A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

throne, Astyages handed him over to a servant named Harpagus with orders to kill the baby (whose
name was Cyrus). Shocked at the idea, Harpagus handed over the child to a herdsman whose own
baby had just died - the corpse of the baby was shown to the guards of Astyages to convince him
that his orders had been carried out.
When the child was ten, his identity was discovered. His playmates had made him king in one of
their games, and he beat the son of a nobleman who refused to obey him. The affair came to the
ears of Astyages, who sent for Cyrus and observed his resemblance to himself. The herdsman was
questioned, and the truth came out. Harpagus was then invited to supper and asked to send his only
son - a boy of thirteen - to the palace. The boy was killed, then cut up and roasted. When Harpagus
sat down to supper, he ate his own son. After the meal, he was handed a basket containing the boy’s
hands, feet and head.
The point is further underlined by Harpagus’s reaction; he bows his head and says that whatever the
king does must be right. Harpagus is so accustomed to absolute submission that he has no difficulty
in concealing his feelings on learning that he has eaten his son. And Astyages is so used to absolute
obedience that he assumes Harpagus bears him no ill-will. Suddenly, we become aware of the
immense distance that separates this Persian monarch from the Egyptian and Sumerian kings of two
thousand years earlier – kings who regarded themselves as servants of the gods and who were as
much subject to the rule of law as any of their people. Astyages is not even necessarily a cruel man.
It is his ego that is offended by disobedience, and he coldly calculates a ‘suitable’ punishment.
And once again, we must bear in mind that this kind of cruelty is the outcome of ‘divided
consciousness’, of the man who stands alone and no longer hears the voice of the gods. But this
same divided consciousness soon led to the achievements of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Eratosthenes. Divided consciousness produced democracy - the political system of men who stand
alone, no longer united by the will of the god. But this same democracy revealed its shortcomings
in the execution of Socrates for impiety against the gods - emphasising that the sum of a thousand
small egos is one small ego. Left-brain consciousness makes men obsessive. Obsession gives birth
to blindness and narrowness, to cruelty and stupidity - but also to science and philosophy. And so
the pendulum of history continues to swing between these extremes, and the story of civilisation is
the story of creativity and of crime.
This book is centrally concerned with crime; but if we ignore the creativity, we shall not only fail to
understand the crime: we shall miss the whole point of human history. Those Greeks who invaded
Crete and built Mycenae were driven by this unique human craving for adventure, by the feeling
that life without conquest is a bore. In this spirit they cheerfully killed their enemies, raped their
female captives and plundered undefended cities. It was not innate wickedness so much as the spirit
that makes boys play at pirates. But four centuries later, when a blind singer named Homer recited
these episodes, his audience was able to enjoy the excitement of the adventure without stirring from
their firesides. In a sense, they were enjoying the adventure more than those ancient heroes did, for
it is always easier to appreciate life in retrospect than when coping with its everyday details. This
love of song and recitation developed to such a point that by the reign of Pisistratus, the first great
tyrant of Athens (561-528 B.C.), the festival of the god Dionysus had turned into a kind of song
contest. One day, the audience was startled and puzzled when the chorus leader began to declaim
his lines as if he himself were the legendary hero he was singing about; but they soon found this
new method of presentation more dramatic and absorbing than a mere narration. It made them
participants in the fall of Troy, the murder of Agamemnon, and the tragedy of Oedipus or
Philoctetes. The author of this new method, Thespis, had invented the drama. And a century later