How Violent Was the Pre-Modern World Really?

It is no secret that the ancient and medieval worlds were, in general, more violent than today’s world. After all, today in the twenty-first century, most countries do not have crucifixions, gladiator fights, or public executions that involve people being torn apart by wild beasts. Cities today rarely have to worry about rival cities attacking them and most modern cities are not even fortified. Clearly, the world has changed quite drastically since antiquity.

Nonetheless, the degree of violence that existed in the ancient and medieval worlds was not nearly so great as many people have been led to believe by popular films and television shows, which often portray an absurd level of violence that is completely beyond the amount of violence that actually existed during any period of human history.

Civilians’ experience with violence in the ancient world

The level of violence that an ordinary person was exposed to in the ancient world depended greatly on the time and place in which they lived. Ancient cultures were not all equally violent and, even within a single culture, there was still a tremendous degree of variability, since some locations and time periods were more violent than others. Consequently, virtually everything I am about to say will be very generalized.

For the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on violence in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in ancient Greece and Rome, because those are the ancient cultures that I am most knowledgeable about. There are, of course, many other ancient cultures, but I am not as knowledgeable about them and, even though I am going to overgeneralize a lot, I do not want to overgeneralize too much.

War

When people think about violence in the ancient world, the first thing they probably think of is war, and there is no question that ancient warfare could certainly be extremely violent. I cannot possibly hope to do justice to a topic as large and complex as ancient warfare in an article of this nature, but I can give a very, very condensed overview of some major aspects.

The traditional view of ancient Greek warfare holds that Greek poleis were always either at war or preparing for war. The historian Hans van Wees, however, challenges this view in his book Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, published by Bristol Classical Press in 2004. He argues that, while it is true that Greek city-states were often at war, war was not seen as the normal state of existence.

Van Wees further points out that the Greeks employed cultural institutions, including kinship diplomacy, amphictyonies, formal declarations of philia, alliances, treaties, arbitration, and truces, with the specific goal to prevent war—a fact which seems to greatly undermine the traditional view of Greek warfare. Although I am not necessarily convinced by all the arguments van Wees makes in his book, I do find this particular argument convincing.

Ancient Greek poleis did not have professional armies. Instead, all adult male citizens of military age were expected to serve in their polis’s military in some form or another. Those who could afford to purchase their own armor and weapons served as infantry. Poorer citizens who could not afford the more expensive gear often served as light troops or auxiliaries. Additionally, poleis often employed foreign mercenaries.

In the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BC), Greek warfare generally tended to be relatively small-scale, because there were many poleis and no individual polis held very much power. Most battles during this period were essentially skirmishes fought between small, untrained armies for control of farmland.

Starting in the late sixth century BC and continuing into the fifth century BC, some Greek poleis started to develop large fleets of warships. These ships were primarily rowed by non-aristocratic adult male citizens, although, in some cases, poleis allowed enslaved people and metoikoi (i.e., resident foreigners) to row the ships. Notably, in 406 BC, the Athenians desperately needed more men to row, so they allowed enslaved people and metoikoi to row ships that were mostly newly constructed in the Battle of Arginousai. When the battle turned out to be a huge victory, the Athenians granted all the surviving enslaved people and metoikoi Athenian citizenship.

Over the course of the fifth century BC, certain Greek poleis became increasingly powerful. This allowed them to have larger militaries and fight larger battles, resulting in greater numbers of casualties. The Greco-Persian Wars (lasted 499 – 449 BC) and the Peloponnesian War (lasted 431 – 404 BC) were sort of like the World Wars I and II of the ancient Greek world; they were both wars fought on a scale that wars had generally not previously been fought.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 500 – c. 475 BC, depicting a Greek hoplite wearing his armor, holding his spear and his shield, with his helmet resting beside him

From the Hellenistic Period onwards, warfare in the Greek world was no longer about tiny poleis fighting over relatively small plots of land, but rather large kingdoms fighting over much larger territories. A similar transition seems to have taken place in the western Mediterranean around the same time with the rises of Rome and Carthage.

