Introduction to Volume I

LINDA HBIGER, MARK HUDSON AND MATTHEW TRUNDLE

Is violence an integral and inescapable part of human nature, embedded in our behaviour, even in our genes? Or are violence and warfare relatively recent developments in the human story, the result of particular historical circumstances such as agriculture or social inequality? These are important questions about human history, yet they also have profound implications for the future.

As its title suggests, this book is a work of history and its primary focus is therefore on changing historical experiences of violence. This perspective provides the unique contribution of this volume and the series as a whole, yet it may also cause some misunderstandings, in particular for the early periods of the human story.

The Evolution of Human Violence

The role of violence in human nature has been one of the most difficult and controversial of all topics considered by the natural and human sciences. Many scholars have brought with them strong preconceptions, assuming from the start of their research that humans are basically either peaceful or violent. Recent years have also seen a number of influential publications that have attempted to portray the human story as a single trajectory from the more to the less violent.^[26] All of these latter works make the assumption that prehistoric humans lived in very violent societies, but this conclusion is not necessarily supported by the archaeological record.^[27] The idea that violence has been an integral part of human nature has a long and influential history in Western humanistic and scientific traditions.⁵ Despite this, until some two decades ago many archaeologists tended to play down the role of violence in the ancient past.

LeBlanc's argument that archaeologists have tended to ignore or play down evidence for warfare and violence is well taken. As Jorg Orschiedt and Alan Morris discuss in their chapters here, there is a growing global archaeological record of violence beginning with the Palaeolithic. However, there is not yet sufficient evidence to argue that warfare, depending on its definition, has been prevalent in all times and places. There are clear ethno­graphic examples of hunter-gatherers who suppress violence both within and between groups.⁷ Archaeological evidence from Jomon Japan and elsewhere suggests that high population densities did not always lead to high levels of violence, and there is a need to consider how demography may have had an impact on strategies of territorialism and resource defence.⁸ LeBlanc assumes that if only we look more carefully, the evidence for widespread prehistoric warfare will be forthcoming. Such an assumption is, however, premature given our present knowledge. For prehistoric warfare to be a universal trait, it would have to be found everywhere, but large parts of the world, such as East

Cultural Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.

5 Robert W. Sussman, ‘Why the Legend of the Killer Ape Never Dies: The Enduring Power of Cultural Beliefs to Distort our View of Human Nature', in Fry (ed.), War, Peace, pp. 97-111.

6 Steven A. LeBlanc with Katherine E. Register, Constant Battles: Why We Fight (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2003), p. 9.

7 Kirk Endicott, ‘Peaceful Foragers: The Significance of the Batek and Moriori for the Question of Innate Human Violence', in Fry (ed.), War, Peace, pp. 243-61.

8 For a useful discussion of such factors see Shannon Tushingham and Robert L. Bettinger, ‘Storage Defense: Expansive and Intensive Territorialism in Hunter­Gatherer Delayed Return Economies', Quaternary International 518 (2019), 21-30.

LINDA FIBIGER, MARK HUDSON, MATTHEW TRUNDLE

Asia, have so far been more or less ignored in this debate. LeBlanc and others are correct that further evidence for violence across the prehistoric world would probably be found through, for example, a closer examination of cranial trauma. We cannot assume, however, that such research would automatically confirm universally high levels of violence in prehistory. This presents a real problem for studies such as Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, which attempt to identify universal trends from a patchy archaeological record.

Violence: Who Benefits?

In evolutionary terms, what are the benefits of violence for the individual or the group? The potential drawbacks of death or serious injury are clear, but when do individuals decide that the potential benefits outweigh those dan­gers? Does violence represent adaptive behaviour, which could increase access to resources such as food, mates, status or alliances? Or is it better understood as a non-adaptive reaction to outside pressures? Violence is not, of course, limited to humans. In fact, lethal violence is reported for nearly 40 per cent of studied mammal species, including hamsters.^[28] Some animals are territorial and engage in violence to defend their territories against other individuals or groups of the same species.

