The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Now in a sense, the criminals of this time, the pirates and bandits, continued to belong to that earlier age of the Trojan war. As far as we can tell, crime had still not entered its sadistic stage – for we can be sure that, if any pirate or brigand was noted for his cruelty, like the legendary Procrustes who cut down travellers to fit his bed, his deeds would have been recorded and exaggerated. Our ancestors loved hair-raising tales as much as we do, and had not yet become sated with horrors. After the defeat of Athens by Sparta in 400 B.C., piracy returned to the seas and banditry to the roads, for after so many years of war, the roads were full of wandering soldiers who knew no other trade. (Ten thousand of them were enlisted by the Persian Cyrus – a descendant of Cyrus the Great, whom we have already met as a child – and they won many spectacular victories in Persia before Cyrus was killed in battle and the army had to fight its way back to the sea – passing, en route, those vast ruined cities of the Assyrians whose names had been forgotten.) In his novel The Golden Ass, Lucius Apuleius, writing three centuries later, describes the brigands who capture the hero (who has been transformed into an ass). They burst into the courtyard of the house, armed with swords and axes, and into the strong room that contains the valuables. They kill nobody, and make off as quickly as they can, loading some of the valuables on to the hero. In their robbers’ cave, they wash in hot water, then settle down to a huge meal – cooked by an old woman – washed down with wine. ‘They bawled songs, yelled obscenities at each other, and played practical jokes on one another.’ In fact, they sound like the Greek army in front of Troy.

The robber chief makes a long speech after their meal, in which he describes some of their exploits. These are designed to emphasise the bravery and toughness of their band. Their former leader had carved a hole in a door, and was groping around inside to find the handle, when the owner of the house took a hammer and nailed the robber’s hand to the door. To escape, they were forced to hack off his arm at the elbow. In the chase, he began to lag behind; and since being caught would mean crucifixion, he committed suicide with his sword. His companions, deeply moved, wrapped his body in a cloak and consigned it to the river.

Another bandit had got into the bedroom of an old woman and, instead of strangling her, threw all her belongings out of the window to his companions below. Then he tried to throw out her bedding, and the old woman tricked him into thinking he had been throwing the goods into her neighbour’s back yard. The bandit leaned out of the window, and the old woman pushed him out; he broke his ribs on a block of stone, and coughed up his life. But there is no mention of the other bandits rushing upstairs to avenge their comrade; they only consign him to the river, like the robber chief.

Later, the bandits go out marauding and capture a beautiful girl. There is no suggestion of rape. They tell her: ‘You are perfectly safe, madam. We have no intention of hurting you or showing you any discourtesy…’ It is true that Apuleius’s bandit troupe has a distinctly operatic air; but Apuleius takes so much delight in a kind of brutal realism that it seems unlikely that he has deliberately toned down the picture.

What emerges from Apuleius is that the bandits regarded themselves as adventurers, making a living as best they could. They strangle old ladies, cut throats, and even make use of torture – to extort information; but then, they are crucified when caught, much as rustlers were lynched in a later century. In fact, accounts of robbery and piracy in this period remind us constantly of the Wild West. They are no longer more-or-less respectable, as they had been in the good old days. One historian tells us:

…as the growing City State became more powerful, it learnt how to extend its strong arm over the haunts of the robber folk. It explored and cleared their mountain fastnesses – those great limestone caves so common in Greece, sometimes mere indistinguishable slits in the hillside, but leading down through difficult ways into high and spacious halls. Here, where the robbers of old had lived and caroused and carved altars to their gods, quiet citizens from below, shepherds with their flocks in the summer pastures, now met to talk and pipe and sleep… And the sea robbers, too, had to leave their old established hiding places. The rocky island across the bay, with its one little cove, so convenient for small boats, and its famous spring of clear water, became just an extra piece of the city’s pasture ground, very useful in winter when there was snow on the heights… Only some bold spirits resisted and moved farther afield, where as yet law could not follow. Thus the gap slowly widened between the adventurer and the honest citizen…

Alfred Zimmern: The Greek Commonwealth, Part 3, chapter 4.

For now, in the centuries that followed the golden age of Athens, the slow spread of civilisation in the Mediterranean was making the profession of ‘adventurer’ almost impossible. The Greeks were carrying their arts of civilisation everywhere. They carried them, for example, to some barbarous tribes who lived on the green plains of a peninsula called Vitelliu – ‘calf-land’ – a word that later dropped its first and last letters and became Italy. The tribes were called Latins – after their country, Latium – and they had founded their city upon low hills as long ago as 900 B.C. They had learned much from a mysterious Asiatic people called the Etruscans, northern neighbours who once conquered their seven-hilled city and later vanished from history as mysteriously as they came into it.

This city would be the chief instrument of human progress for the next thousand years. But whether it could really be called progress is another matter. If a god could have watched the course of human history, from the building of the cities and the foundations of the great empires – Egyptian, Akkadian, Minoan, Assyrian, Macedonian – he might have felt that the evolution of humanity was proceeding in a tortuous but, on the whole, satisfactory manner. The gamble of ‘double consciousness’ was paying off.

With the coming of the Romans, history seemed to take a wrong turn. Everything that could go wrong with double consciousness went wrong. And when they vacated the scene, around 500 A.D., they left behind a strange double legacy of civilisation and criminality.

NO MEAN CITY

These citizens of Rome – as they called their town – were temperamentally similar to the Spartans: hard-headed, practical, disciplined. But they were overawed by Greek culture and Greek subtlety, and set out to learn all they could from them. They adopted the Greek gods, changing Zeus to Jupiter, Eros to Cupid. They even paid them the compliment of adopting a little of their history, claiming that Rome was founded by Aeneas, the Trojan prince who fled from the Greeks after the fall of Troy. Another version of early Roman history, as recounted by Winwood Reade, declares that ‘a rabble of outlaws and runaway slaves banded together, built a town, fortified it strongly, and offered it as an asylum to all fugitives. To Rome fled the over-beaten slave, the thief with his booty, the murderer with blood red hands. This city of refuge became a war town… its citizens alternately fought and farmed; it became the dread and torment of the neighbourhood.’ And because their city had no females, they kidnapped the women of the nearby Sabine tribe. It is an interesting story; for this tale of the founding of Rome by slaves and murderers helps to explain a certain fatal deficiency in the Roman soul – a curious insensitivity and literal-mindedness. The Romans never learned to inhabit the world of imagination.

It is as a result of their materialistic outlook that the history of Rome contains more crime and violence than that of any other city in world history; to read the story of Rome from the early struggles between the plebs and patricians (common people and aristocracy) to its downfall under Romulus Augustulus is to feel that this is a magnified version of Calhoun’s ‘behavioural sink’. The poet Robert Graves was one of the first to recognise its possibilities for sensational fiction, and his novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God give an impression of non-stop murder, assassination, intrigue, promiscuity and sexual perversion. One is left with the feeling that life under Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula must have been far more dangerous than in Chicago in the days of Al Capone; and, allowing for the exaggeration which springs from the novelist’s selectivity and compression, this impression is not inaccurate. Rome typifies what can go wrong when human evolution is restricted to the purely material level.