The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It is important to remember that these early pirates were not the ‘criminal rats’ who came to overrun the Mediterranean in later years. They regarded themselves as warriors. What they were after was easy pickings. Civilisation was expanding; the Mediterranean was becoming more and more prosperous, and the pirates could see no reason why they should not help themselves to other people’s riches. The fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C. were a ‘boom time’ in the Mediterranean.

After the fall of Knossos, a people called the Achaeans began to build themselves a stronghold at Mycenae; they had come from somewhere in the north and hacked their way into Greece. Mycenae’s defensive walls were built of blocks of stone so immense that later Greeks believed they could only have been moved by giants and so called them ‘cyclopean’. Mycenae became as prosperous as Knossos had been. Agamemnon, the king who led the Greeks to Troy, was king of Mycenae. Troy fell about 1184 B.C. and Agamemnon returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, according to legend. In any case, the kingdom of Agamemnon did not long survive its greatest king; invaders called the Dorians poured down from the Danube basin and another great civilisation collapsed. The next three hundred years were the period known as the Dark Ages – not because it was a time of new barbarian invasions, as in the Dark Ages of Europe after the collapse of Rome, but because there is so little written evidence from the period. There were no more vast kingdoms such as the Minoans and Achaeans – only dozens of small countries with dozens of small towns surrounded by walls. Even the farmers moved close to the towns. The seas were still full of pirates – even though the pickings had long ago ceased to be rich – and these were not warrior chieftains like Achilles and Ulysses, but small-time operators who probably had long periods with empty bellies. Small towns and villages do not have much opportunity to get rich. Most people were half starved; there was meat only on holidays, and for the rest of the year it was fruit, olives and barley porridge. But then, for the pirates, there was always the possibility of a good haul – if only the food that had been stored up for the winter by poor villagers. Another important motive was rape. As N. K. Sandars remarks of an earlier period: ‘The whole purpose of the hero’s activity is spoil.’ ‘Silver, gold, bronze, horses, cattle and sheep, women, above all, treasure and women.’ (The Sea Peoples p. 186.) And when treasure became scarce, there was still rape. People who live in small communities usually have strong views on immorality; they want their daughters to remain virgins until after marriage. The male, on the other hand, is naturally promiscuous. So rape no doubt continued to be one of the pleasanter rewards of piracy. When the women had been possessed, they could be sold as slaves – for at this period, and for many centuries to come, all civilised life was based on the institution of slavery.

The post-Homeric age is, of course, the age of Jaynes’s ‘breakdown of the bicameral mind’. And whether or not we accept his theory about the ‘coming of consciousness’ there can be no doubt that this was an age of increasing individualism. The usual explanation is that people living in small towns and villages grew tired of kings (or chieftains), preferring to be ruled by councils of leading citizens – the oligarchies. But a council still amounted to a ‘privileged few’, and the citizens found these irritating, which provided an ideal opportunity for rabble-rousers to preach against the aristocracy, gather a few followers with knives and cudgels and set themselves up as tyrants or despots. But the Greeks, having acquired a taste for individualism, finally got rid of these tyrants, and the result was, eventually, the world’s first democracy.

According to this view, individualism was the outcome of the disappearance of big cities – like Knossos and Mycenae – and their replacement by small towns and villages. But there had been towns and villages since 6000 B.C. and they had peacefully accepted the rule of kings and priests. The new individualism in Greece was the rise of a new kind of consciousness – the same consciousness that soon created science and philosophy. Endless hardships and dangers had created a race of survivors, of claustrophobic little communities who regarded the rest of the world with a certain mistrust. Vigilance and determination had turned them into ‘left brainers’.

What is certainly true is that the rule of tyrants gave the Greeks a taste for freedom. ‘Tyrant’ meant simply a ruler or king, with no implication of cruelty; but, as Herodotus remarks:

Even the best of men, were he granted such power, would alter the train of his thoughts. Insolence will be engendered in him by the advantages of his position, and envy… With these two in his soul he is filled with every wickedness, for insolence will cause him to break into many acts of wantonness, and envy into many more.

Book 3, para 80

We have already encountered the tyrant Alexander of Pherae, who buried men alive and hunted them with his dogs. The tyrant Phalaris of Acragas in Sicily is famous for his unpleasant habit of roasting people he disliked in a bronze bull, his first victim being the craftsman who made it; he was overthrown and met the same fate himself.

