This chapter starts by locating the common association of religious violence with Christianity and late antiquity in a Protestant polemic which was further developed by the Enlightenment. New approaches have started to question this master narrative, however, by highlighting the limited number of temple destructions and other paradigmatic acts of religious violence, contextualising religious violence within the prominent role played by violence in the later Roman Empire, and dissociating violent language from violent acts. Moral principles and specific understandings of religion and history produce a Christian discourse that makes violence highly visible because the church is associated with peace and society with violence. Two well-known case studies illustrate the point. First, the destruction of the Serapeion in Alexandria (391 CE) allows us to notice how the historian Rufinus constructs a narrative playing on Christian understandings of martyrdom and pagan, sacrificial violence. Second, the letter of Severus of Minorca on the conversion of the Jews (418 CE) is not an aggressive tract to promote widespread conversion of the Jews, but a defensive document that tries to free Severus from accusations of having stirred up violence.

How does the Bible represent violence? How does its literary nature shape these representations? How is violence central within biblical theologies? This chapter provides an analytical overview of biblical representations of violence and theorises ‘sanctification’ of violence. Biblical stories feature the range of violence common throughout ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies: war, ritual violence and violence between individuals, both ‘criminal’ and normalised. Socio-narrative context determines the legitimacy or illegitimacy of violence attributed to patriarchs, prophets, priests, Israelites, Judeans, ‘foreigners’ and royals. Some violence follows purported divine directive, but much is mundane. Yhwh’s (or divine subordinates’) violence is typically rendered legitimate. The ‘justness’ of divine violence rhetorically impacts explanations of misfortune: suffering of direct and symbolic violence indicates godly punishment. Within the Hebrew Bible and New Testament the notion that divinely decreed violence accomplishes theistic plans enables misrecognition of ritualised violence. Since antiquity, people have employed biblical themes to claim divine approval of violence. Theorisation of ‘religious violence’ facilitates distinguishing between assertions of biblically ‘justified’ violence versus how the biblical anthology represents violence. Investigating portrayals of violence, especially who benefits and who suffers from each portrayal, is key for examining social impacts of ancient ‘biblical violence’ and modern ‘Bible-based violence’.

The mirror trope is now so well established in Classics that it is easy to overlook its novelty when François Hartog first published his ground-breaking book, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Analysis of Herodotus’s literary representations – the ‘mirror’ of ethnographic inversions which he presented to his fellow Greeks – still resonates with Western societies accustomed to defining themselves by reference to imagined civilizational antitypes. Observing the way other moderns fashioned themselves in the mirror of ancient literary representation sheds important light on the complex sequence of metaphorical reflections and sideways glances through which they constructed their sense of identity. It also punctures the false sense of superiority which arises from the notion that the Western observer occupied the position of a disinterested spectator. In exploring Russia’s national self-identification in the mirror of Herodotean ethnography, nothing could be further off the mark than to presume that Western readers are less prone to wishful self-projection than their Russian counterparts. On the contrary, by engaging in the mode of self-conscious analysis, the goal is less to study the changing ways in which nineteenth-century readers understood Herodotus than to realize the potential their readings afford for changing how we understand our place in the world. With respect to Russian readers of Herodotus, I endeavour to show how their interpretations of Herodotean ethnography can help us confront not only their continuing struggles for a coherent identity but also our millennial contests with cultural pluralism, globalization and resurgent nationalism. One means of achieving such committed self-reflection is to frame Herodotus’s impact in the intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Russia by focusing on the broader intellectual and ideological implications of the ancient text.

This chapter summarises the main themes of the book, placing individual chapters within diverse thematic frameworks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of human violence, it introduces the Palaeolithic and Neolithic beginnings of human violence before examining prehistoric and ancient warfare. This includes considerations of the role of farming in the Neolithic, the more specialised warfare of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the era of classical antiquity and the growing importance of osteoarchaeology in understanding early violence. The discussion then continues with the other themes of the volume: intimate and collective violence; religion, ritual and violence; violence, crime and the state; and representations and constructions of violence.

This chapter looks at whether violence within and between groups played an important role in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods. The evidence is based on osteological information, which is limited by preservation and the incomplete osteological record. With regards identified traumatic lesions, it seems problematic to distinguish between accidents and interpersonal violence. The first clear evidence of interpersonal and lethal violence on a large scale is from the Upper and Late Palaeolithic. Current data shows that cases of violent behaviour are evident through the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, some of which gives evidence of group conflict. However, violent behaviour does not occur more often in later or earlier times of the Palaeolithic. Besides the evidence for violent interactions there is also sporadic evidence for treatment and care of trauma and other injuries throughout the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. The increase in cases of interpersonal violence from the Mesolithic period is most likely related to better preservation and the much higher number of burials and more complete skeletons. Violence is present not only in recent hunter-gatherers and nomadic groups, but also among Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

The advent of the First World War in August 1914 is often taken as the end-point for the long nineteenth century. In this chapter, I will argue that, for Herodotean receptions at least, the long nineteenth century should be extended until September 1922 and the conclusion of the Greco-Turkish War. While the First World War marked a crucial turning point for historiography in general (and, indeed, for society as a whole), the Greco-Turkish War had profound implications for the way that Herodotus in particular was read, interpreted and understood. It seems that the 1919–1922 conflict especially lent itself to Herodotean comparisons, throwing up Herodotean resonances and recalling Herodotean themes more vividly than other episodes during the previous five years of World War. Just as the Gallipoli campaign was often discussed in relation to the Iliad, and the British experience after the fall of Kut in Mesopotamia was described in terms of Xenophon’s Anabasis, the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War acquired a distinctly Herodotean flavour. But this influence did not only work in one direction.

