Resisting Evil, IV: The Duty to Defend

Private Violence in Self-Defense--A Natural Duty

Christ’s equation of physical violence with internal anger raises questions that juries often have to face: What are the circumstances that might justify the use of lethal violence in self-defense?  Specifically, when an argument leads to a violent altercation, does the one party bear any responsibility for the consequences if, though the other party struck the first blow, his own anger was a contributing factor?  The varied legal traditions of human societies will have different answers to this question.  Differences in ethnicity, religion, and social structure will all color the approach to violent self-assertion, but even among European nations, there are serious differences.  In general, the barbarian ancestors of Americans and Northern Europeans were less likely to condemn acts of violence between consenting adults, while ancient Greeks and Romans, as we shall see, imposed more stringent requirements on those who used violence to defend or assert their rights.  Nonetheless, even the most civilized societies have condoned some forms of self-defense.

Greek mythology and literature are filled with violence, not just the great wars—the Trojan War and the war of the Seven Against Thebes—but the exploits of Heracles and Theseus and dozens of lesser known heroes and villains.  In most cases, the victims of heroic violence were themselves homicidal maniacs whose deaths were a step toward civility, but triple-bodied Geryon (among others) was an innocent victim:  He was robbed of his cattle by Heracles and killed simply for trying to recover his property.  The great poet Pindar used the story of Geryon to illustrate his view of Nomos, usually translated as law:

Nomos, the king of all, mortals and immortals,  justifying/making just the most extreme violence with an overpowering hand.  I bring as evidence the labors of Heracles, since he drove the cattle of Geryon to the massive gates of Eurystheus [the king of Thebes who commanded the labors], though he had got them neither by asking for them nor by buying them.

To understand what the poet is saying, we have to understand that the word Nomos, refers both to written laws and to customs handed down from time immemorial.  It can thus be the equivalent of “the way things are.”  While in ordinary human terms—ancient Greek as well as modern American—Heracles is a criminal, he was a son of Zeus, who had been given a higher destiny than Geryon, and there is nothing that anyone, including Geryon's patron god Poseidon, can do. 

  Pindar’s treatment of Geryon, which may have been inspired by a much earlier poem of Stesichorus, indicate a growing discomfort with the amoral conduct of some mythological heroes.  Stories of heroic violence, while they remained popular, were subjected to critical scrutiny in the classical period, when Greek cities forbade the carrying of weapons and most forms of violent revenge.  One of the most famous literary cases of a violent altercation leading to death is narrated by Sophocles' Oedipus (OT 800-813), who uneasily gives an account of how he killed an old man and his retainers. 

As I was walking near the place where three roads meet, there was I confronted by a herald and a man mounted on a horse-drawn wagon.... The guide and the old man himself tried to drive me from the road by force, and I struck in anger the driver, the one who was trying to turn me aside; and the old man, when he saw, having waited until I passed by the wagon, struck the middle of my head with his two-pronged goad, and I paid more than I got; namely, having been struck by this hand with a stick he rolled backwards right out of the wagon, and I killed them all.

Sophocles has described one of the earliest recorded instances of road rage.  Oedipus was, however, not quite correct in claiming to have killed the entire party, which, in addition to King Laius of Thebes, a herald, and probably a driver, included the slave who escaped to tell the tale.  Laius and his company were certainly at fault in trying to drive the young wayfarer out of the road, and, while Laius himself struck Oedipus, it was only after the young man had struck one of his men.  It is a sign of Oedipus' intemperate character that he responds to a passing blow by murdering as many as he could lay his hands on, including the old king, who will turn out to have been his own father.  

Greek roads, in the time of Sophocles, were not the grand highways built by the later Romans but were more like single-lane tracks.  It would not have been easy or even possible for a walker to pass by a wheeled carriage heading in the opposite direction.  Both father and son were arrogant characters, neither of them willing to give place to the other.  Such conflicts must have been a common occurrence, though not often with such fatal results. 

Although the dramatic date of the Oedipus Tyrannus is two generations before the Trojan War (thus about 1300 B.C.), the play was staged in Athens in the 420’s, and Sophocles would certainly have been thinking of Athenian law and custom rather than of Thebes in the Bronze Age.  Oedipus seems not to have been much disturbed by the events, but under Athenian law, he would almost certainly have been prosecuted for murder by the kinsmen of Laius and the herald.  (The obligation to prosecute extended as far as the sons of first cousins.)  Oedipus might argue in his defense that it was lawful at Athens to kill in self-defense and that Laius had struck him first.  But the prosecutors would certainly point out that the violence was initiated by Oedipus, and rest their case on the principle that a killing was not justifiable, when it was committed by the man who struck the first blow.  

Setting aside the case of Laius, a jury would have rightly have convicted Oedipus of the other killings.  To avoid problems, the killer might attempt to bribe the victim's family--though to accept such blood-money was considered shameful--or go into exile.  

In Athens, Laius’ male next of kin (unfortunately Oedipus himself) could demand that the killer be executed for striking the first blow before going on to kill four men.  On the other side, Oedipus could argue that the driver had offered violence in attempting to drive him off the road.  Laius and his retainers, had they killed the insolent young man who attacked them, would probably have got off, even though their behavior was provocative.  It is useless to speculate on the decision that might have been rendered by an Athenian jury that was liable to be swayed by extra-legal considerations.  Nonetheless, one can say in general terms that the conduct of a young man who displayed angry disrespect to a distinguished older man, whom he proceeded to kill along with his attendants, would not have been approved.  

Every society has its own laws regulating self-defense, but it is only reasonable to distinguish between the wanton killing of an innocent man and the killing of an assailant.  Much later in his career as dramatist, Sophocles brought Oedipus back on stage as an old man of his own age—though the chronology is impossible.  There, the aged Oedipus says, in killing Laius he had done what anyone would have done.  It is not that the old blind man has a failing memory but, rather, that for the purposes of the play Sophocles emphasizes the innocence of Oedipus and portrays, though without details, the homicides as justifiable acts of self-defense.