The Roman Republic started out with a military composed of mostly untrained adult male citizens who could be called upon to fight when needed similar to those of the ancient Greek poleis. Over time, however, the Roman military became increasingly professionalized. By the time of the establishment of the Principate in the late first century BC, Rome had a full-time professional army. This meant that not all men were required to be soldiers.

Nonetheless, war continued to impact ordinary people’s lives. Ordinary people living in the Empire were less likely to be impacted by Rome’s conquests abroad, but there were also periodic civil wars, most of which were fought over the throne. These wars significantly impacted the lives of ordinary civilians living in the areas where the wars were being fought.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Roman soldiers depicted on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, dating to the late second century AD

People in the ancient world committed many truly horrific wartime atrocities and massacres. A few very notorious examples include:

• In 415 BC, the Athenians killed all the men of the island of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery. The Athenian historian Thoukydides includes a famous dramatization of the negotiations between the Athenian and Melian emissaries before the slaughter in his book Histories of the Peloponnesian War 5.84–116.

• In December 335 BC, King Alexandros III of Makedonia (who is commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”) ordered the total destruction of the Greek city-state of Thebes. His soldiers killed all the men, sold all the women and children into slavery, and burned all the buildings in the city, allegedly sparing only the house and living descendants of the famous poet Pindaros (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BC).

• In 146 BC, the Romans completely destroyed the city of Carthage. For six days, the Roman soldiers killed anyone they encountered without mercy. Only on the last day of the sack did they take prisoners; they captured around 50,000 people from Carthage and the surrounding areas and sold them all into slavery. After the city was ransacked, the Senate established a commission to ensure that nothing remained of the city.

• In that same year, the Romans slaughtered all the men of the Greek city of Corinth, sold all the women and children into slavery, and burned the whole city to the ground.

These acts of outrageous violence in which conquering armies slaughtered entire cities without mercy, however, were far from everyday occurrences. The frequency of these kinds of mass slaughters varied significantly, but, in a time period of relatively less turmoil, it might be only once in a generation or more that some conquering group would completely destroy a major city somewhere in the Mediterranean world.

Furthermore, even when these sorts of mass slaughters did happen, they primarily only impacted the people who happened to live in the particular city or cities where the slaughters were carried out and had less of an impact on people living elsewhere. Thus, these massacres, though certainly horrendous, were limited in scale. If we want to know what presence violence had in everyday people’s lives, we have to look beyond the huge calamities and see the bigger picture.

ABOVE: The Last Day of Corinth, painted in 1870 by the French painter Tony Robert-Fleury, showing what he imagined the Roman destruction of the Greek city of Corinth in 146 BC might have looked like

Animal sacrifice

Probably the most common form of violence that ordinary civilians in ancient Greece and Rome would have been exposed to was actually animal sacrifice. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2019, animal sacrifice was a common practice in the ancient Mediterranean world. Usually the only time a person in the ancient Mediterranean world got to eat meat was after a sacrifice. An animal sacrifice in ancient Greece or Rome typically involved killing the animal, cooking its flesh, and eating it.

We still kill animals today. In fact, thanks to modern capitalism and factory farming, we almost certainly eat far more meat today than the Greeks and Romans did back then. The average person in the United States probably eats about as meat in a year as your average person in ancient Greece ate in a decade. Nonetheless, today, very few of us actually kill the animals we eat ourselves with our own hands; whereas, in the ancient world, that was pretty much the only way people did it.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 510 – c. 500 BC, depicting two men ritually sacrificing a pig to the goddess Demeter

Violence against enslaved people

Violence against enslaved people was extremely common in the ancient world. As I discuss in greater depth in this article about ancient slavery, ancient texts attest that it was extremely common for slaveowners to beat the people they enslaved as a form of “punishment.”

Of course, not all people in ancient Greece or Rome owned slaves, since many people could not afford them. Likewise, the treatment of slaves certainly varied drastically from one master to another and not all masters necessarily beat their slaves. Even many of those who did beat their slaves may not have done so on a regular basis. Nonetheless, all the surviving ancient sources clearly indicate that beating and torturing slaves was thoroughly normalized.

Indeed, the beating of slaves was so common and widespread that most free people were simply desensitized to it. The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC) makes frequent jokes about masters beating their slaves throughout his comedies. For instance, his comedy The Knights, which was first performed in 424 BC, begins with what is apparently supposed to be a comedic scene of two enslaved men complaining about how much their new overseer beats them and tortures them.

