Werner Reiss, author of the most detailed recent discussion on the subject of violence in the Greek world, defined violence as ‘a physical act', stating further that it is a ‘process in which a human being inflicts harm on another human being via physical strength’.1

Violence also relates closely to theore­tical notions of power and unwanted, unlawful and immoral force both physical and metaphysical. The Greek word for violence, biasmos /biaiotes, synonymous with the violent man (biaios), was closely connected to the early Greek form bie/bia (force or bodily strength), and these words have deep connotations with the life force and indeed with life - bios - itself.

Greek ideas concerning violence changed over time, especially as states coalesced and the law played more of a role in Greek society. Violence underpinned much early Greek mythology and literature. In mythology Bia, as the personification of physical violence, was the daughter of Pallas (the Titan god of war) and Styx (the personification of the river boundary to the underworld). She was also the sister of Zelus (Pride, Glory), Nike (Victory) and Cratus (Power). Each of these siblings was closely connected with physical and military achievement.^[1048] It is interesting that the mytholo­gical embodiment of violence is feminine, Bia, while men perpetrated most real-world violence. Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, produced between the period after the collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaeans in c. 1150 and the sixth century bce, and the earliest Greek literature demon­strate the significance of violence to social order, wealth and political power. The Iliad is the story of the violent quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles set amid the war against Troy. The Odyssey concludes with cycles of violence, the deaths of all the suitors in the palace that require violent retribution from their relatives (not to mention the slave women who had slept with them).

Violence begets violence as deaths brought vendettas in endless cycles of enmity. Only the intervention of Athena at the end of the Odyssey prevents further violence. Gregory Nagy argues that words such as menos (rage), sthenos (strength), bia (force), is (strength, force), kratos (divine-physical power) and dunamis (power) each denoted physical abilities in the early Greek mind, but by later times and especially in Plato are more abstractly used than simply to describe bodily force.^[1049] We might note that Thucydides could describe Cleon as the most violent (biaiotatos) of citizens with reference to his character rather than his physical actions, let alone his physical ability.^[1050] The Greeks were aware of similar changes that had come about over time within some Greek societies concerning the ubiquity of violence or the threat of it. Thus, Thucydides noted that certain Greek tribes still carried arms in public places in his own day as a relic of the past when raiding and inter- communal violence had been ubiquitous. He states that the Athenians were the first to lay aside arms and adopt a more peaceful way of life.^[1051]