5 ms·

Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities ha

Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities had was to prevent / punish this.

ska 5y ago
> do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person. This is very much not true across societies, or historically.
iamthemonster 5y ago
I think the distinction they were drawing was the level of faith people could have in law enforcement by the state. In most Western countries you would tend to expect that as soon as a murder occurs, the police attempt to find the murderer and prosecute, with no action required by the victim. In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > with no action required by the victim. It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.
pasabagi 5y ago
'Personal' is probably too far, 'private', as in, not the business of the state, is more where I was going with it. I think in general, for antique societies, they don't have detectives - if a crime is committed, the first problem is, there's no state agency interested in investigating the matter. The claim that murder was a 'private matter' is from Emma Southon, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Pre-modern history is rife with blood feuds that are basically the 'private' way of preventing murder. The state typically wouldn't have the resources to get involved, even if they did have the interest. If you imagine the chain of somebody_is_murdered to somebody_is_punished there are questions like: 'who reports the crime, and to whom?' and 'how do you establish the crime actually happened, in the way it was reported?' that are just really hard to answer unless you have a big state organization dedicated to managing stuff like that.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  In some culture and religion it's even written in books. Under some circumstances and granted the insulted peer followed a few steps, right to murder was granted.

Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities had was to prevent / punish this.

ska 5y ago

> do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person. This is very much not true across societies, or historically.

iamthemonster 5y ago

I think the distinction they were drawing was the level of faith people could have in law enforcement by the state. In most Western countries you would tend to expect that as soon as a murder occurs, the police attempt to find the murderer and prosecute, with no action required by the victim. In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> with no action required by the victim. It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.

pasabagi 5y ago

'Personal' is probably too far, 'private', as in, not the business of the state, is more where I was going with it. I think in general, for antique societies, they don't have detectives - if a crime is committed, the first problem is, there's no state agency interested in investigating the matter. The claim that murder was a 'private matter' is from Emma Southon, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Pre-modern history is rife with blood feuds that are basically the 'private' way of preventing murder. The state typically wouldn't have the resources to get involved, even if they did have the interest. If you imagine the chain of somebody_is_murdered to somebody_is_punished there are questions like: 'who reports the crime, and to whom?' and 'how do you establish the crime actually happened, in the way it was reported?' that are just really hard to answer unless you have a big state organization dedicated to managing stuff like that.

agumonkey 5y ago
In some culture and religion it's even written in books. Under some circumstances and granted the insulted peer followed a few steps, right to murder was granted.