Violence and Community

Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World

Ioannis K. Xydopoulos, Kostas Vlassopoulos, Eleni Tounta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317001775
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Violence and community were intimately linked in the ancient world. While various aspects of violence have been long studied on their own (warfare, revolution, murder, theft, piracy), there has been little effort so far to study violence as a unified field and explore its role in community formation. This volume aims to construct such an agenda by exploring the historiography of the study of violence in antiquity, and highlighting a number of important paradoxes of ancient violence. It explores the forceful nexus between wealth, power and the passions by focusing on three major aspects that link violence and community: the attempts of communities to regulate and canalise violence through law, the constitutive role of violence in communal identities, and the ways in which communities dealt with violence in regards to private and public space, landscapes and territories. The contributions to this volume range widely in both time and space: temporally, they cover the full span from the archaic to the Roman imperial period, while spatially they extend from Athens and Sparta through Crete, Arcadia and Macedonia to Egypt and Israel.

1 Introduction

The study of violence and community in ancient Greek history

Kostas Vlassopoulos and Ioannis K. Xydopoulos

The inseparable link between violence and community makes its appearance at the beginning of classical literature. Given that the Iliad and the Odyssey are framed around the theme of the Trojan War, this is hardly surprising. A significant part of the Iliad consists of graphic descriptions of battles between Achaeans and Trojans, and the ways in which intercommunal violence affects all aspects of the Trojan city and the Achaean camp. But equally significant is the fact that both epics are dominated by a different kind of violence, which takes place within a particular community. The first scene of the Iliad narrates how a violent confrontation between Agamemnon and Achilles was barely averted, and the rest of the work follows the fatal consequences of this initial conflict. Intracommunal violence is at the heart of the Odyssey, which focuses on the conflict between Odysseus’ household and the Suitors, the violent settling of this conflict and the peaceful avoidance of further bloodshed through divine intervention.¹

It is thus hardly surprising that violence, in its various manifestations, has been at the forefront of the research interests of ancient historians for a very long time. What is more surprising is the peculiar way in which violence in the ancient Greek world has been studied until very recently.² Scholars have not approached violence as a unified field of study; instead, different facets of violence have formed independent fields, which tend to be examined by different kinds of scholars with distinct research agendas and research traditions. The study of Greek warfare has obviously a very long pedigree, and has in recent decades experienced a major transformation through the application of novel approaches and the broadening of perspectives; but it remains the case that the intercommunal violence which constitutes warfare tends to be examined separately from the various forms of intracommunal violence.³ If in the case of intercommunal violence there is at least a unified field of study, in the case of intracommunal violence even this is largely missing. The diverse aspects of violence within Greek communities tend to be examined in different contexts and by different scholars: the study of stasis, the various forms of political conflict and violence that were a characteristic feature of Greek history, has hardly developed any links with the study of assault and homicide.⁴ To give another example, the debates on the extent to which Greek communities were states which monopolised the legitimate exercise of violence are not connected with the study of the violence that Greek masters habitually exercised over their slaves.⁵

This volume aims to make a contribution towards the study of violence in ancient Greek communities as a unified field of study by tracing an agenda of interconnected themes. But in order to frame such an agenda it is essential first to explore the wider scholarly approaches that have shaped how aspects of violence and community have been perceived.

Narratives and scholarly traditions

Most approaches to violence and community in ancient Greece have been influenced, in one way or another, by the tradition which is usually associated with Thomas Hobbes. This is a tradition which has its origins already in fifth-century Greece, and Hobbes built his edifice with ancient materials.⁶ His Leviathan has drawn a vivid image of the violent world of pre-political society and the order created by the social contract that led to the creation of the state and its monopoly of violence. In the Hobbesian narrative the state is the undoubted hero. Societies without states are characterised by eternal feuding and vendettas; self-help is the only means of achieving results in the face of conflict, and this unsurprisingly generates recurring or escalating circles of violence. The emergence of the state presents a radical break: states create laws and institutions which provide alternative, non-violent ways of achieving results.

The impact of this narrative on the study of violence and community in ancient Greece cannot be doubted. ‘The rise of the polis’ is the standard account of the Hobbesian narrative in Greek history. In the Dark Ages and the early archaic period, so the story goes, the absence of formal institutions and laws meant that the punishment of violence could only be achieved through feuding and self-help. In an early stage of development the polis tried primarily to limit the forms that feuding and self-help could take by devising regulations like Draco’s famous homicide law, whose provisions are examined by Mirko Canevaro in this volume (pp. 52–63). But by the classical period the polis had managed to take over and control the whole process of punishing violence: by now, the only legitimate recourse for punishing violence consisted in prosecuting offenders in communal law courts on the basis of the explicitly formulated laws of the polis. According to this approach, the citizens of a classical Greek polis lived in a world that was incomparably less violent compared to the world of their ancestors in Homeric Greece.⁷ It is telling that a recent global account that presents the paradoxical claim that the escalation of warfare has created stronger states, which have managed to create a far less violent world, has been written by a scholar who started his career with a book on the transition from the Dark Ages to the emergence of the polis in the course of the archaic period.⁸

