingly minor refugee
developments can fester into enormous political crises and generate significant
impacts on the future of the two empires. Figure 1 showcases the similarities between the two crises. While the two crises
ended with a de facto normalization, they also both unleashed dynamics
that were particularly harmful to both empires. The Attican
refugee crisis, by aggravating the outbreak of the plague, demoralized the
Athenian society, lessened the likelihood of an early Athenian victory, and led
its cosmopolitan democracy to be more receptive to demagogy, xenophobia, and
authoritarianism. The Gothic refugee crisis produced similar outcomes, with the
disaster at Adrianople dealing a blow to Roman cosmopolitanism through its
anti-Gothic massacres. Adrianople also opened a breach to other ‘barbarian’
tribes seeking a place within the Empire. In both cases, there was a ‘before’
and an ‘after’ to the refugee crises.

Figure 1

When History Rhymes: The Pattern of two Ancient
Refugee Crises

It remains unclear whether the two refugee
influxes could have been avoided: while Athens would have needed to completely
rethink its war strategy to protect the whole of Attica (Spence, 1990), Eastern Rome, even if
it had rejected the Tervingi refugees, would have
inevitably faced other refugee crises owing to the advance of the Huns. What
however could most likely have been avoided is the despicable ways the refugees
were treated in the two empires. Pericles could have better anticipated how
overcrowded Athens would be and the health risks associated with overcrowding[5]. For example, Pericles could have ordered the relocation of some of the
refugees to Athenian islands in the same way as he relocated the Attican cattle to Euboea (Martínez, 2017, p. 139). Valens could also have easily
avoided the escalation of tensions with the Goths of Fritigern,
had he had more competent administrators in place in Thrace. Perhaps even
Valens’ presence when the crisis started would have helped. While Valens was
not the most competent emperor and had all the negative traits to be expected
from a leader with an “active-negative personality”[6], he remained a “conscientious administrator, careful of the interests
of the humble” (Hughes, 2013, pp. 191–193).
If he had been the person directly in charge of marshaling the refugee influx,
it seems unlikely that the situation would have escalated as badly as it did
with greedy men like Lupicinus and Maximus taking
advantage of the situation.

Athens and Eastern Rome’s failures reveal the
value of key international law principles in addressing refugee crises
triggered by military invasion. The first one of these principles is the
inherent dignity of the human person, as codified today in the
International Bill of Human Rights. If core human rights treaties stipulate
that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” (Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948),
they also emphasize the responsibility of all states to “ensure that any person
whose rights or freedoms … are violated shall have an effective remedy” (Para
3, Article 2, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966).
Special emphasis is dedicated to the right of everyone to an “adequate standard
of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and
housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions” (Para 1,
Article 11, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
1966). In a context of refugee crises triggered by military invasion,
refugee-hosting states are therefore bound to protect all human beings within
their jurisdiction and to remedy to abuses that may have arise
during the war or while settling here.

Neither
the Atticans nor the Goths were treated with dignity
by their ancient hosts, which only contributed to exacerbate resentment and
anger among the refugees (and eventually anarchy for the former, revolt for the
latter). Athens and Eastern Rome did open their gates to a significant influx
of Attican and Gothic refugees fleeing the invading
armies, thereby complying – at least mostly[7] – with the Principle of Non-Refoulement, the Right of Asylum, and the
Rule of Temporary Refuge[8]. However, both empires fell short of providing long-standing protection
to the fleeing individuals, as the refugees were not provided with adequate
health and food security. While the Atticans’ right
to health was largely disregarded when Athens was under siege and hit by the
epidemic, the Goths were deliberately starved out; in turn turning both populations
against the host authorities. Both the right to health and the right
to food are sanctified principles of modern international law. While health
is recognized as a “fundamental human right indispensable for the exercise of
other human rights” (Article 1, General Comment No. 14, 2000)[9], the right to adequate food is also considered key. The latter is
“realized when every man, woman, and child, alone or in community with others,
has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its
procurement” (Article 6, General Comment 12, 1999). In this connection,
intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare – which is
what the Eastern Romans did – constitutes a war crime that is today punishable
under international law[10].