Martyrdom was a central component in the fashioning of both ancient Jewish and early Christian identities. Within Christian circles martyrdom is often presented as an exclusively Christian phenomenon that emerged in the context of persecution by the Romans. The presence of ‘suicidal’ martyrs in both Jewish and Christian traditions demonstrates both that martyrdom is not the exclusive property of the Christian tradition and also that prior to the third century CE it and suicide were not clearly distinguished from one another.

Ancient Egypt, its society, law and belief system were brought into being, and sustained, by the threat and application of violence in the form of cruel and unusual punishments intended unabashedly to intimidate. The ‘Big Man’ role which informs the office of kingship from the outset of Egyptian history, maintains itself on celestial as well as terrestrial levels. The fertility of valley and delta promised untold agricultural riches to the human community if there was general cooperation; it was essential therefore to deter free thought and action by all available means of violent force. Prosperity would come through the plans of a single authority, not the collective debate of a people. Similarly, in Egypt’s sphere of influence whole-hearted subservience was required on pain of violent punishment. From the third millennium BCE Egypt had begun the process of cloning this life to produce a heaven and hell.

The ritualisation of violence in Iron Age Europe has long been seen through the distorting lens of classical literary sources. Signs of perimortem trauma and the complex processing of human remains have typically been seen as evidence for Druidic sacrifice or the ‘Celtic cult of the head’. This chapter presents a more anthropological perspective, drawing analogies with societies documented through the ethnographic literature. Evidence for ritualised killing in the Iron Age comes from bodies found preserved in peat bogs, who suffered extremely violent deaths. Similarly, complex killings are represented by skeletal evidence from archaeological sites ranging from small settlements to large religious complexes. Despite differences in scale, similar cosmological principles underlie these sorts of practices across the Continent. Particularly common is a concern with the removal, curation and display of the human head; rather than representing a singular ‘cult of the head’, however, headhunting was a complex and recurrent practice that altered its character and meaning through time. The ritualisation of warfare is also implicit in the design of major hill forts and oppida. Overall, the archaeological evidence suggests that ritualised violence was a core element of the religious and cosmological beliefs that underpinned social relations in Iron Age Europe.

This chapter discusses the various ways in which the relationship between kingship, violence and non-violence was conceptualised in ancient India during the period c. 500 BCE to 500 CE, both in general terms as well as in special relation to punishment and war. Examining a variety of textual, epigraphic and visual sources, it identifies a strong and enduring tension in ancient Indian political thought between the ethical principle of non-violence and the pragmatic need for the king to use force while discharging his duties. While non-violence was considered a laudable virtue, there was an acknowledgement, even in Buddhist and Jaina thought, that it was incompatible with political power. At the same time, a distinction was made between necessary force and force that was unnecessary, disproportionate, random or excessive. The former was accepted, the latter condemned. Moral and pragmatic arguments for the measured use of force were accompanied by a constant emphasis on self-control as a desirable royal virtue. By the middle of the first millennium a ‘classical’ model of kingship had emerged, wherein the king’s violence was legitimised and aestheticised. Nevertheless, a window for critiquing the potential and actual violence of the king remained.

It is now widely acknowledged that warfare played an important role in cultural developments throughout Maya history, including from its earliest origins. There is still much disagreement, however, over a number of fundamental aspects of Maya warfare, such as who participated in it, how it was conducted, the scale of conflicts and what the motivations were. This chapter provides a brief synthesis of current knowledge and controversies in the archaeology of ancient Maya warfare. First, a brief overview is provided of who the Maya are, the geographic region they have inhabited for over 3,000 years, the periods under study, and general patterns in how they conducted warfare. New findings produced by a diverse array of methods and specialists are then placed side by side and situated within their chronological and regional context. The focus here is on areas that have seen recent advances, in particular new archaeological evidence on the Preclassic period roots of Maya warfare, epigraphic advances showing the complexity of geopolitics during the Classic period in particular involving the Kaanul Snake kingdom, Postclassic mass burials and contact period war among Maya and between Maya and Spanish.

In the years following the publication of Arnaldo Momigliano’s inaugural lecture on George Grote in 1952, interest in ‘the historian of Greece’ (as Grote was once known) has never waned. For Momigliano, a Jewish exile from Italian fascism writing in the wake of the Second World War, the distinguished Victorian was much more than a pioneering figure in the history of ancient Greek studies; he was one of the first critical historians of the modern type. ‘Grote’, wrote Momigliano, ‘possessed the all-redeeming virtue of the liberal mind. He was determined to understand and respect evidence from whatever part it came; he recognized freedom of speech, tolerance, and compromise as the conditions of civilisation; he respected sentiment, but admired reason.’ He thus represented all that had been imperilled in the West over the preceding three decades.