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40 The Mediterranean and Ancient History
notions about revenge, and there is more to learn, without any
doubt, about both Greek and Roman attitudes and what may
underlie them. In the course of this debate, Mediterranean
comparisons have raised some interesting questions—but it
has been difference that has been most intriguing: while vendetta
(in the English and French sense, i.e. a long series of
killings and counter-killings) has been characteristic of certain
regions such as Sicily and Corsica (that is to say, as they were in
ethnographic time), it was arguably a rare phenomenon in
Graeco-Roman antiquity. The Oresteia was a particularly horrific
story. 136 The fact is, however, that if you want to study
how any given society has dealt with the apparently innate
human desire to inflict revenge, a matter which forces itself
into the consciousness of all communities everywhere, there is
not the slightest advantage in limiting oneself to the Mediterranean.
Or consider again the question how much of the Greek or
Roman population lived in the countryside (above, p. 31),
which many scholars probably regard as an open question,
within certain broad limits. The comparative Mediterranean
evidence from early modern times is instructive, but it is not
definitive. A wider ethnography would certainly help: we need
to know about more cases in which pre-modern farming populations
lived in town, more about which occupations besides
farming and flock-grazing kept pre-modern populations almost
all the time in the countryside, more about how much rural (or
urban) crime was too much to bear. The wider our angle of
vision the better.
What is needed in the study of the ancient world is a wide
frame of reference that accepts structural similarities from any-
136 D. Cohen, Law, Violence and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge,
1995), 16–21, makes use of comparative evidence to illuminate the
trilogy’s significance on the subject of feuding (cf. also Harris, Restraining
Rage, 161–2). In this book Cohen in fact moved away from the heavily
Mediterraneanist model he had employed in Law, Sexuality, and Society.
Some of the material he invokes is of marginal relevance, but that does not
invalidate the method (which is not represented accurately in G. Herman’s
review, Gnomon 70 (1998), 605–15: 606). M. van de Mieroop’s ‘Revenge,
Assyrian Style’, Past and Present 179 (2003), 3–23, raises other questions
which cannot be pursued here.