The evidence for conflict and aggression among primates is important for an understanding of human violence, yet significant problems remain. With respect to chimpanzees, the role of human impacts such as provisioning, habitat loss and hunting has been debated in the literature.11 Humans, chimpanzees and bonobos are three closely related species with very different behavioural repertoires. Humans are the derived species, but it is presently

unclear if our last common ancestor was more like a chimpanzee or a bonobo - or was different again. Recently it has been argued that humans share with chimpanzees a high propensity for proactive aggression - planned, purposeful violence with a reward as a goal.^[31] Although it might be assumed that early human expansions out of Africa were more or less peaceful due to lack of competition over resources, researchers working in North America have found very high rates of violent trauma on the Palaeo-American skeletons who represent the first human settlers of the New World. Like many other early Homo sapiens skeletons in Eurasia and Australia, Palaeo­Americans display high sexual dimorphism, a trait which is usually associated with increased male competition over female mates. In a novel theory, James Chatters suggests that these biological traits may be associated with high levels of competition for resources and mates among populations of what he terms ‘wild type colonisers'.^[32]

Violence in Early Prehistory

This volume is divided into six parts.

In addition to these six constituent parts, the chapters focus on a number of core themes. These themes interweave throughout the volume and form an important basis for its contiguity, straddling as they do both time and space in their analysis of different forms of violence. They can be summarised as relating to (1) organised violence, styled more clearly as warfare; (2) ritualised violence, which underpinned both mythical inter-relationships and religious

LINDA FIBIGER, MARK HUDSON, MATTHEW TRUNDLE

observances; and (3) violence within communities that upheld social relation­ships, sometimes legally and sometimes through extra-legal and private means.

In exploring these three themes, therefore, a good number of chapters examine warfare in the ancient world alongside its role as both a driving force of civilisation and community integration. Warfare held an absolute signifi­cance to state organisation, politically, socially and economically. Side by side with organised violence in this formal setting, several chapters examine notions of what might be called ritualised violence and the religious signifi­cance of violence and its various manifestations. The importance of violence to a variety of rituals, whether that be sacrifice or even sport, should not be overlooked as a significant aspect of communal action. Finally, inside ancient communities the threat or use of low-level violence was commonplace and several chapters examine the use of this kind of physical force either to (re)enforce social relationships and civic order or simply to normalise such relationships. As noted, this kind of violence was sometimes exercised through legal processes and sometimes through illegal, extra-legal or simply private physical force. Violence against the weak and the poor was thus commonplace. Inside households, behind closed doors, violence against women, children and slaves upheld the dominant male hierarchies.

Chronologically, this volume covers a vast stretch of time from the emergence of the first human communities to the last years of the Roman Empire and fifth century ce India and China. Most of the chapters divide into a rough chronological progression from the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic to the Neolithic, through the Bronze and Iron Ages and finally to early states and empires. While the Cambridge World History ofViolence emphasises the histor­ical contingency of violence across the ages, there are nevertheless several common stages and trends which can be identified across broad areas of the world. One such stage is marked by the Neolithic. Despite the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record, the evidence for violence in the preced­ing Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods is not insignificant, and is discussed in detail by Jorg Orschiedt. The Neolithic, however, resulted in one of human history's most monumental shifts with regards to the way people lived, to more settled (versus seasonally mobile) lifeways, the ownership of land, crops and livestock, and of course increasing competition for all of these things, underscored by a substantial increase in population numbers and the growth of community and settlement size. As population numbers increased, so the Neolithic also led to the expansion of individuals and groups into new territories. Recent research has emphasised that these varied elements only

coalesced into one ‘package' at the end of the Neolithic; prior to that, societies across the world were characterised by different histories of accept­ing and resisting the Neolithic.^{[33] [34] [35]} While compared to preceding hunter­gatherers the prevalence of Neolithic violence does not necessarily increase per se, the primary material evidence for violence, particularly human remains with signs of violent trauma, becomes more marked across a wider geographical area. As lifeways in the Neolithic became more com­plex, so did the motivations and contexts for the occurrence of violence, which has now to be seen not as a fallback option but as a legitimate, socially sanctioned and widespread form of social interaction. Everybody - men, women, children - was affected, though to different degrees. This suggests a variety of contexts for violence (ritual, domestic, feuds, raids, and so on) and introduces a growing degree of martial inequality, with injury patterns and fatality rates connected to age and gender.1⁵