If the Hobbesian narrative features the state as the main hero, an alternative tradition focuses instead on economy and culture. If the first tradition found its most influential formulation with Hobbes in the seventeenth century, the latter was primarily shaped in the course of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its debates. At the centre of the ‘Enlightened narrative’ is a fundamental distinction between ancient and modern societies.⁹ In ancient societies, which were primarily agricultural and pastoral, predation played a fundamental social and economic role. Given the limits of agricultural growth in pre-industrial societies, violent extortion and warfare constituted the most efficient ways of amassing wealth and power. Consequently, ancient societies were warrior cultures that put a premium on successful violence; but they were also slave societies, because the violent subordination of labourers was the only means of procuring wealth on a large scale. A further consequence concerned the limited ‘moral circle’ of ancient societies. Protection from violence was restricted to full members of the community (citizens); all outsiders were fair game to unmitigated private and collective violence.¹⁰

Modern societies were radically different, the ‘Enlightened narrative’ posited. On the one hand, they were based on commerce: commerce requires peaceful exchanges, and therefore tends to strongly limit the utility of recourse to warfare. The novel significance of the market meant that free labour was the modern alternative to the violent domination of slaves and serfs that characterised pre-modern societies.¹¹ Furthermore, as a result of the impact of Christianity and the Enlightenment, modern societies had undergone a transformation in terms of sensibility and morality. Christianity and the Enlightenment had widened the moral circle by recognising the natural rights of all human beings, even if they were outsiders to the community. The abolition of slavery, which started in the late eighteenth century and was largely accomplished in the course of the nineteenth, at least for the Western world, was a major consequence of this revolution in morality. Equally significant was a revolution in sensibility that made modern people abhor violence as a means of achieving order: violent punishment, whether for children or convicted felons, was widely criticised and ultimately abolished from the late eighteenth century onwards.¹²

These themes have been explored in a range of highly influential modern works from a variety of perspectives. Norbert Elias has examined what he famously described as ‘the civilising process’: the process through which European societies from the Middle Ages onwards came to radically transform their standards of acceptable violence through the gradual diffusion of courtly etiquettes that created new understandings of shame and repugnance.¹³ Michel Foucault explored the break between early modern forms of punishment that were based on the public spectacle of inflicted violence and the modern form of punishment which emerged from the nineteenth century onwards and was organised on the basis of new forms of discipline based on incarceration. Foucault challenged the traditional description that presented the abolition of corporal punishment as a progressive result of humanitarian concerns; but his memorable descriptions of the employment of spectacles of violence by early modern states had a major impact on scholarship.¹⁴ To give a final example, Steven Pinker has presented an influential account which argues that in the course of human history the frequency and impact of violence has declined as a result of five interrelated processes: the growth of modern states with their monopoly of legitimate violence, the impact of doux commerce in regulating human affairs peacefully, the increasing influence of cosmopolitan perspectives, the ‘feminisation’ resulting from a growing respect for female interests, and the intensified application of knowledge and reason to human affairs.¹⁵

These approaches have had their impact on the study of ancient Greece. Danielle Allen has taken her cue from Foucault’s study of punishment and the spectacle of public violence in order to provide a comprehensive examination of the politics of punishment in classical Athens and the interconnections and contradictions between Athenian democracy and its critics.¹⁶ Jon Ploug Jørgensen has applied Elias’ approach to archaic Greece, by exploring the civilising process through which Greek elites came to abandon the everyday carrying of arms and the violent settling of disputes.¹⁷ In his contribution to this volume, Nick Fisher explores the extent to which Pinker’s account of how interrelated processes led to the limitation of violence can be applied to ancient Greece, by focusing in particular on the rituals and institutions of educating and socialising the young in Sparta, Crete and Athens.

A third narrative, related to but distinct from the other two, can be described as ‘the rise of representative government’. Its origins can be found among the Enlightenment discourses on politics, but its clearest formulation emerged in the course of the debates engendered by the American and French revolutions. The major question for these revolutions was whether there exist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: the study of violence and community in ancient Greek history
• 2 Making law grip: inequality, injustice, and legal remedy in Solonian Attica and ancient Israel
• 3 How to cast a criminal out of Athens: law and territory in archaic Attica
• 4 Macedonians in Bottiaea: ‘warriors’ and identities in late Iron Age and archaic Macedonia
• 5 Socialisation, identity and violence in classical Greek cities
• 6 Binding curses, agency and the Athenian democracy
• 7 Reintegrating the exiles: violence, urban landscape and memory in early Hellenistic Tegea
• 8 Violating the security of the oikia: thefts from houses in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods
• Index