After much debate it was decided that the people would not be ordered to reciprocate the King’s oath of allegiance. This was wise. As ancient Greeks knew, oaths have serious implications.
For them, to take an oath was in effect ‘to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it was false’. The Trojan war – the subject of the West’s first work of literature – happened only because Tyndareos, stepfather of Helen, compelled all her Greek suitors, on oath, to go to war on anyone who seduced her from her husband – which the Trojan Paris proceeded to do. Betraying that oath (Achilles was too young to swear it) would have meant divine punishment in the future.
But the practice was open to abuse. One Greek pointed out that wicked people in a difficult situation might well swear an oath to try to get out of it but then forget it when they had. As Aeschylus said: ‘Oaths do not give credibility to men; men give credibility to oaths.’ Consequently, you were inviting trouble on yourself if you asked a man known for breaking oaths to swear one. (A comic poet said there were two people ‘who will swear to anything that suits the person they’re talking to: courtesans and politicians’.)
But there were also ways of legitimately getting around them. One man, bound by an oath of silence about the proposed murder of a friend, wrote in the sand ‘Run for it!’ just before the blow was to be struck.
King Charles was against the idea of a people’s oath. He was right, and Greeks would have had an explanation. An oath between enemies to allow each other to, for example, pick up the bodies of their dead after battle made perfect sense.
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