The Neolithic skeletal record shows that physical violence, as expressed in traumatic injuries to the skeleton, was endemic in large parts of, for example, central and western Europe, suggesting conflicts of varying scales and both in-group and out-group fighting. The latter is evidenced in the emergence of large enclosure sites and the occurrence of mass graves that probably repre­sent whole groups or settlements. Though not covered in this volume, Neolithic China also saw increased evidence of walled and defensive sites and associated violence.16 The increasing mobilisation of large numbers of people in the Neolithic heralds a shift in scales of interaction, including cooperation and conflict, while at the same time greater specialisation and a more rigid division of labour signal a diversification leading to a less homogeneous and ultimately less equal society, another potential driver for conflict. With respect to the more martial aspects of society, this diversifica­tion and division of labour means that fighting and violent interaction - especially violent conflict between groups - gradually transformed from something that would be the task of many to that of the specially trained few. In other words, we are looking at the origins of professionalised fighting and warfare, the basis for many of the developments seen in successive periods.

The Bronze and Iron Ages and the Specialisation of Violence

The Bronze Age, which began in the Near East in the second half of the fourth millennium bce, transformed violence and warfare in myriad ways, which are discussed in several chapters in this volume. In most parts of the world the material cultural record of the Neolithic lacks specialised weapons, suggesting instead the use of tools as multi-purpose implements (or weapon­tools) for industry and crafts as well as more martial purposes.^[36] During the final stages of the Neolithic, however, we witness the emergence of single purpose weapons which, in the Bronze Age, evolved into an extensive, specialised materiality of violence, including a wide range of arms and armour, as well as horse-drawn chariots employed in combat and a growth and expansion in fortifications. The metals and other raw materials required for this new materiality of violence were associated with a widening of contacts, increased levels of mobility and an expansion of the motivations and mobilisation (via land and sea) for violence. Conflict, violence and warfare now relied on considerable structural support and ever-increasing specialisation. Often associated with the emergence of the warrior, the probably more significant development during the Bronze Age was the emergence of elites that controlled and sanctioned large-scale violence, like that represented at the much debated potential battlefield site in the Tollense Valley of north-east Germany.^[37] By the third century bce elites at both ends of Eurasia controlled huge armies of up to half a million men who engaged in massive military campaigns such as those of Rome against Carthage and, in China, the Qin against the Zhao.^[38]

It is important to keep in mind, though, that Bronze Age societies and those of the later Iron Age - and their attitudes to and performance of violent interactions - were far from uniform and varied in size and complexity. And while written records emerged during these periods documenting the deeds and politics of cities, states, empires and notable individuals, these records bias the historical record towards the centra­lised administrative systems that controlled them and could afford to produce them. The development of specialisation and hierarchy is not uniform across space and time, and not everybody would have benefited from the support and protection of a political and military centre, thus creating vast differences in lived experience. Mycenae around 1500 bce and, as an example, the west coast of Ireland would have provided very contrasting circumstances in terms of social, economic and religious systems. In terms of physical acts of violence in particular, this means that how people fought, the weapons they used, whom they fought and, most importantly, what they fought for are not equally well represented for the prehistoric period.

Coming back to the issue of a fragmented record, we may not always be able to construct as detailed a narrative for the way violence shaped society across all space and time, but what we certainly can hypothesise within this heterogeneous evidence for physical/martial violence is a common human experience of anger, ambition, fear, pain and death, something that is often lost in a focus on state systems, armies and tactics, and in the search for the ‘why'. The skeletal record that provides our most direct evidence for the actual occurrence (rather than the threat of) physical violence in these early periods is a good reminder that, ultimately, violence - physical violence in particular - shaped, altered and at times ended the lives of individuals. The impact of these indivi­dual losses to families, clans and communities may ultimately be much harder to assess than the reasons for and roles of violence in the state politics of antiquity.

