War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris Page A

factions in the senate fell into heated arguments over whether Attalus actually had the right to give his city to them.
    Ptolemy and Attalus did what they did not because they loved Rome but because they feared it less than they feared war. 3 Lacking heirs, both men dreaded civil war. The brothers Ptolemy had already tried fratricide and gone to war even before Fatso drew up his will, and Attalus’s position was worse still. A pretender to the throne, claiming to be Attalus’s half brother, was stirring up revolt among the poor (and might have begun a civil war even before Attalus died), and four neighboring kings were waiting inthe wings to dismember Pergamum. No wonder a bloodless Roman takeover looked good to both kings.
    This was the classical world’s answer to Rodney King: No, we can’t all get along. The only force strong enough to persuade people to give up the right to kill and impoverish each other was violence—or the fear that violence was imminent.
    To understand why that was so, though, we must turn to another part of the world entirely.
    The Beast
    In a jungle clearing on a South Sea island, a boy named Simon is arguing with a dead pig’s head on a stick.
    â€œFancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!” says the head.
    Simon does not reply. His tongue is swollen with thirst. A pulse is beating in his skull. One of his fits is coming on.
    Down on the beach, his chums are dancing and singing. When these schoolboys first found themselves marooned on the island, all was fun and games: they swam, blew on conch shells, and slept under the stars. But almost imperceptibly, their little society unraveled. A shadow crept across their fellowship, haunting the forest like an evil beast.
    Until today, that is. Today, a troop of teenage hunters impaled a screaming sow as she nursed her young. Whooping with excitement, the boys smeared each other with blood and planned a feast. But first, their leader recognized, there was something they had to do. He hacked the grinning head off the carcass and skewered it on the sharpened stick that they had used to kill the pig. “This head is for the beast,” he shouted into the forest. “It’s a gift.”
    And with that, the boys all set off running, dragging the flesh toward the beach—all except Simon, who crouches alone in the dappled, unreal light of the clearing.
    â€œYou knew, didn’t you?” asks the pig’s head. “I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”
    Simon knows. His body arches and stiffens; the seizure is upon him. He falls, forward, forward, toward the pig’s expanding mouth. Blood is darkening between the teeth, buzzing with flies, and there is blackness within, a blackness that spreads. Simon knows: the Beast cannot be killed. The Beast is us.
    So says William Golding in his unforgettable novel Lord of the Flies . Cast away in the Pacific, far from schools and rules, a few dozen boys learn the dark truth: humans are compulsive killers, our psyches hardwired for violence. The Beast is us, and only a fragile crust of civilization keeps it in check. Given the slightest chance, the Beast will break loose. That, Golding tells us, is the reason why it’s no go. Why Calgacus and Agricola fought, not talked.
    Or is it? Another South Sea island, perhaps not so far from Golding’s, seems to tell a different story. Like the novelist Golding, the young would-be anthropologist Margaret Mead suspected that in this simpler setting, where balmy breezes blew and palm fronds kissed the waves, she would see the crooked timber of humanity stripped of its veneer of civilization. But unlike Golding, who never actually visited the Pacific (although he was about to be posted there in charge of a landing craft when World War II ended), she decamped from New York City to Samoa in 1925 ( Figure 1.6 ).
    Figure 1.6.