harming one’s enemies is pervasive. Aristotle notes in his Rhetoric that “all things are
good which men choose to do; this will include…whatever may be bad for their enemies
or good for their friends” (Rhetoric, 1363a20). In the Republic Socrates rejects
Polemarchus’ reasoning about justice, though the centrality of the role of enmity in public
life is obvious in the structure of Plato’s ideal city-state and the elevated function of the
guardians. This latter observation pertains to the question of the nature of public enmity,
however.
In medieval Europe, finding oneself in a relationship of personal enmity indicated
not simply a state of emotional hostility or ethical demands but triggered legal regulation
by the common law (a secular jural landscape marked by exceptions, discontinuity and
diversity, rather than legal uniformity). Enmity signified, as medieval historian Robert
Bartlett has argued, an institution bound by “ritual, expectation and sanction.”
Linguistically, again, this was reflected in the distinction between inimicitia mortalis,
mortal enmity, also referred to as mortal war (pro guerra mortali) and “war between
kings” or bellum, a condition in which persons stood as hostes, people at war, with one
another. Both customary (or secular) law and “learned law” premised upon Roman and
canon law emphasized the distinction between personal enmity and public enmity. The
obvious question emerges: what led to the diminution of the power of the personal enemy
in legal and ethical terms? Some have tied this to the growth of the modern state, one
theory contending that “the strength of legal enmity and that of the state vary inversely.”
Bartlett challenges this conjecture, arguing instead that it was the king’s need to
maximize his own resources in conducting wars against other kings (glorified guerra
mortali instead of bella?) that led to restrictions on the pursuit of personal enmity. I
simply want to point out here the previous legal dualism in traditions of the enemy idea.
18
Otto Bruner, Land and Lordship, as quoted in Bartlett, 1998.
19
Convention