The principles of humanity, also reflected in
the Greek and Roman religions of the time, would have facilitated the
management of the refugee crises and possibly even
prevented the refugee influxes from becoming crises. Today, under the
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, Lupicinus
and Maximus would be treated as war criminals and they
would be arrested for their outrageous actions. Frameworks such as the Human
Rights Committee of the United Nations[11] would also have warned Pericles that even states confronted to
widespread contagion cannot “derogate from their duty to treat all persons,
including persons deprived of their liberty” (Human Rights Committee, 2020, p.
41). The Committee would particularly stress the importance of ensuring “the adequacy
of health conditions and health services in places of incarceration” as
exceptional measures cannot impede on the right to health of individuals within
Athens’ territory (p. 42). If the authorities are unable to commit to measures
proportionate to the health threat, a complaint may be submitted to the
Committee. An inquiry procedure then unfolds and the
Committee keeps the case under consideration until satisfactory measures are
taken by the State party (OHCHR, 2021).

Two final principles of customary international
law gain tremendous value when reviewing the two crises: the principle of
responsibility-sharing and the principle of access of humanitarian
relief. The principle of responsibility-sharing stresses that refugee
protection only works with a sound level of participation by all countries. The
countries to where refugees arrive first cannot be the only ones receiving
refugees, every state “having differing capacities and resources” (Article 68,
New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, 2016). One may thus wonder what
might have happened, had Athens and Eastern Rome received the support of their
allies in the reception of the refugees (Athens with its Delian allies, Eastern
Rome with Western Rome). The principle of access to humanitarian relief also
comes to mind when reviewing the two ancient refugee crises. Although customary
international law does not prohibit military sieges, it does impose on
besieging powers the obligation to provide access to humanitarian aid for the
civilian population in need (International Committee of the Red Cross, n.d.).
Retrospectively, the law would not only apply to Sparta during the siege of
Athens but also to Emperor Theodosius when he waged his war of exhaustion
against the Goths of Fritigern. Both powers would be
required to maintain an unimpeded access or “corridor” for the passage of
humanitarian aid for the civilians in need. This kind of assistance in turn may
have helped de-escalate the two refugee situations, for example by mitigating
the death toll of the plague in the case of Athens. To paraphrase the Brahimi
Report[12], effective peace-building is contingent with
the making of a demonstrable differences in the lives of the people and
humanitarian relief, in this context, can help bridge the divide between
refugees and hosting authorities.

From all these insights, it appears evident
that our international legal acquis is relevant to address refugee
crises triggered by military invasion. Two factors played an instrumental role
in turning refugees against their host states in the two case studies: health
and food insecurity. Two additional factors aggravated the refugee crises: the
lack of solidarity from neighboring powers and the lack of humanitarian relief.
In this context, the developments in international law and human rights law
provide effective mechanisms for the management of refugee crises triggered by
military invasion, as countries are under scrutiny to ensure that their
policies and practices remain consistent with international law principles. In
turn, complying with these principles might help modern states ensure that they
do not reproduce the same mistakes as ancient empires in their dealing with
refugee influxes.

Conclusions

Mark Twain
once said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” (Mark Twain, n.d.; as cited in Burleson,
2007, p. 23). The cases of the Attican and Gothic
refugee crises confirm the line of Twain remarkably well. Although the
settings, the people, and the host states were different, the pattern still
rhymed: forced relocation in a war environment resulting in anarchy or revolt
in the host country, due to poor treatment by the host authorities. Even the
consequences of the two refugee crises were highly alike for both empires:
structural weakening, erosion of the model of society, and overall decline. The
article thus confirms the nexus between refugee influxes, poorly managed
integration policies, and the undermining of ancient civilizations. It is
evident that both the Attican and Gothic refugee
crises could have been better managed and that the two empires’ failings had
broader consequences on their political future.

