The Problem of Violence in the Ancient World

Focus on Family and Sacrifice — the Oresteia and the Mahabharata — and the Book of Genesis

"Morality is a human creation, and though the gods may approve of it, they are not bound by it. And violent as they are, they cannot feel the ultimate consequence of violence. . . ." (p. 106)

". . . the story of the house of Atreus . . . deals with a series of retributive murders that stained the hands of three generations . . . and it also has a larger significance, social and historical. . . . The legend preserves the memory of an important historical process through which the Greeks had just passed: the transition from tribal institutions of justice to communal justice, from a tradition that demanded that a murdered person's next of kin avenge the death to a system requiring settlement of the private quarrel by a court of law. . . ." (p. 534)

"[The Mahabharata 's] persistent focus . . . is the public life of a clan society in which . . . warrior values and rituals dominate. . . . When the Kauravas insult Draupadi with obscene language and gestures, Bhima swears that he will break Duryodhana's thigh and drink Duhsasana's blood. The same ethos of honor and violent action dominate the war books. . . ." (p. 957)

Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.
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Through mythology and art, the ancient world confronted the specter of violence that threatened the hard-won social arrangements that made it possible for human beings to live with each other. Defining aggression as a sacred obligation often served to justify brutal impulses that could not be ignored. From the chaotic lashing out that characterizes most violent action, ancient cultures somehow forged formal structures that conferred a sense of order and a perverse beauty on primal realities like terror and pain.

The House of Atreus: An Encyclopedia of Violence

Greek literature begins with the story of a war and Homer's treatment of his subject is excruciatingly precise. Here, for example, is what happens to Cebriones, Hector's charioteer, when Patroclus hits him

right between the eyes.
The sharp stone crushed both brows, the skull caved in,
and both eyes burst from their sockets, dropping down
in the dust before his feet. . . . (Iliad. XVI.363–66)

But violence in war is to be expected. No story of the ancient world is more horrific than that of The House of Atreus, because the violence that it catalogues takes place in private quarters. Blood relations inflict on each other hideous acts of butchery, cannibalism, rape, and incest. This is a pattern set for human beings by the gods themselves: Zeus and the Olympians, after all, wrested power from a father (Kronos, or Saturn in Latin) who tried to devour them; and that father had begun his career by castrating his father (Uranus, the primordial sky god).

Cain and Abel, attributed to Pietro Novelli (1603–47)
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Generational conflicts, brutal physical assaults, and insidious acts of slyness characterize much of the literature of the ancient world. Homer and Aeschylus and to a significant extent, the early books of the Hebrew Bible lay these markers down for the European imagination; if Homer begins with a war, the Bible begins with the murder of one brother by another. The Mahabharata, a combination of epic and sacred materials fundamental to South Asia , similarly recounts the obsessive violence that breeds — and is in turn bred by — family rivalry and war. Cruelty abounds: the challenge is to contain and channel it, since it seems impossible to eradicate it.

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The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

In the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatizes the successful sublimation of violence, charting the transition from personal revenge to public trial, but the choral odes brood on the unresolved cruelty that predates the events dramatized in the trilogy. Cassandra, Clytaemnestra, and Orestes are all haunted figures, tortured by their inability to erase images of horror — past, present, and to come — from their minds. Through stage spectacle and verbal imagery, Aeschylus's dramas similarly imprint on the mind of the audience the understanding that we are all caught in a fatal net that binds humanity, and that the gods are caught as well.

The opening chorus of Agamemnon revolves around the struggle between law and license, justice and revenge. Eventually, the trilogy affirms the triumph of law and justice, but the threat to the sources of life is ever-present. Although the Furies may be tamed at the end of The Eumenides, the choruses' incantatory poetic evocations of the violated womb echo throughout the plays. The family history that begins with Tantalus, a son of Zeus who served his father and the family of immortals the flesh of his son Pelops as a meal, reverberates through each generation of the House of Atreus. Despite the Watchman's dislike of Clytaemnestra, made palpable to the audience in his prologue to the play, the Chorus helps us understand her action by its visionary reconstitution of the sacrifice of Iphigenia:

"I see
pure Artemis bristle in pity —
yes, the flying hounds of the Father
slaughter for armies . . . their own victim . . . a woman
trembling young, all born to die — She loathes the eagles' feast!"
(ll. 134–38)

The virgin goddess avenges the slaughter of the young animal sacred to her by demanding the life of a woman's child — and that woman is Clytaemnestra.

