Killing and The Psychological Cost.

[Sean Manning]

I think we should be careful in transferring the modern situation to antiquity. As E. Muir has shown in "Mad Blood Stirring" there were ways to make killing easy, in that case e.g. treating the "prey" like animals, when killing, and afterwards. Especially in a society where almost everybody is used to butcher animals the kill is much easier.

Yes, it is hard to say because nobody has studied willingness to kill in a society much like Greece or Rome, and because modern and ancient warfare are so different. We don't even know for sure how many infantry tried to kill their opposite numbers in World War II, so its almost impossible to know for earlier periods. And many of the things that soldiers would do to keep safe overlap with things they would do if they weren't keen on killing. For example, running away, keeping out of the front ranks, or posturing at a distance rather than closing in. Similarly, if soldiers missed a lot in combat, was that because they deliberately tried to miss or because combat is messy and stressful and confusing? So what we know about how ancient soldiers behaved doesn't necessarily tell us why they did so.

Its a very complicated question, and it really deserves a book by someone expert on both ancient warfare and human responses to combat. We also need more studies of modern societies outside the Anglosphere. I suspect that many Greeks and Romans were not eager to kill other soldiers, and that for most of them killing had a psychological cost, but I won't claim I'm certain.

There are lots of interesting anecdotes, and as Jona says several ancient cultures had rituals to help men make a mental transition to a warrior role. There is even the theory by Jonathan Shays that Greek tragedies were used as group therapy for veterans!