The modern
reader would be wrong to regard the Attican and
Gothic refugee crises as episodes of a remote past that became irrelevant with
the passing of time. In fact, reviewing these two refugee crises and their
contextual situations with key international law principles reveals the value
of our contemporary legal acquis in addressing refugee crises triggered
by military invasion. The right to health, the right to food,
responsibility-sharing, humanitarian relief; all these principles would have
been relevant to help Athens and Eastern Rome manage the refugee crises of
their time. In turn, the codification of these principles in contemporary
international law demonstrates that these principles continue to remain
relevant to address today’s refugee crises.

Acknowledgments

The authors of this article would like to express
their gratitude to Professor Taran and Professor Solorzano for having given them the possibility to
contribute to this special issue on migration. We would also like to thank the
Geneva School of Diplomacy, Professor de Zayas, our families, and our friends,
in particular Aynur Yu
Huang and Mayra Ramírez Llerena, who supported us throughout our research. Without their guidance and
moral support, the successful completion of this article would have been
unthinkable.

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/thucydides-plague-athens-coronavirus.html

[1] The 1951 Refugee
Convention defined a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return
to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership, membership of a particular
social group, or political opinion” (UNHCR, 2021, p. 3).

[2] The only numbers
mentioned by Thucydides are those of Athens’ military at the beginning of the
Peloponnesian War: 29 000 hoplites, 1200 cavalry, 1600 archers, and 300
seaworthy triremes (Pritchard, 2020, p. 1).

[3] The original Periclean
law of 451 B.C. was primarily voted to limit the number of potential
beneficiaries of the civic redistributions of wealth which Pericles had
championed for the poorer citizens. Contrary to popular wisdom, it did not have
much to do with Athens’ founding tale of autochthony (Azoulay, 2014, pp.
100–102).

[4] The scouts had largely
underestimated the number of Goths; modern estimates confirm Ammianus’
narrative and place both armies at roughly the same number (Eisenberg, 2009;
Goldsworthy, 2014).

[5] The imposition of
quarantines, both officially and spontaneously, indicates that the Athenians
were knowledgeable of the connection between overcrowding and the spread of the
disease (Martínez, 2017, p. 139).

[6] Rourke (2007) defines a
leader with “an active-negative personality” as follows: “The more active a
leader, the more criticism he or she encounters. Positive personalities take
such criticism in stride, but negative personalities are prone to assume that
opponents are enemies. This causes negative personalities to withdraw into an
inner circle of subordinates who are supportive and who give an unreal,
groupthink view of events” (p. 74). This definition matches well with Valens’
behavior prior to the battle of Adrianople: seeing enemies everywhere, including
within his inner circle (Sebastianus); he only listened to the scouts that were
giving him a positive narrative of his battle situation.

[7]
A reservation could be made in the case of Eastern Rome as the
Greuthungi were not initially admitted.

[8]
The three principles belong to customary international law. The
Principle of Non-Refoulement finds echo in Article 3 of the Convention against
Torture, which states that “No State Party shall expel, return
("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are
substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected
to torture” (Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
1984).  The right of
asylum is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948),
Article 14(1): “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries
asylum from persecution.” Lastly, the rule of Temporary Refuge finds echo in
United Nations General Assembly Document No. 12A (A/35/12/Add.1): Para (i) of
Article (b) asserts that “in the case of large-scale influx, persons seeking
asylum should always receive at least temporary refuge” (Temporary Refuge No.
19, 1980)

[9] The General Comment was
submitted by the UN Treaty Body for the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The CESCR is a core UN instrument ratified
today by 171 States.

[10] Para
(xxv) of Article 8(b) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
forbids states from “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of
warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including
wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions”
(Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998)

[11] The Human Rights Committee is the
UN Treaty Supervisory Body for the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR). The ICCPR is a core UN instrument ratified today by
173 States.

[12] The Brahimi Report outlines the
need for strengthening the UN’s capacity to operate a wide variety of
peacekeeping operations (Comprehensive Review of the Whole Question of
Peacekeeping Operations in All Their Aspects, 2000, p. 7).