ABOVE: Detail of an Attic vase painting showing a scene from a comedy of a master beating his slave

Public executions

A fourth kind of violence that ordinary civilians in some ancient cultures would have been regularly exposed to would have been public executions of convicted criminals. Not all ancient cultures had public executions, however. The classical Greeks, for instance, seem to have usually thought of public executions as barbaric and uncivilized. In classical Athens, as well as in many other Greek city-states during the classical era, there generally were no public executions. Instead, executions were usually carried out in private, with the person sentenced to death being forced to drink poison, usually hemlock.

The most famous execution that was carried out in classical Greece was the execution of the Athenian philosopher Socrates in 399 BC. Socrates’s student Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BC) wrote extensively about Socrates’s trial, imprisonment, and execution in his surviving dialogues Euthyphron, The Apologia of Socrates, Kriton, and Phaidon, so we know quite a bit about how the process was carried out.

On an interesting side note, as I discuss in this article I wrote back in July 2018, archaeologists have actually excavated the prison in Athens where Socrates was imprisoned and eventually executed. In that prison, they found examples of clay medicine cups that were used to administer hemlock to the criminals who had been condemned to death. It is unlikely that any of the cups that have been excavated is actually the cup that Socrates himself drank from, but they are certainly the kind of cup that he would have drank from.

ABOVE: The Death of Socrates, painted in 1787 by the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David

In the Roman world, matters of execution were quite different from how they were among the Greeks. While the Greeks generally tended to eschew public executions as barbaric, the Romans did them all the time. Enemy captives and people who had been convicted of various capital offenses were often sentenced to be torn apart by wild animals in the arena or forced to fight to the death for public amusement.

It is important to emphasize, though, that these were either captive enemies or people who had already been convicted of crimes and sentenced to death; these were not just random folks off the street who happened to get grabbed for the arena. Also, these kinds of gruesome executions were not everyday occurrences; they happened frequently, but you couldn’t just go down to the arena at any time to see people being killed.

Finally, people were not required to go to these kinds of events and we know from surviving Roman sources that many people found them distasteful. For instance, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) describes his own utter revulsion at the sight of a public execution in the arena in his Moral Letter to Lucilius 7. He writes, as translated by Richard Mott Gummere:

“By chance I attended a mid-day exhibition, expecting some fun, wit, and relaxation, – an exhibition at which men’s eyes have respite from the slaughter of their fellow-men. But it was quite the reverse. The previous combats were the essence of compassion; but now all the trifling is put aside and it is pure murder. The men have no defensive armour. They are exposed to blows at all points, and no one ever strikes in vain. Many persons prefer this programme to the usual pairs and to the bouts ‘by request.’ Of course they do; there is no helmet or shield to deflect the weapon. What is the need of defensive armour, or of skill? All these mean delaying death.”

“In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators. The spectators demand that the slayer shall face the man who is to slay him in his turn; and they always reserve the latest conqueror for another butchering. The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword. This sort of thing goes on while the arena is empty. You may retort: ‘But he was a highway robber; he killed a man!’ And what of it? Granted that, as a murderer, he deserved this punishment, what crime have you committed, poor fellow, that you should deserve to sit and see this show?”

The Romans also had gladiators, who were slaves trained to fight for public amusement. There was some distinction between gladiators and people condemned to death in the arena, however. As I discuss in this article I wrote in February 2019, unlike people condemned to death in the arena, gladiators were conceived of as valuable property. They had owners and those owners generally wanted to keep their gladiators alive as long as possible so they would get the most return on their investment.

Consequently, for most of Roman history, there were rules in place that were intended to keep gladiator deaths to a minimum. Gladiators were, as best as we can tell, given extensive medical attention. Some gladiators certainly did die and the death toll for gladiators in the arena was certainly higher than the death toll for modern combat sports like boxing and wrestling. Nonetheless, there were measures in place designed to reduce deaths.

ABOVE: Some gladiators did die. The two gladiators marked with a Ø in this Roman mosaic from Terranova are both dead. The Ø may be intended to represent the Greek letter Θ, which may stand for the word θάνατος (thánatos), meaning “death” or “corpse.”