A picture of a Roman tragic mask, possibly a representation of Thyestes.
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What appalls Iphigenia's mother is that her daughter, and not one of the animals usually slaughtered in honor of the gods, should be the sacrificial offering. Artemis's demand that Agamemnon kill his virgin daughter before the winds will send his ships to Troy seems to be a throwback to an earlier time, when human sacrifice was the norm. And indeed, in the House of Atreus, human victims were the norm. The chorus refers back to the Thyestean banquet when it laments "nothing sacred, no / no feast to be eaten" (ll. 148–49), because Iphigenia's flesh, at least, will not be consumed by the ritual celebrants.

In Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides tells, in characteristically ironic fashion, an alternate version of the myth, in which a last-minute substitution of a beautiful deer saves Iphigenia. This is the scene depicted in the Greek krater painting above; the resemblance to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is obvious.

The Sacrifice of Isaac, Caravaggio.
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Sacrifice and violence: The biblical heritage

Anthropologists interpret the hostility between Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 as a product of the age-old competition between farmers and shepherds; they explain the last-minute substitution of a ram for Isaac in Genesis 22 as a symbolic representation of the Israelites' rejection of the human sacrifices practiced by their close neighbors. Theologians remark on the way both of these stories insist on the intimate engagement of human beings with a morally demanding God and the heavy responsibility that He places on them. Both perspectives illuminate some of the reasons why these stories continue to compel our interest; other readers marvel at the textual economy with which these biblical narratives hint at the profound complexity of violent emotions and their physical manifestation.

No story of sacrifice, not even the painful story of Agamemnon's daughter, more poignantly holds up to question the human need to placate the powers of the universe by offering a victim to absorb and deflect the anger of the gods. In a series of important critical investigations of sacred violence, Rene Girard has taught us to see the centrality of the victim, or the scapegoat, in the shaping of the world's great civilizations. Perhaps, the Euripidean plays suggest, the child bound for sacrifice was saved before the knife struck; the biblical narrative, by contrast, revolves around that act of substitution in order to lead up to the moment of salvation. Yet the horror of the demand made by God so grips readers that an alternative version of Isaac's story insists that Abraham in fact did kill his son, who was, according to these interpretive commentaries, revived and then removed from the altar on which the ram ultimately bore the suffering that proved Abraham's faith.

Internalizing violence

Cain's inability to control his anger leads him to lash out and kill his brother. This is the kind of violence that we see elaborated on in other ancient literatures, but the biblical author differs from the Greek and Sanskrit poets who make us look at the physical expression of violent impulses. In Genesis, we get only the tersest indication of action: "and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him." Did Cain smash Abel's skull? Did eyes pop out of sockets? The Bible does not tell us; it shows us rather Cain's confrontation with God and his recognition that his act has alienated him from home, humanity, and further communication with God.

Enjoined against committing violence against his brother, Cain fails his test; commanded to commit violence against his child, Abraham passes his. Chapter 22 of Genesis makes us acutely aware of the instruments that the father assembles in obedience to God. He cleaves "wood for the burnt offering" and prepares to use a cleaver to butcher the son who has gone up the mountainside bearing the wood that is to serve as his own pyre. Critics and commentators note the hallucinatory quality of this description. The emphasis falls on burden placed on Abraham, the emotional violence that the projected violence works on the old man and the cherished son who is to be the sacrificial victim. The Bible makes us feel the moral meaning of the physical act and awakens violent emotions in us as a result.

