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date: 17 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines genocide in the ancient world, by examining European literature and comparing the atrocities committed during the events of the Trojan War. The massacre of all Troy's male inhabitants and the enslavement of its women and children were fictional, but it had many counterparts in ancient history. It was almost the normative form of genocide in ancient Greece and some other parts of the ancient world, although mass enslavements and mass executions which made no distinctions of gender or age are also widely attested. The Greeks' reasons for treating the Trojans so brutally were typical of the motivations for genocide in antiquity: it was usually an act of ‘conspicuous destruction’, a display of force designed to assert the power and status of the perpetrator in the face of a perceived challenge. Ancient genocide sometimes had a religious dimension.

Keywords: ancient genocide, mythology, Troy, European literature, Trojan War, ancient Greece, mass enslavements

Hans van Wees

Hans Van Wees is Professor of Ancient History at University College London. He is the author of Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and History (1992), and Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004), as well as numerous articles on aspects of war and peace in the ancient world. He has edited, among other things, a volume on War and Violence on Ancient Greece (2000) and the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2007).

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