Horizon

Polybius on Cause vs. Pretext

A recent discussion about the Downing Street memos on HNN left me feeling a bit stupider and wishing the participants had read Polybius:

Some of those writers who have recorded the history of Hannibal and his times and have tried to identify the causes of this war between Rome and Carthage have cited as first cause the Carthaginian action in laying siege to the city of Saguntum, and as its second their crossing of the river Ebro in contravention of their treaty with the Romans. I could concede that these events might be described as the beginnings of the war, but should by no means agree that the constituted its causes. On the same analogy one might as well say that Alexander the Great's crossing into Asia was the cause of his war against Persia, and Antiochus' landing at Demetrias the cause of his against Rome, neither of which assertions is correct or even plausible. For how could anyone maintain that these actions were the causes of the war in question, when in the case of the Persian war many of the plans and preparations had been made by Alexander, and some even in the lifetime of father Philip, and in that of the war against Rome, by the Aetolians long before Antiochus arrived?

Such theories are put forward by those who cannot grasp the distinction — still less its magnitude — between a beginning, a cause, and a pretext, and overlook the fact that the cause comes first in a given chain of events and the beginning last. The word beginning I shall use to refer to the first attempt to execute and put in to action plans which have already been decided; and the word cause to those events which influence in advance our pursposes and decisions, that is to say our comceptions of things, our state of mind, or calculations about them and the whole process of reasoning whereby we arrive at decisions and undertakings.