Herodotus’s mistrust of tyrants emerges in a gruesome story he tells about the Median ruler Astyages (about 600 B.C.). Convinced by a dream that his grandson would supplant him on the throne, Astyages handed him over to a servant named Harpagus with orders to kill the baby (whose name was Cyrus). Shocked at the idea, Harpagus handed over the child to a herdsman whose own baby had just died – the corpse of the baby was shown to the guards of Astyages to convince him that his orders had been carried out.

When the child was ten, his identity was discovered. His playmates had made him king in one of their games, and he beat the son of a nobleman who refused to obey him. The affair came to the ears of Astyages, who sent for Cyrus and observed his resemblance to himself. The herdsman was questioned, and the truth came out. Harpagus was then invited to supper and asked to send his only son – a boy of thirteen – to the palace. The boy was killed, then cut up and roasted. When Harpagus sat down to supper, he ate his own son. After the meal, he was handed a basket containing the boy’s hands, feet and head.

The point is further underlined by Harpagus’s reaction; he bows his head and says that whatever the king does must be right. Harpagus is so accustomed to absolute submission that he has no difficulty in concealing his feelings on learning that he has eaten his son. And Astyages is so used to absolute obedience that he assumes Harpagus bears him no ill-will. Suddenly, we become aware of the immense distance that separates this Persian monarch from the Egyptian and Sumerian kings of two thousand years earlier – kings who regarded themselves as servants of the gods and who were as much subject to the rule of law as any of their people. Astyages is not even necessarily a cruel man. It is his ego that is offended by disobedience, and he coldly calculates a ‘suitable’ punishment.

And once again, we must bear in mind that this kind of cruelty is the outcome of ‘divided consciousness’, of the man who stands alone and no longer hears the voice of the gods. But this same divided consciousness soon led to the achievements of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes. Divided consciousness produced democracy – the political system of men who stand alone, no longer united by the will of the god. But this same democracy revealed its shortcomings in the execution of Socrates for impiety against the gods – emphasising that the sum of a thousand small egos is one small ego. Left-brain consciousness makes men obsessive. Obsession gives birth to blindness and narrowness, to cruelty and stupidity – but also to science and philosophy. And so the pendulum of history continues to swing between these extremes, and the story of civilisation is the story of creativity and of crime.

This book is centrally concerned with crime; but if we ignore the creativity, we shall not only fail to understand the crime: we shall miss the whole point of human history. Those Greeks who invaded Crete and built Mycenae were driven by this unique human craving for adventure, by the feeling that life without conquest is a bore. In this spirit they cheerfully killed their enemies, raped their female captives and plundered undefended cities. It was not innate wickedness so much as the spirit that makes boys play at pirates. But four centuries later, when a blind singer named Homer recited these episodes, his audience was able to enjoy the excitement of the adventure without stirring from their firesides. In a sense, they were enjoying the adventure more than those ancient heroes did, for it is always easier to appreciate life in retrospect than when coping with its everyday details. This love of song and recitation developed to such a point that by the reign of Pisistratus, the first great tyrant of Athens (561-528 B.C.), the festival of the god Dionysus had turned into a kind of song contest. One day, the audience was startled and puzzled when the chorus leader began to declaim his lines as if he himself were the legendary hero he was singing about; but they soon found this new method of presentation more dramatic and absorbing than a mere narration. It made them participants in the fall of Troy, the murder of Agamemnon, and the tragedy of Oedipus or Philoctetes. The author of this new method, Thespis, had invented the drama. And a century later an enormous theatre, capable of holding twelve thousand people, was built at the foot of the Acropolis. The actors, walking on shoes that made them artificially tall, and speaking through wooden masks that amplified their voices, brought to life again these great dramas of the past, and the silence was so total that no one missed a word. No wonder this golden age saw the sudden flowering of science and philosophy, as well as of poetry. Man had at last stumbled upon his most unique and incredible accomplishment: living in two worlds at once: the real world and the world of imagination. It was a trick the Spartans never mastered, for they chose the way of obsession. But Alexander the Great was driven to conquer the world by his imagination, rather than by the political realism that had driven Sargon the Great and King Minos. He was the first hero who was conscious of his role as hero; he played the conqueror like an actor on the stage.