A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

takes so much delight in a kind of brutal realism that it seems unlikely that he has deliberately
toned down the picture.
What emerges from Apuleius is that the bandits regarded themselves as adventurers, making a
living as best they could. They strangle old ladies, cut throats, and even make use of torture - to
extort information; but then, they are crucified when caught, much as rustlers were lynched in a
later century. In fact, accounts of robbery and piracy in this period remind us constantly of the Wild
West. They are no longer more-or-less respectable, as they had been in the good old days. One
historian tells us:
...as the growing City State became more powerful, it learnt how to
extend its strong arm over the haunts of the robber folk. It explored
and cleared their mountain fastnesses - those great limestone caves so
common in Greece, sometimes mere indistinguishable slits in the
hillside, but leading down through difficult ways into high and
spacious halls. Here, where the robbers of old had lived and caroused
and carved altars to their gods, quiet citizens from below, shepherds
with their flocks in the summer pastures, now met to talk and pipe and
sleep... And the sea robbers, too, had to leave their old established
hiding places. The rocky island across the bay, with its one little cove,
so convenient for small boats, and its famous spring of clear water,
became just an extra piece of the city’s pasture ground, very useful in
winter when there was snow on the heights... Only some bold spirits
resisted and moved farther afield, where as yet law could not follow.
Thus the gap slowly widened between the adventurer and the honest
citizen...
Alfred Zimmern: The Greek Commonwealth, Part 3, chapter 4.
For now, in the centuries that followed the golden age of Athens, the slow spread of civilisation in
the Mediterranean was making the profession of ‘adventurer’ almost impossible. The Greeks were
carrying their arts of civilisation everywhere. They carried them, for example, to some barbarous
tribes who lived on the green plains of a peninsula called Vitelliu - ‘calf-land’ - a word that later
dropped its first and last letters and became Italy. The tribes were called Latins - after their country,
Latium - and they had founded their city upon low hills as long ago as 900 B.C. They had learned
much from a mysterious Asiatic people called the Etruscans, northern neighbours who once
conquered their seven-hilled city and later vanished from history as mysteriously as they came into
it.
This city would be the chief instrument of human progress for the next thousand years. But whether
it could really be called progress is another matter. If a god could have watched the course of
human history, from the building of the cities and the foundations of the great empires - Egyptian,
Akkadian, Minoan, Assyrian, Macedonian - he might have felt that the evolution of humanity was
proceeding in a tortuous but, on the whole, satisfactory manner. The gamble of ‘double
consciousness’ was paying off.
With the coming of the Romans, history seemed to take a wrong turn. Everything that could go
wrong with double consciousness went wrong. And when they vacated the scene, around 500 A.D.,
they left behind a strange double legacy of civilisation and criminality.