Some of Cicero’s theories were very specific to his time and place. He advised, for example, that anger was best expressed with high-pitched staccato phrases and that speeches should always be made with the right hand extended like a weapon. Energetic passages, he felt, ought to be both introduced and concluded with a vigorous stamp of the feet. But he also possessed a cynicism that was timeless. Advocacy, he claimed, was about advancing ‘points which look like the truth, even if they do not correspond with it exactly’, and he was said to have boasted twice of winning acquittals by throwing dust into his judges’ eyes. His own life encapsulated the mixture of brutality, efficiency, and superstition that characterized Roman criminal law – and never more so than when he took leave of it. He was one of the first people to theorize that laws presupposed the right to a trial, but he personally arranged for several summary executions in 63 BC, and he himself was assassinated twenty years later on the orders of Mark Antony, then one of Rome’s ruling triumvirate. The posthumous treatment of the 63-year-old was eloquent comment on the judicial system that he had come to personify. The rostrum of the Roman Forum, from which he had won so many hearts and minds, was adorned with his severed head and hands. Mark Antony’s wife is said to have taken an even more symbolic revenge. Cicero had recently attacked her in several vitriolic speeches, and according to one Roman historian, she now inflicted the most poetic injustice of all, driving a hairpin through the great orator’s tongue.
Rome formally adopted Christianity as its state religion during the fourth century AD. The Holy Roman Empire would loom large in Europe’s history over the next millennium, inspiring countless wars between popes and princes who sought to cloak themselves in its pseudo-legitimacy, but Roman culture itself would collapse long before the nations of medieval Europe began to emerge. In the middle of the fifth century, waves of invaders thundered out of central Asia and set off a chain reaction of hostilities that soon robbed the Empire of its heart, as barbarian incursions caused the imperial capital to relocate to Constantinople. In the late 520s, Emperor Justinian had his lawyers produce the Digest, a codification of virtually every Roman edict and legal theory ever penned, but his honouring of one tradition was accompanied by the evisceration of another. He simultaneously closed Europe’s last institutional link to ancient Greek philosophy, the Athenian Academy that Plato had established to perpetuate the teachings of Socrates some nine centuries before. A curtain was falling on the ancient world.
Scientists have recently postulated that the impact of a comet or a volcanic eruption set off catastrophic climatic cooling during the mid 530s and, whether or not they are correct, the decade marked the beginning of four centuries of unprecedented gloom. The Black Death reached Europe for the first time, spreading like an inkblot from its southeast corner, and more marauders were soon storming in from the steppes. By the middle of the next century, an entirely new horde was sweeping out of Arabia behind the standards of Islam, conquering, converting, or killing all in its path. Europe’s Vandals, Franks, Goths, and Celts were meanwhile stampeding about like beasts in a forest fire, fleeing disaster one year only to shove their neighbours towards it the next. It was the beginning of the era that the peoples of western and southern Europe would come to call the Dark Ages. As monasteries were abandoned and monks forgot how to read, Christendom dropped the baton of learning that had been passed around the Mediterranean for a millennium. By the time it recovered its wits five centuries later – thanks in large part to translated texts and fresh commentaries preserved by Arab and Persian scholars – Greece would be barely a memory, and Rome’s traditions would have been bastardized almost beyond recognition.
