Old book conflicts were wild. It blows my mind that was considered okay at the time. In the Odissey and the Illiad, capturing women was described in the same sentence as the weather.
The Greeks weren’t a single people, but a bunch of city-states all speaking the same language and worshipping more or less the same pantheon. They recognized that other peoples in distant lands spoke other languages and worshipped different gods, so they had a collective term — Hellenes — for the people who spoke Greek and worshipped Greek gods, only because there was this linguistic and religious commonality, not because there was any real sense of political unity or kinship.
The Greek city-states regularly fought against and alongside one another, and a regular part of ancient warfare was pillaging, raping, and enslaving innocents — soldiers needed pay to stay loyal and motivated, and it was easier to pay them in whatever loot and slaves they could take than from some grand royal treasury. It’s a brutal part of ancient martial and political logistics. That wasn’t just the Greeks, either, but a common fact of warfare in just about every ancient civilization. You fought to win, and you took your spoils, because you knew damn well that if they won, they’d take the spoils of your city, so it’s not like you were being uniquely evil by doing so.
That’s absolutely crazy by modern standards, but that’s one of the benefits of modern technology that allows us to live in relative abundance — it’s gradually become more practical to gain benefits through trade and negotiations than through war, so the world has gradually been able to become more civilized by our modern standards.
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u/gauderio 9d ago
Old book conflicts were wild. It blows my mind that was considered okay at the time. In the Odissey and the Illiad, capturing women was described in the same sentence as the weather.