A review of the popular perception of violence in the ancient world

As I think I have shown, certain kinds of violence that are not normalized today were very much normalized in the ancient world. Although the amount of violence that a person in the ancient world was exposed to depended greatly on when and where that person happened to live, the average person in ancient times was probably exposed to more real-world violence than the average person today.

Nonetheless, the general public seems to have a radically inflated conception of just how common violence was in the ancient world. Here is a quote from an answer written by a high school student to the question “Compared to the modern world, how violent were ancient and medieval times?” I think this passage illustrates an general impression about the ancient world that a lot of people share:

“Okay, so you know how almost no dispute in America, at least publically [sic], is solved by extreme violence? We usually solve arguments in court nowadays. Back in ancient Roman times, however, problems we’re [sic] solved in cage matches or the arena. In cage matches, anything goes, and you can kill your opponent any way you liked. The only rule was there could only be one man left alive. Arenas were a little more controlled, but we’re [sic] still as deadly.”

“Go forwards a ways [sic] to the period between the fifth and fifteenth centuries A.D. Much like the Romans, Kings solved public disputes with death matches or quests. Examples of quests could be to kill the pack of wolves that attacked their kingdom on a regular basis, or to find out a way to solve their economic issues.”

Almost all of this is factually incorrect. It is not true in any sense that the Romans resolved all their conflicts through “cage matches” in which people were allowed to kill each other however they liked. Throughout all of human history, the primary method of resolving conflicts has pretty much always been through talking. Believe it or not, talking existed in antiquity; it’s been around for a very long time.

If a conflict in ancient Rome could not be resolved through discussion, it generally went to the judicial system. Once again, believe it or not, the Romans actually had a judicial system. The ancient Roman judicial system was horribly flawed, but it did exist. As for the “cage matches” the person here speaks of, we have absolutely no record of their existence. As much as I love the mental image of a buff, shirtless Cicero literally strangling Catiline to death with his bare hands in a public cage match in front of cheering crowds, it just didn’t happen.

ABOVE: Roman marble bust from the Capitoline Museum thought to depict the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who, contrary to what some people may tell you, did not strangle Catiline to death with his bare hands in a public cage match.

The author of this answer seems to be thinking of how people condemned to death were sometimes forced to fight in the arenas. These fights, though, were a form of capital punishment—not dispute resolution. I’m sure there were probably some brawls to the death that happened in ancient Rome, but, whatever the case may be, battles to the death were certainly not the standard manner of resolving civil conflicts.

The whole thing about medieval kings resolving all their disputes through cage matches generally isn’t true either and the thing about them resolving conflicts through “quests” seems to come from fantasy video games. I really want to dismiss this answer as a joke, but I don’t think it is, since I have seen the kinds of views expressed here expressed elsewhere in all seriousness.

I think that the popular perception of how violent the ancient world was has been greatly shaped by three main influences. The first influence is ancient literature and mythology, which many people unfortunately seem to read at face value as reflections of ordinary life. The second is modern books, films, television shows, and video games set in ancient and medieval worlds, which often portray absurdly exaggerated levels of violence. The third is historical propaganda.

Ancient literature and mythology

It is true that ancient literature and mythology abound with violence. I myself compiled a list of some of the most disturbing and violent stories from Greek mythology in this article I published in September 2019. Many of these stories are really gruesome.

For instance, in Greek mythology, King Atreus, the father of the heroes Agamemnon and Menelaos, is said to have gotten revenge on his brother Thyestes by murdering his two sons, serving them to Thyestes without telling him what he was serving him, and revealing the truth to him afterwards by presenting him with his sons’ severed hands and heads. Meanwhile, in some ancient Greek vase paintings, the Greek hero Neoptolemos is depicted bludgeoning King Priamos of Troy to death with the corpse of his murdered infant grandson Astyanax.

Works of ancient literature also contain episodes of extreme violence. The Odyssey ends with the hero Odysseus, his son Telemachos, and his slaves Eumaios and Philoitios slaughtering the suitors who have been terrorizing his family, eating all his food, and wreaking havoc on his kingdom for years. The Roman playwright Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) is particularly notorious for his extremely graphic and bloody descriptions of violence, which often span multiple pages.

