Revolutionary and Sub-revolutionary Terrorism

Abstract

Murder for motives of political ambition and rivalry was well known to the ancients, as the classical histories bear witness. Sennacharib was murdered by his two sons. Many Roman emperors murdered their rivals and even decimated their own families. The actual motives of tyrants such as Tiberius and Nero are as hard to speculate about as those of Stalin, but clearly madness, jealousy and hatred, as well as sheer lust for power, were involved. Thus the mad Caligula arranged the murder of Tiberius in order to clear the path for his own accession. Some of these murders were inspired by paranoid suspicion, others were provoked by fear of an evil augury. Yet whatever the pretext, none of these murders, with the sole exception of tyrannicide, was given explicit religious or ideological justification. Though often associated with coups or Praetorian conspiracies they were not committed in the name of popular revolutionary ideology or religious legitimacy. As Feliks Gross observes, ‘At the time of the Emperor Constantine, it became a method later called “sultanism”, a continuous murder of all possible pretenders to power, or competitors, until no one but the ultimate ruler survived’ ([52] p. 423).