From Early States to Empires

The Bronze (c. 3500-1200 bce) and Iron Ages (c. 1200 bce onwards) saw the establishment of the first major cities in Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent and then spontaneously elsewhere in India and China. The rise of early state societies transformed the way in which violence was used as a political tool. In order to maintain their agrarian economies, these states increasingly relied on warfare to obtain slaves and other workers to labour under their control. Wars were not so much about territorial control as commandeering loot and manpower, with much of the latter being women and children.^{[39] [40]} This early state violence was mirrored by attempts by ‘barbarians' on the outside to grab the resources that states had conveniently concentrated in one place. States, in other words, became a type of ‘one-stop shopping' centre for non­state peoples. As a result, those states were forced to invest heavily in defences against raiders or else to pay tribute in an attempt to stop such 21

raiding.

The early Bronze Age saw the emergence of the first cities, and state-level polities arose in tandem with more sophisticated forms of political thought and, of course, warfare. Wars grew more complex as states commandeered more resources. The rise of specialist soldiers - in Marxist terms, part of the emergence of a new class - brought their military skills to the battlefield. In this environment, weapons improved in quality but with the advent of iron in particular they also multiplied in quantity. Ian Morris writes that ‘Iron swords were the ancient equivalent of AK-47s, giving every angry young man the same killing power as representatives of law and order.'^[41] The inexpensive nature of iron as compared with bronze meant that new military systems developed which improved the ability of states to wage wars and inflict more damage on their opponents. As a result, early states overcame their enemies more effectively and extended the empires that had been first created in the Bronze Age. The ancient world, not only in Europe, western Asia and north Africa but also in north India and China, saw the ebb and flow of imperial powers, one following from another and all the product of violence and improved and developing techniques of war and control through violence. The first so-called imperialist, Sargon of Akkad, conquered the Sumerian cities of southern Mesopotamia in about 2400 bce. The rise of the Old Babylonian Empire (c. 1800 bce), the first Assyrian imperialists (c. 1800 bce), the Hittites (1800-1200 bce) and New Kingdom Egypt (1600-1200 bce) were each products of the flourishing of military technology and centralised state structures of the Later Bronze Age. Further east, the rise of the Shang dynasty (c. 1550 bce) and the extension of its power beyond the Yellow River Valley is often attributed to the introduction of bronze and bronze weapons.

The period after the collapse of the Bronze Age and the disappearance of New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittites and the Mycenaeans saw the slow but progressive emergence of the New Assyrian Empire in western Asia (c. 883-612 bce), which from the ninth century bce grew to dominate almost the entire region and even Egypt. Its fall opened the way for the rise of Persia and the establishment of what many describe as the first durable ‘world empire' from 559-330 bce. The same process can be seen in China, where the Zhou emperors reigned for 500 years from the eighth to the third century bce. In the last historical phase that concerns this volume, we see in the west the fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander's conquests and then the rise of Rome, which itself conquered much of Europe, north Africa and the far west of Asia. In China, the emergence of the Han dynasty (c. 202 bce -220 ce ) saw political unity restored and a Chinese empire re-established. The idea that both the Roman Empire and the Chinese empire brought peace and stability to their respective imperial subjects has long been a matter of academic debate. Certainly, the imperial governments controlled the abilities of all those living within their empires to wage war. At the same time, these empires theoretically protected their regions from foreign invasion. The emperors who controlled the army became the means of control of power and resources. Thus, for a long period of history both east and west enjoyed relative stability and our evidence suggests that populations rose alongside increased economic prosperity.^[42] The so-called Pax Romana and Pax Sinica, therefore, have come to symbolise past golden ages. That stated, plenty of evidence suggests that both the threat of violence and violence itself abounded, not just from state authorities but also violence inflicted by those outside of the state system such as runaway slaves, pirates and crim­inals. Violence remained common currency within the empires of antiquity. Garrett Fagan, in his chapter on violence in the Roman world, even goes so far as to state that violence was ‘the language of rank and status'. The peace brought by Roman and Chinese imperial power was in the end only relative to other less settled periods of time.