ABOVE: Illustration from a French manuscript of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron dating to c. 1480 depicting Atreus presenting Thyestes with the severed heads of his murdered son, whose flesh he has just unknowingly eaten.

Many people seem to read these stories and wrongly assume that they reflect the historical reality of what ordinary life was like in the ancient world for most people. This is not, however, the case. What you need to remember at all times is that myths are not history; they are stories that people told, often mostly for entertainment. The fact that ancient myths are so full of violence does not mean that the violent actions described in those stories actually happened; it only means that people in the ancient world found stories involving those violent actions entertaining.

People still find these sorts of gruesome and violent stories entertaining today, as evidenced by how common they are in modern literature, film, and television. Indeed, the same old tropes that were popular with the ancients even recur in modern works. For instance, in George R. R. Martin’s bestselling 2011 fantasy novel A Dance with Dragons, the character Wyman Manderly murders three Frey boys, bakes them into pies, and serves them at a feast at Winterfell held by the Boltons, where several Freys are in attendance.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the similarities between Martin’s story and the ancient Greek story of Atreus and Thyestes. If anything, George R. R. Martin’s story is even more morally wrong than the ancient Greek story because, in A Dance with Dragons, Wyman Manderly is portrayed as a sympathetic character; whereas, in classical literature, Atreus is pretty much invariably portrayed as a despicable villain.

Interpreting violent stories from ancient literature and mythology as evidence that everyday life in the ancient world was full of violence is like interpreting modern violent books and television shows as evidence that everyday life in the United States in the twenty-first century is full of violence. Quite simply, while there may be some kind of distant correlation between people telling violent stories and people actually committing acts of violence, the mere existence of violent stories in and of itself tells us very little about how violent that society actually was.

ABOVE: Illustration from A Wiki of Ice and Fire by the artist Jake Murray depicting Wyman Manderly with his pies, as described in George R. R. Martin’s bestselling 2011 fantasy novel A Dance with Dragons

Modern novels, films, television shows, and video games

The second reason why I think many people think that the ancient and medieval worlds were so unfathomably violent is because modern novels, films, television shows, and video games portray them that way. The reason why they portray them as so violent is often less because that’s how they really were and more because many people today enjoy reading about and watching displays of violence.

Let’s take the HBO historical drama series Rome, which aired from 2005 to 2007, as our first example. I mention this series in particular not because I think it is a particularly egregious example of historical inaccuracy, but rather because, overall, I really enjoyed the series. In my opinion, it’s potentially the best dramatization of the late Roman Republic to date and, historically speaking, the makers of the show got a lot of things right. For instance, I appreciate their nuanced portrayal of Julius Caesar, their overall level of attention to the ancient sources, and the surprisingly meticulous work that went into the set and costumes.

I do, however, think that the show is not entirely historically accurate when it comes to its portrayal of violence among Roman civilians. In the Roman world, whether or not violence was acceptable depended on who was committing the violence and against whom. It was entirely acceptable for a slaveowner to torture and abuse a person whom they enslaved, but it was completely taboo for a free citizen to physically torture and abuse another free citizen.

Therefore, when Rome portrays scenes of gratuitous violence in warfare and against enslaved people, it is probably fairly accurate—not necessarily in the specific acts of violence that are portrayed on screen, but in the general level of violence. The show, however, also portrays free Roman citizens brutally torturing and murdering other free Roman citizens in sewers and basements on a routine basis without consequences. This part is probably not historically accurate.

For instance, in season one, episode five, the character Titus Pullo and the young teenaged Octavian brutally torture and murder a free Roman citizen named Evander in the sewers beneath Rome for information. No one ever comes enquiring about what happened to the man and no one ever faces any repercussions for killing him. What evidence do we have of this happening? Absolutely none. The whole scene is fiction. Evander is a completely fictional character and Titus Pullo and Octavian as they are portrayed in the show are mostly fictional as well.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Titus Pullo and the young Octavian torturing and murdering Evander in the sewers beneath Rome

Later, in season two, episode four, Octavian’s mother Atia has Servilia, the mother of Marcus Junius Brutus and a very prominent patrician woman, brutally tortured and raped in her basement. Once again, there is no evidence that anything like this ever actually happened. In fact, the characters Atia and Servilia as they appear in the show are both pretty much entirely fictional, even though they share the names of historical women.

