From Anxiety to Exemplarity: Towards a Typology of Roman Mass-Violence and Genocide

Abstract

The Roman proclivity for ferocious violence in warfare is virtually proverbial both for ancients and moderns. Thus Harris has described Romans as behaving 'somewhat more ferociously than most of the other politically advanced peoples of the Mediterranean world' (Harris 1985, 51) and Polybius describes in some detail the Roman custom or ???? in sacking a city, that often results not only in human corpses, but also dismembered animals (10.15.4-5). Such examples of violence led Isaac to argue that the Romans felt no need to justify acts that we might term genocide (Isaac 2004, 222).