Violence and the Ancient World

Once we move from prehistory into the early historic era, documentary records provide new perspectives on violence which, as a result, shapes the way we view antiquity. Much of the evidence presented to us from the ancient past deals with physical force, especially in its organised form of state warfare. As the Greek historian Thucydides pointed out in his History of the Peloponnesian War, ‘War was the most violent teacher' and as such he considered that war reveals the fundamental nature of the human condition in extremis.^[43] Violence or perhaps the threat of violence played a prominent role in the lives of all ancient peoples from inter-state, organised warfare to low-level everyday violence between ordinary people in their daily encoun­ters. In the former case, violence played a crucial role in state formation and it justified the political, social and economic power of a community's elites and even its leaders and kings. Indeed, violence appears to be intrinsically con­nected to early state formation. The first sedentary communities in the region of Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers needed to defend themselves against outsiders and to coordinate themselves to attack others.^[44] Thus cities emerged, and their occupants built walls and other infrastructure to protect themselves and their property.^[45] Symbiotically, those who sought to attack them developed strategies, towers and rams to overcome defensive structures. Each required specialist infrastructure and its coordination. Organised violence and, dare one suggest, civilisation itself go hand in hand with controlling and defending land, specialist workers, sol­diers, priests and rulers. This infrastructure emerged alongside sedentary communities across the globe first in western Asia and Egypt, then in north­ern India and China. It is important, of course - and even more so in a volume that hopes to cover so much ground in both space and time as this one - that we recognise potential differences between cultures and environments. As Wicky Tse makes clear in discussing early imperial China, different concepts and ways of warfare developed in a different environment to those of Europe and Western Asia. The ebb and flow of power between local rulers, like the seven kingdoms that emerged in the third century bce, and a single ruler of the region saw Chinese history develop slightly differently from that of the empires of the west. The lack of an inner sea naturally made warfare more territorially complex and power centres were based around two great rivers, the Yellow and the Yangzi. To the north and west, China lay open to migrants from the great steppe but also remained naturally contained by the Gobi Desert and the Mongolian and Tibetan Plateaus.

Due to the nature of our ancient documentary sources, and to the extreme features of war in society, violence plays an overly prominent part in the written as well as the archaeological records, the latter including new visual representations of violence and military operations. This emphasis on war­fare places limits on what we can say about the overall role of violence in society. In addition, low-level violence (small-scale violent interactions out­side military contexts) was omnipresent and effected the lower echelons of communities such as slaves and those others deemed lesser beings within ancient states, as well of course as those physically weaker in defending themselves, such as children and women. Unlike coordinated military actions, which were seen as glorious and ‘manly', interpersonal violence receives far less attention in the literary traditions and is almost absent from visual representations. This stated, we are still aware of its common­place nature in our sources through circumstantial references, legal codes on punishment and control, and other written commentaries. Several chapters in this volume explore the everyday nature of violence within societies, from domestic violence against wives and relatives to random acts of force that mediated so many relationships.^[46]

Early literature reflects the significant role of violence for ancient peoples. The earliest written stories, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, present the hero as a warrior and a war leader, a man who can both defend his community and destroy its enemies. This poem states that Gilgamesh is ‘Supreme over other kings, lordly in appearance, he is the hero, born of Uruk, the goring wild bull. He walks out in front, the leader, and walks at the rear, trusted by his companions. Mighty net, protector of his people, raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone!' The Old Testament records the first murder among the children of Adam and Eve: Cain killed Abel over the reception of a gift he had grown for God (Gen. 1:4-8). His grain offering fell short of the animal sacrifice presented by his brother, which in itself symbolises the violent struggle between farmers and pastoralists. The first Egyptian phar­aohs were also closely connected to war.^[47] Egypt was united by violence through the conquest of the northern realm by that of the south. The Narmer palette shows the first pharaoh smiting with a mace his opponent to bring together the two lands as one kingdom. The first emperor of Chinese history, that of the Qin dynasty, became emperor in 221 bce not just through military conquest but by ‘killing so many people that resistance became impossible'.^[48] His famous 8,000 strong terracotta army symbolised his military power even in death. On the walls of their palaces, Assyrian kings boasted in text and images their violence and power over enemies across the Near East.^[49] The first great poems of the Western tradition, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, both glorify violence. One concerns a great war over a large and doomed city, focusing on the violence of one man, Achilles, and ends with the death of the principal Trojan chieftain Hector at his hands; the other sees the return of Odysseus to his home and culminates in a violent denouement in which the eponymous hero kills all those who would have usurped his place in Ithaca as lord of his community and husband to his wife. Looking further east, Jarrod Whitaker in this volume identifies a similar use of violence to assert personal identity and enforce power relationships in the Vedic Epics of India such as the Mahabharata. The first written texts in Japan, the early eighth-century ce histories known as the Kojiki and Nihon shoki describe how rulers in the west of the archipelago violently subdued the barbarians of the east.