The testing of Abraham's faith

In his brilliant meditation on the binding of Isaac, Fear and Trembling (1843), the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard probes the spiritual violence that God imposes on Abraham in the test that this episode records. Kierkegaard compares Agamemnon to Abraham:

He who denies himself and sacrifices himself for duty gives up the finite in order to grasp the infinite, and that man is secure enough. . . . where is the envious eye which would be so barren that it could not weep with Agamemnon; but where is the man with a soul so bewildered that he would have the presumption to weep for Abraham? (Trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, p. 71)

The test of Abraham's faith requires him to bring the butcher's knife to his son's throat. Only because Abraham can bring himself to initiate the violent form of this sacrifice does the scene on Mount Moriah reach its miraculous end. Unlike Agamemnon, Abraham cannot argue that he will slit the throat of his child for the sake of a higher goal; unlike Cain, he loves the person whose life he is poised to take. The existentialist Kierkegaard here speaks of the absurd. "Only at the moment when his act is in absolute contradiction to his feeling is his act a sacrifice" (p. 84), for killing Isaac accomplishes nothing but a demonstration of faith that no human being will comprehend.

The battle waged at Kurukshetra.
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Violence in the Mahabharata

The best-known book of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad-Gita, most famous in the West as the inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's empire-weakening doctrine of nonviolent resistance to oppression. Yet neither the Bhagavad-Gita nor, certainly, the Mahabharata in its totality, presents an argument against violence. Krishna 's counsel to Arjuna emphasizes the state of mind in which to undertake the violence that the warrior must necessarily commit. Probably as a response to the challenge mounted to the Hindu code by pacifist Buddhist teachings, Krishna frames the problem in terms of action, not violence. One must do one's duty with a pure spirit: "Be intent on action, / not on the fruits of action" (The Second Teaching, stanza 47). In this Sanskrit masterpiece, as in the Greek and Hebraic texts we have been considering, sacred obligations link sacrifice and violence.

Action imprisons the world
unless it is done as sacrifice;
freed from attachment, Arjuna,
perform action as sacrifice!
(The Third Teaching, stanza 9)

A typical popular representation of Krishna , here wielding a chariot wheel as a weapon.
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The early books of the Mahabharata describe the miraculous births and education of the Kuru clan. Kunti's three Pandava sons, each immaculately sired by a different god, collectively embody the qualities of ideal kingship. Yudisthira, the oldest son, is born of Kunti's invocation of Dharma, the god of law. Although he is a trained warrior, he is not noted for feats of heroism. His two full brothers, Bhima (son of the god of wind) and Arjuna (son of Indra, the most powerful of the gods), however, master their weapons and together destroy their immoral cousins in the terrible war that ensues. In a warrior culture, how one fights defines one's nature; Bhima and Arjuna favor different weapons and represent different modes of violent action.

Bhima's revenge

The Mahabharata tells us that Drona taught the Kurus how to fight, and that two of his charges, "Duryodhana and Bhima, became highly proficient in club fighting" (pp. 964–65). But Bhima, son of the wind god, always wins at games of strength, and Duryodhana, the oldest of the Kaurava cousins, consumed with jealousy and devious in all things, "conceived a lasting enmity towards him" (p. 963). In the climactic scene in the Assembly Hall, Duryodhana urges his brother Duhsasana to drag Draupadi into the chambers (p. 972), and it is Duhsasana who performs the unseemly acts of grabbing her by the hair, stroking her body, and trying to strip her of her clothes. Watching this humiliation of his and his brothers' wife, Bhima vows to exact revenge: "May I forfeit my journey to all my ancestors, if I do not carry out what I say, if I tear not open in battle the chest of this misbegotten fiend, this outcaste of the Bharatas, and drink his blood!" (p. 977).

Duryodhana himself offers an even more egregious affront to Draupadi by exposing his thigh to her; this obscene gesture inflames Bhima all the more, and he explodes in his second oath: "May the Wolf-Belly never share the world of his fathers, if I fail to break that thigh with my club in a great battle!" (p. 980). The warrior's place in his family lineage is at stake. If he fails in his oaths, Bhima, known for his animalistic strength as the Wolf-Belly, will not join his ancestors in the afterlife. To achieve family solidarity, he must break family solidarity.

For all the fighting that goes on in the Mahabharata, there is relatively little explicit description of violence. But Bhima's fulfillment of his vows gets special treatment. After Duhsasana attacks with bow and arrow, Bhima throws his mace — his club — at Duhsasana, who falls from his chariot and thus lies vulnerable on the ground.

