The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

As with the ‘rape of Nanking’, we are dealing with the traditional warrior mentality and the need to ‘save face’. The essential point is made in an essay on Parkman by John Andrew Doyle: ‘The cruelties of the Indians were not so remote from the ideas and practices of civilised men in that age as they are now.’ Doyle is speaking of the Indians of an earlier age, whose ruthlessness was not very different from that of their white conquerors. Parkman describes the massacre of English settlers by Indians who were in the pay of the French: ‘A hundred and four persons, chiefly women and children half-naked from their beds, were tomahawked, shot or killed by slower and more painful methods.’ And at the conclusion of the massacre, a Jesuit priest who accompanied the Indians said a mass. The French employed the Indians because they were cheaper than white soldiers, and had no objection to their methods; a French priest told a correspondent: ‘They kill all they meet; and, after having abused the women and maidens, they slaughter or burn them.’ Parkman also mentions that the French handed over prisoners to the Indians, knowing they would be tortured and burned alive.

But then, this was in the century before the Sioux revolt in Minnesota, and the English were capable of showing the same ruthlessness towards their enemies. England had been at war with Spain, on and off, since the time of Elizabeth I, and the government actively encouraged pirates – called ‘privateers’ – to prey on Spanish ships; it was not unusual for everyone on board such a ship to be murdered. In England itself, coastal villages were encouraged to engage in ‘wrecking’ foreign ships, luring them on to the rocks with false lights. In Roots of Evil (page 40) there is the story of the captain of a wrecked ship who struggled to shore in Cheshire only to be stripped naked by villagers, who cut off his fingers to get his rings; the earlobes of a sailor were bitten off to get his ear-rings. It was only because the wreckers made no distinction between British and foreign ships that wrecking was finally made a capital offence in 1753.

We have no way of knowing when piracy and banditry became common in Europe; but it was probably towards the end of the third millennium B.C., around the time of that early Napoleon, Sargon of Akkad (2350 B.C.). The first walled cities date from about six hundred years before Sargon, suggesting that war was becoming the rule rather than the exception. Gordon Childe points out in What Happened in History (p. 154) that graves of this period in the small Aegean islands (the Cyclades) contained many metal weapons, ‘so it may be suspected that these insular communities combined piracy with peaceful trade, adding loot to profits, a practice normal in the Mediterranean at many subsequent periods.’ Great wars like those conducted by Sargon must have unsettled the whole region and left behind the usual aftermath of robbery and violence. When small cities and tribes are welded together into a great empire, one of the consequences is a feeling of loss of identity, which – as in the case of the Ik – leads to an increase in selfishness and ruthlessness. Dispossessed rural populations have to survive as best they can. And when kings destroy cities and their soldiers are allowed to loot and rape, some men are bound to acquire a taste for more exciting and violent ways of making a living. In his essay ‘Civilised Life Begins’, M. E. L. Mallowen says:

The widespread contact between distant parts of the civilised world at that time implied a desire to share in the wealth available to man, and a determination to compete for it if it were withheld.

From The Dawn of Civilisation ed. by Stuart Piggott, Thames and Hudson, 1961.

The Mediterranean area was turning into a melting pot, and the age of violence was beginning.

Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the rise of piracy and banditry in the Mediterranean. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing towards the end of the fifth century B.C., gives the best picture of what it must have been like more than a thousand years earlier.

In ancient times, both Greeks and barbarians, the inhabitants of the coast as well as of the islands, when they began to find their way to one another by sea, had recourse to piracy. They were commanded by powerful chiefs, who took this means of increasing their wealth and providing for their poorer followers. They would fall upon the unwalled or straggling towns, or rather villages, which they plundered, and maintained themselves by plundering them; for as yet such an occupation was held to be honourable and not disgraceful. This is proved by the practice of certain tribes on the mainland who, to the present day, glory in piratical exploits, and by the witness of the ancient poets, in whose verses the question is invariably asked of newly arrived voyagers, whether they are pirates; which implies that neither those who are questioned disclaim, nor those who are interested in knowing censure the occupation. The land too was infested by robbers; and there are parts of Hellas in which the old practices still continue… the fashion of wearing arms among these continental tribes is a relic of their old predatory habits. For in ancient times, all Greeks carried weapons because their homes were undefended and intercourse was unsafe…

He shows us a time when local chieftains sailed the seas and plundered undefended villages, probably carrying off some of their inhabitants as slaves. Piracy was honourable because it was still regarded as a form of war, and there was almost certainly no question of indiscriminate slaughter or cruelty – otherwise piracy would not have been tolerated, even considered honourable. These people were simple, direct, violent, but not sadistic. Thucydides, regarding the ‘barbarians’ from the safety of Athens, sounds rather like a New Yorker of the nineteenth century commenting on the Wild West. He also tells us that the legendary King Minos of Crete conquered most of the Mediterranean and cleared the seas of pirates. This Minos is, of course, the king who is supposed to have built the labyrinth, and whose wife fell in love with a bull and produced the minotaur. Since Minos is supposed to be the son of the god Zeus and the maiden Europa – another lady who admired the bull’s sexual equipment – historians of the nineteenth century assumed him to be purely mythical. But in 1900 an Englishman named Arthur Evans began digging at Knossos, in Crete, and soon started to uncover the walls of an enormous palace. The size of its walls and the richness of its decorations made it clear that it was a remnant of a mighty civilisation, but the astonishing thing was that, although it was fairly close to the sea, it appeared to have no defending walls; clearly its inhabitants were not afraid of pirates. The remains of a mighty fleet solved this puzzle: Crete had no need to fear pirates. The palace’s rooms and corridors were so confusing that Evans suspected he had found the origin of the legend of the labyrinth. The Cretans – or Minoans, as Evans called them – certainly seemed to be obsessed by bulls. Wall paintings showed youths and maidens vaulting over the backs of bulls, and on the roof of the palace there are two carved stones that look like horns. In short, there is much evidence that King Minos really existed and that the legends are based on fact.

A later Greek historian, Plutarch, has more to tell us about King Minos – how Minos’s son was murdered by the Greeks, and how, after a bitter war, Minos agreed to receive a tribute of seven youths and seven virgins every nine years. These were sacrificed to the Minotaur, who lived in the labyrinth. The hero Theseus, son of the king of Athens, went to Crete and slew the Minotaur. Evans argues that the Greek hostages probably were sacrificed to the bull-god, or made to take part in gladiatorial contests with bulls. This same hero Theseus, according to Plutarch, had spent his early years clearing the roads around Athens of criminals. ‘For it was at that time very dangerous to go by land on the road to Athens, no part being free of robbers and murderers.’ One of these robbers was a woman named Phaea, ‘full of cruelty and lust… and had the name of the Sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners’ – the first female criminal in history. Theseus also killed a bandit named Sciron who used to order strangers to wash his feet and then, as they bent over, kick them from the rock – named after him – into the sea. Plutarch mentions that Jason, another legendary hero who lived at the time of Minos, was given the task of clearing the seas of pirates. So although we have no way of drawing the line between fact and fiction, it seems clear that a king called Minos really existed around 1600 B.C. and that by that time piracy and brigandage were common in the Mediterranean. Knossos itself was finally destroyed around 1380 B.C., by pirates and other raiders. These were dangerous times to live in. The people who survived had to be fierce and brutal.