The fact that violence mediated social relationships in antiquity was no more clearly demonstrated than in gender relations. Such relationships were deeply ingrained in ancient ideology, and once more warfare set the tone. Men fought, and women stayed behind in the home. Power relationships were reinforced stereotypically and through self-fulfilment. Women were considered weak because they did not fight, but women were not allowed to fight because they were weak. Women only appear in military actions during sieges in which their homes and families were threatened directly. They threw stones and tiles from rooftops and walls. Violence reinforced power relationships more generally in antiquity as well.^[50] Like women, slaves were prohibited from fighting in battle, though they rowed galleys and could be freed to fight in times of national crisis, as happened during Hannibal's invasion of Italy. As with women, slaves were considered weaker than free men because they did not fight, their slavery often justifying the fact that they did not fight. Many slaves, of course, had been captured in warfare. The laws of war allowed and justified such enslavement of the defeated, of men (though men were regularly executed after defeat), but especially of women and of children (Andoc. 11; Xen. Cyr. 7.1.44).

By the same token, the weak in all ancient societies constantly suffered the threat of violence or violence itself. The bodies of those who were socially and politically disenfranchised might experience physical abuse and violation by their social and political superiors at any time. Slaves at Athens could only give evidence in legal trials under torture. Punishments for the same crimes varied depending on the status of the perpetrators. Social elites might escape physical violation for the same crimes as their social inferiors. In the Roman world, crucifixion or death in the arena was reserved for lowly criminals. Elites might be allowed to commit suicide or more ‘leniently' to go into exile. Violence enforced and reinforced all forms of hierarchy. Ultimately, violence and more significantly warfare delineated political, social and economic status. Politically, as we have noted, it justified leadership or determined citizenship, and therefore determined status. Socially it delineated the free person from the slave or even man from woman, and the adult from the child. Economically, violence protected property but also enabled acquisi­tion. The ancient world demonstrates clearly the principle that might makes right and that violence enabled and justified property ownership.

The political, social and economic connections between violence and prosperity must never be overlooked. Physical force was closely connected to economic privilege (as it was to other privileges of status). Philosophers like Plato (Phd. 66c) and Aristotle (Plt. 1.8, 1255b37, 1256b1, 1256b23-7, 1333) saw warfare as a natural form of wealth acquisition. Plato (Resp. 372e-374a) even thought that states required military forces to increase their own resources. Here, of course, the great thinkers of the Greek world diverged from those of the east, like Confucius or Gautama (Buddha), who saw physical force as anathema to achieving the ultimate good. This was, of course, despite the fact that both Confucius and Gautama served in the courts of those emperors whose military power supported their rule. Jesus Christ also never advocated revolution against the Roman imperial system and his statement on Roman taxation, ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’, aptly demonstrates the role of taxation as symbolic of Roman power (Matt. 22:21).

Warfare in all circumstances yielded plunder in the form of both land or movable goods like crops, metals from arms and armour, animals and people as slaves or serfs to work the land. Small-scale raiding by families or clans might capture movable booty from neighbouring villages, while more coor­dinated military actions by whole communities and political states led to greater acquisition of goods and chattels. Battles ended with the taking of plunder, with the stripping of the dead of their property or after sieges the wholesale capture of a city and its people. As states grew and empires developed, so raids and plundering gave way to annual tributes whereby communities paid a portion of their property to avoid attack. Such tributes led to empire and formal systems of annual taxation within complex systems of governance. Tribute or tax became symbolic of subservience as much as practical economic exchange. Of course, in such systems, the threat of violence replaced the use of violence to extract resources from neighbouring peoples.^[51]