Drawing his keen-edged sword, and trembling with rage, he placed his foot upon the throat of Duhsasana and, ripping open the breast of his enemy, drank his warm lifeblood, little by little. . . . "O you heroes, I have accomplished today what I had vowed in respect of Duhsasana! I will soon fulfill my other vow by slaying that second sacrificial beast, Duryhodana!" (p. 992)

Duryhodana, who has, with typical wiliness, hidden from his pursuers, is flushed out of cover like a sacrificial beast by "the hunters who supply [Bhima] with meat" (p. 995). It is only a matter of time before Bhima accomplishes his second goal. This time, however, he ignores the rules of battle by aiming his mace below the waist of his opponent, thereby breaking Duryhodana's thigh and kicking in his head. Significantly, however, Bhima acts on the advice of Krishna , who knows that the devious Duryhodana will evade Bhima's blow unless the Pandava fights unfairly. As the avatar of Vishnu, Krishna precipitates the war by advising Arjuna that a warrior must fight. If violence is enjoined on the warrior, cheating in battle can be condoned.

An ancient Indian hero stone depicting men fighting a battle to defend cows and women.
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Arjuna's arrows

In Book I of the Mahabharata, Arjuna is described as the most well-rounded warrior of the Kuru clan. His intellect and his powers of concentration equal his physical abilities, clearly distinguishing him from the more savage Bhima. It is hard to imagine Arjuna drinking an enemy's blood. Arjuna particularly excels in the use of the bow and arrow, and he wins the hand of Draupadi by stringing a great bow and then shooting it in an unusual test of skill that resembles the challenges issued in the Odyssey by Penelope when she announces her willingness to be married to the suitor who can string the bow left by Odysseus and then shoot an arrow through twelve sockets of iron axes lined up in a row.

What does it mean for a warrior to be distinguished more for archery than spearwork or his dexterity with a club? The test that Arjuna, like Odysseus, passes requires a combination of brute strength, cool nerves, good judgment, and a keen eye. Yet at the end of the Mahabharata War, Arjuna must also, like Bhima (and like Odysseus, who is not above tipping his arrows with poison), break the rules to insure his ultimate triumph in battle. The great Indian epic asks troubling questions about violence. At the end of the poem, the world is a diminished place. Brotherly love does not solve the problems of the human race.

Western Han Dynasty, Tales from History and Legends
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Violence in the Family and Against the Self: Ssu-Ma Ch'ien

Confucius taught that violence does not provide a solution for human conflict.

The Master said, "Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.
Analects, II.3

In the Historical Records, Ssu-ma Ch'ien directly challenges Confucius's faith that goodness and the rites — sacrifices and hymns — can guide a people. The Biography of Po Yi and Shu Ch'I asks whether men who starved themselves "out of their sense of right" are good examples of the Confucian pronouncement that they "felt little bitterness of spirit" (p. 867). An outlaw who "killed innocent men every day and fed on their flesh: died at a ripe old age," the historian reports (p. 868). How does this contrasting history prove the power of virtue?

It is noteworthy that the violence that the heroic brothers Po Yi and Shu Ch'I inflicted they inflicted on themselves, and that in effect they sacrificed themselves in order to support each other when they refused their father's order that the younger son should inherit the throne, against the rule of custom. The Prince of Wei tells a similar story having to do with complicated family conflicts in which half brothers are at odds and noble souls enter into self-defeating schemes out of altruistic motives. Beneath the surface of these dense narratives brutal deeds occur. Men deface themselves to maintain secrecy and slit their throats out of loyalty.

Ssu-ma Ch'ien allowed himself to be mutilated in order to complete his father's project and preserve the history of the Warring States. Episode after episode reveals a warrior culture devoted to subtle strategy and the cultivation of a remarkable network of spies and informers. Confucius himself was scarred by his experience of brutal feudal rivalries like these. Chinese culture may be without an epic on the scale of the Mahabharata, but it did produce The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. In a way, his tutelary spirit infuses the Historical Records . As some of the ballads collected in the Classic of Poetry attest, ancient China knew as much about civil wars and private cruelties as any early society. Were it not for the tragic courage of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, we would know less about a world where many were fully capable of clubbing adversaries to death and eating their flesh. For all their exquisite manners, Confucian gentlemen could not eliminate violence from their lives.