Two peoples would clamber towards the top of the heap. The first were the Germans, a cluster of tribes originating somewhere in Asia, who ousted the Celts from a vast chunk of central Europe. While some established the settlements that would eventually coalesce into Germany, others, known as the Franks, settled west of the Rhine in the region known as Gaul. The second group – the Scandinavians – would arguably have an even greater reach. A contingent of Danes invaded Britain during the mid fifth century, accompanied by two north German tribes known as the Angles and the Saxons, and a later wave of emigrants travelled considerably further during the 700s. In search of a little living room, the Norsemen got as far as America and North Africa, established permanent colonies in Greenland, Iceland, and Russia, and caused so much havoc among their erstwhile cousins in England that the country had to be partitioned in the late 800s. (They would only stop sticking their oars into the island’s politics in 1016, when Denmark’s King Canute brought the interference to a neat conclusion by taking over entirely.) Viking raids in Gaul led to a compromise no less significant when, in 911, King Charles the Simple persuaded a red-headed raider called Rollo to swear allegiance in return for control over a large region near Rouen. Rollo reportedly displayed little fealty to the Frankish monarch, delegating the job of kissing Charles’s foot to a flunky who upended the royal leg. His hairy warriors would, however, become some of the truest sons of feudalism – for as they swapped their longboats for horses, Gaul became France and the Norsemen became the Normans.
The barbarians, whose customs incorporated ingredients from as far afield as Mongolia and India, transformed Europe’s notions of justice just as dramatically as they affected every other aspect of continental culture. Although the Romans’ concepts of contractual and property law lived on, their pragmatic techniques of dealing with crime expired or mutated as semi-rational inquiries gave way to rituals that relied squarely on the gods. For whereas the deities of Rome and Greece were never called upon to adjudicate actual trials, few areas of human endeavour seemed to fascinate those of the barbarians more. Celtic Druids caged troublemakers in mammoth wicker effigies that were periodically set ablaze to propitiate their gods. German priests enjoyed a similar monopoly over judgment and dispensed punishments that were regarded as offerings to the god of war. Scandinavian religion produced one of the most bloodthirsty ceremonies of all. In honour of Odin, criminals were strangled from long wooden beams and stabbed repeatedly while they died. Odin’s time was running out, but the ritual that honoured him was destined to last – for the Norse gálgatré would come to be known as the gallows tree.
The appeal of vengeance was even stronger among the barbarians than it had been for the Athenians. Few activities were quite as satisfying to German and Scandinavian warriors as the thrill of hunting down and annihilating a kinsman’s killer and they did not even theoretically leave the job to the gods. Whereas the Furies of Greece had stood ready to wreak vengeance if a kinsman failed to do so, the closest barbarian equivalent were the German Valkyries, and they were responsible only for hovering over battlefields and transporting fallen warriors to Valhalla. The shame of cowardice and the spur of a fame to outlast death were enough to make the barbarians settle scores themselves.
The eagerness for revenge finds expression in all the great literature of the era. The epic poem of Beowulf, written in the tenth century and composed up to three hundred years earlier, was concerned throughout with justice, and it was owed as much to the dead as to the living. On occasion, the dead even had the prior claim. When King Hrethel’s eldest son was accidentally killed by a younger one, the monarch was plunged into despair – not only because his firstborn had died, but also because kinship rules forbade him from killing the survivor.
No less vivid is the Norse myth of Balder the Beautiful. Balder, the god of light, was so beloved that when he dreamed of death, his mother Freya was able to persuade almost every single object on earth not to hurt him. She failed to ask only the mistletoe, a plant so young and feeble that it seemed entirely harmless. The omission would, needless to say, have consequences. As news spread around Asgard that Balder was invulnerable, his fellow gods began playfully to pelt him with battleaxes, clubs, and spears. Only two stood on the sidelines: Loki, god of mischief, and Hodur, the blind, dim twin of brilliant Balder. Loki, unremitting prankster that he was, had made it his business to learn mistletoe’s secret, and he asked Hodur why he was not joining in the fun. Hodur explained sadly that he had no missiles, and wouldn’t know where to throw them even if he did. Loki offered to assist. He happened in fact to have a bow and a mistletoe dart. And thus it was that while Balder was joyfully bouncing off hardware from every other direction, Loki guided Hodur’s aim and a whirring arrow skewered like a stiletto through Balder’s beautiful forehead. The god teetered and toppled, and had barely hit the ground before a fellow deity called Wali had sworn neither to comb