There is no doubt that in each ancient world context, levels of military violence grew as states became more centralised, better coordinated, weal­thier and more sophisticated in fighting wars and mounting longer and more elaborate campaigns. Strategy and tactics developed in tandem with techno­logical developments. This phenomenon alone may explain why ancient peoples looked back to a golden and distant past in which human beings lived more peacefully with each other and with the environment. The Hebrews recalled the birth of humankind in the Garden of Eden before the Fall and first murder (Gen. 3:6-24), Greeks a golden, silver and bronze age when heroes walked with gods (Hesiod, Works and Days 109-84), and Romans recalled Saturn’s Italy, wild indeed, but as yet undevastated by war and political strife (see for example, Ovid, Metamorphoses; Vergil, Aeneid 7). Further east, in India the myth of the perfect age or Kitra Yuga reflected similar notions of a peaceful past, and China had a similar belief of an early age of perfect or highest virtue. These myths in and of themselves suggest that early civilisations could envisage a world without war and without violence.

Finally, we should note the important role of ritual and symbolic violence within ancient communities.^[52] The act of sacrifice, so central to the worship of ancient gods, was in itself fundamentally an act of both ritual and real violence. Evidence suggests that some societies practised human sacrifice at some time in their distant past. Animal hunting, violent in itself, may well lie behind both sacrifice and by extension a series of other ritualised events found in ancient contexts from athletic contests to beast hunting and gladia­torial displays.^[53] Athletic games, religious in nature as they were, saw athletes strive for victory not only in events involving no physical contact (for example races), but also in the so-called ‘heavy events' involving wrestling and boxing. Some even suggest that originally the athletic victor won the right to be sacrificed to the god himself rather than to lead the sacrifice, as he did in historical times. Even Romans sacrificed human beings as late as the darkest days of the Second Punic War, when Hannibal threatened their gates (Livy 22.57). The arena played a central role in city communities across the Roman Empire.^[54] Spectators watched beast hunting, criminal executions and of course gladiatorial combat (though not usually to the death). The games began life as part of religious festivals, despite their later gloss of mass entertainment. This ritualised violence reinforced community and identity. Spectators were arrayed by class and status, but all were free people of some standing. Those whom they watched were slaves and criminals. If the Flavian Amphitheatre held 50,000 Romans, that represented perhaps as few as 5 per cent of the population of the city of Rome. In a less well-known context, violence lay at the heart of theatre and other staged events. Tragedies always centred around murder or war, naturally the extreme moment in any relationship. Family and community underpinned the power of violence to rend people apart and bring them together. Antiquity presents us with the stark realities of every level of violence and its interaction with every facet of society.

Violence and the End of Antiquity

This volume concludes chronologically with the traditional historiographic transformation from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Recent research has shown a growing interest in the ‘global' interactions of the medieval period, yet, as we have shown here, in terms of violence and warfare there were already major connections across Eurasia as early as the Bronze Age. The end of antiquity saw the end of the expansion of the Roman and Han empires and the growing strength of ‘barbarian' migrations and conquests across the steppes and beyond. The fall of both the Han dynasty and the Roman Empire, admittedly under very different circumstances, forms the focus of the last chapters in this volume and lays the foundations for the volumes that follow, exploring as they do the medieval, early modern and modern ages. The fall of empire is usually seen through the lens of conquest and chaos, in Edward Gibbon's terms ‘decline and fall', but we should be mindful too of Peter Brown's delineation of this significant if fluid time period passing the baton from one age to the next and thus also as one of ‘continuity and change'.^[55] Warfare remained the domain of the elite. Roman military titles like dux (later ‘duke') and magister passed into this later age, but they simply masked more substantial change. In this latter period smaller cavalry and mobile field armies dominated battlefields, non-Romans increasingly fought what were no longer Roman wars. As separate kingdoms emerged, especially in the west the centralised nature of warfare collapsed as did the size of military operations. Violence remained a crucial power marker, but one exercised by new and emerging feudal elites.