Large parts of both seasons one and two of Rome are centered on Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo’s involvement in organized crime in the city of Rome. In season two, they become leaders of a collegium, which is portrayed as essentially an ancient Roman gang. In historical reality, we do not know much about collegia, but, for the most part, they seem to have been more like guilds or labor unions than the mafia.

Overall, I think that Rome portrays civilian life in the ancient world as more violent than it really was for the sake of providing viewers with gory entertainment.

ABOVE: Image of the characters Lucius Vorenus (left) and Titus Pullo (right) walking down the streets of Rome, as portrayed in HBO’s Rome

Rome, however, is actually generally on the less absurd end of the spectrum as far as portrayals of violence are concerned. Modern fantasy novels, films, and television shows often depict fantasy worlds that resemble the ancient and medieval worlds but often exhibit unbelievable amounts of violence.

I have already mentioned George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which portrays the cruel, violent, and basically lawless land of Westeros, which is clearly styled after medieval western Europe. Martin’s books are excellent and enjoyable to read, but it is important to remember that they are works of fiction and that they do not accurately reflect what real life was like in western Europe during the Middle Ages. The HBO television series Game of Thrones, based on Martin’s series of novels, likewise isn’t a very accurate representation of what the pre-modern world was really like.

Meanwhile, other fantasy shows and films present equally violent worlds resembling the ancient and medieval ones. For instance, the opening scene of the first episode of the first season of the American fantasy drama series American Gods, based on the 2001 fantasy novel of the same name by the British author Neil Gaiman, portrays Viking warriors arriving in North America.

Almost as soon as they come ashore, one of them is promptly shot completely full of arrows by the natives—far beyond what could ever be considered plausible. Then the Vikings want to leave, but they find there is no wind, so they carve an idol to Odin and randomly start slaughtering each other in a bloody free-for-all because apparently they need some kind of “blood offering.” For at least a minute, there is nothing but blood and body parts flying everywhere.

This whole scene, though, is historically ridiculous. Although Vikings do seem to have sometimes practiced human sacrifice, we have no record of them ever randomly slaughtering their own comrades for such a purpose, let alone doing so in a chaotic free-for-all with blood and body parts flying all over the place. This whole scene is made up just to provide a horrible and shocking opening for the show.

ABOVE: Shot of Viking warriors slaughtering each other in a shower of blood for no apparent reason in the opening scene of the first episode of American Gods

I think the sheer absurdity of the violence portrayed in modern fantasy shows is perhaps best encapsulated by a scene from season one, episode four of the new Netflix fantasy drama series The Witcher, which is based rather loosely on a series of fantasy novels and short stories originally written in Polish by the Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The scene I am talking about is a party being held by Queen Calanthe, the ruler of the fictional medievalesque kingdom of Cintra.

Right from the beginning, the level of violence doesn’t make sense. The queen barges in late to her own banquet, dressed in full battle armor with fresh blood all over her face and armor. She says that she has just gotten done reminding the people in the south who their queen is. Again, one has to wonder, “Why did she decide to do this right before her banquet? Couldn’t she have done her slaughtering some other time? Why didn’t she wash up and change out of her armor before coming in? Why is the blood seemingly still fresh when she has presumably been travelling at least for an hour or two to get here?”

The scene only gets even more nonsensically violent. A bit later in the episode, a knight with the head of a porcupine comes in to ask for the queen’s daughter’s hand in marriage. The queen orders her knights to kill him for no apparent reason. A massive swordfight breaks out in which the porcupine knight and the main character, Geralt of Rivia, somehow manage to slay at least twenty knights all on their own. For some reason, the knights keep coming at them to get slaughtered—as though the first twenty knights they killed weren’t some kind of warning.

