Daylight reading now Robert Harris’s Imperium. It’s a novel based on Cicero’s career as politician and orator in Republican Rome. Fascinating and well researched - as are all Harris’s books.
Podcast last night on the Fall of Civilizations series described the methods of Assyrian Asher-Nazirpal who became king in 883 BCE. Expanding and maintaining empire less high tech in those days but no less brutal. After putting down a rebellion the king commissioned an inscription as boast cum warning:
“I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive. From some I cut off their arms and hands. From others I cut off their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt, and consumed the city.”
Makes the normal Roman punishments of death by execution or by being thrown off a cliff seem pretty restrained.
And then there’s the nightly news. And it’s hard not to think that brutality may simply be inherent in the human species.
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