Finally, the queen herself grabs a sword from one of her men, kicks the man she stole the sword from in the face, charges into the midst of the fight, and kills one of her own knights. Then she points her sword at Geralt and orders everyone “Stop!” Nothing about this scene makes sense. Why didn’t she just say “Stop” to begin with? What was the whole point in her grabbing a sword, stabbing one of her own knights, and pointing the sword at Geralt? The knights were fighting because she told them to kill the porcupine knight, so she should have just been able to holler “Stop!” and they would presumably have stopped.

Scenes like this one that contain completely senseless violence just for the sake of violence are extremely common in modern fantasy films and television shows. Most of these shows are obviously set in fantasy worlds and, because of that, I understand that it doesn’t have to be completely realistic. I do not necessarily have a problem with the fact that fantasy shows contain senseless violence. I understand that lots of people enjoy this sort of thing.

My real problem is with the fact that many people seem to actually think these scenes of senseless and gratuitous violence set in medievalesque worlds accurately represent what the pre-modern world was really like. There are many people out there who honestly think that people in the Middle Ages really couldn’t get though a party without at least twenty people getting killed. To anyone who actually takes the time to think carefully, though, it quickly becomes apparent that medievalesque fantasy worlds are precisely that: fantasy. The lesson here should be obvious; don’t get your history from fictional novels, movies, television shows, or video games.

ABOVE: Image of Queen Calanthe pointing her sword at Geralt of Rivia. The whole scene in which this happens makes no sense, because, rather than just ordering her men to stop fighting, she grabs a sword, kills one of her own men, points her sword at Geralt and then she tells her men to stop.

Historical propaganda

A third source of the widespread perception that the ancient and medieval worlds were more violent than they actually were is historical propaganda. Throughout history, people have always tried to portray the people that came before them as violent. During the Middle Ages, Christian authors sought to portray non-Christian ancient Romans as violent persecutors.

It is true that Christians were sometimes violently persecuted in the Roman Empire; we have both ancient non-Christian and Christian sources that directly attest to this fact. Nonetheless, the degree to which Christians were persecuted, the number of Christians who were actually killed, and how frequent persecution was have all been greatly exaggerated by unreliable medieval legends and stories.

Later, in the Modern Period, Renaissance, Protestant, and Enlightenment historians sought to portray the Catholic Middle Ages as a period of violence, brutality, and superstition. Many of the most popular beliefs about the Middle Ages today come from Renaissance and Enlightenment historical propaganda. For instance:

• As I discuss in this article I wrote debunking misconceptions about the witch trials, there were no widespread, church-sanctioned witch hunts during the Middle Ages. Large-scale witch hunts really did happen, but they happened during the Early Modern Period, not during the Middle Ages. The official teaching of the church for almost the entire Middle Ages was that witches did not exist. Because the period when witch trials were actually most common corresponds with the period of the so-called “Scientific Revolution,” though, many people have a tendency to mentally push them back into the Middle Ages.

• As I discuss in this article I wrote in February 2019, it is not true that educated people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat. In historical reality, virtually anyone in the Middle Ages with even the vaguest smattering of an education knew perfectly well that the Earth is spherical. The misconception about people in the Middle Ages thinking the Earth was flat originates from late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Enlightenment pseudohistory.

• I have written a quite extensive article debunking the persistent misconception that the Middle Ages were a unique period of darkness, superstition, and technological stagnation. In reality, even in western Europe, the Middle Ages produced quite a large number of inventions that have greatly impacted human history, such as the horse collar, the movable type printing press, glass mirrors, eyeglasses, the sternpost-mounted rudder, lateen sails, the dry compass, wind and water mills, the heavy plow, paper money, and so on.

• As I discuss in this article I wrote in November 2019, there is very little evidence to support the popular idea that people in the Middle Ages went around killing cats en masse. The idea that they did this is based on an extremely flimsy modern interpretation of a few medieval texts, combined with the pre-existing impression of the Middle Ages as a backwards and violent epoch in human history.

• As I discuss in this article from November 2019, most of the horrifying devices that are popularly believed to have been used for torture in the Middle Ages—including the brazen bull, the iron maiden, the pear of anguish, and the Spanish tickler—were either never actually used for torture at all or did not exist during the Middle Ages.

• As I discuss in this article I wrote in December 2019, there is no good evidence to support the popular belief that Christians in the Middle Ages deliberately burned Sappho’s poems and there is actually a lot of good evidence against this idea. The idea that medieval Christians went around deliberately burning the poems of Sappho, along with large numbers of other pre-Christian texts they did not approve of, seems to have originated among classical scholars during the Renaissance.

Again, all of these misconceptions feed directly into the modern popular perception of violence in pre-modern cultures.

ABOVE: Daguerreotype photograph of the American writer Washington Irving, the man most directly responsible for the promotion of the misconception that people in the Middle Ages believed the world was flat, from between 1855 and 1860

A debunking of the book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

I am sure that, by this point, some of my readers are probably already preparing to point to the bestselling book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, written by the Canadian-American linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker and published in 2011 by Viking Books, as proof of how violent the ancient and medieval worlds really were.

For those of you who haven’t read it, in that book, Pinker essentially portrays the entire history of the human race up until the beginning of the Enlightenment in western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as nothing but a chronicle of superstition, backwardness, barbarity, and relentless, inhuman cruelty.

Now, as it happens, I have written an article debunking Pinker’s book in depth. If you want the full debunking, you can click on the link and read the full article, but I will summarize some of my main points here. First of all, I want to clarify that I actually mostly agree with Pinker’s broad thesis that, generally speaking, over the course of human history, at least so far, most conventional forms of violence do seem to have grown less common overall.

Nonetheless, I do have a number of serious problems with Pinker’s book. As I talk about in the main article, Pinker paints an egregiously inaccurate portrait of what life in the pre-modern world was like. Pinker’s portrayal of the ancient world in particular relies heavily on portrayals of violence in a small number of highly unreliable sources, including works of outright fiction. He relies especially heavily on the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the books of the Hebrew Bible.

ABOVE: Image of one version of the front cover of Pinker’s bestselling book

As I discuss in this article I wrote in March 2019, the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of fiction composed for entertainment and they do not accurately reflect what it was like to live in ancient Greece during any period of history. They are full of meddling deities, talking horses, heroes performing impossible feats of strength, hideous ogres, sorceresses, ghosts, and all kind of other impossible things.

Even if you filter out all the obviously mythical elements, the Iliad still does not accurately reflect ancient Greek warfare. The author of the Iliad even seems to misunderstand how Bronze Age warriors used chariots. The Iliad and the Odyssey tell us about as much about how violent the ancient Greek world was as modern violent television shows like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or The Walking Dead tell us about how violent our world is today.

I won’t say that you can’t learn anything about violence in the ancient world from the Homeric Epics, but I am saying that they should be treated with extreme caution when used as historical sources. Pinker does not treat them with the appropriate level of caution.

Pinker also engages in extensive cherry-picking and misrepresentation. For instance, he highlights a few good examples of real injustices that existed in the ancient world, but fails to mention that there were also people at the time who spoke out against those injustices. Instead, he repeatedly makes comments that make it sound as though no one in the ancient world had even the faintest idea that things like rape, torture, and genocide might actually be wrong.

Finally, Pinker repeats of lot of popular errors that show he didn’t put nearly as much effort into researching his book as he should have. For instance, he repeats the claim that the thumbs-down gesture originates from the sign made by crowds to signal to a Roman gladiator to kill his opponent (which I specifically debunk in this article from February 2019) and the claim that Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Inquisition for claiming that the earth orbits around the sun (which I specifically debunk in this article from July 2020).

ABOVE: Painting of Achilleus fighting the god of the river Skamandros, a scene from Book Twenty-One of the Iliad, painted in 1737 by the French painter Charles-Antoine Coypel. The Iliad is a work of fantasy, not of history.

Conclusion

To reiterate my point from the beginning, a lot of extremely violent and horrific things happened in the ancient world. Forms of violence that are not socially acceptable in most countries today were completely normalized back then. The average person in the ancient world was most likely exposed to more real-world, physical violence than the average person living in a western country today.

Nonetheless, as far as we can tell from the surviving sources, ordinary civilians in pre-modern times did not generally live in constant fear of being randomly slaughtered by cutthroats and, at least in some cases, people were capable of resolving some disputes without gutting each other. People in the Middle Ages really could get through a banquet without several dozen people getting slaughtered and the ancient Romans did not resolve all their disputes through “cage matches.”