So, I see you've been looking into Wikipedia and beginning some interest in history. I'm glad you've taken some of your first steps into a deeper understanding of the topic. There are a few warnings, though. When we see numbers in ancient texts such as Plutarch's reference to "thirty thousand," these need to be framed with extreme caution and understanding that ancients simply did not keep accurate records, such as birth certificates, and what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated. We must consider also that Thucydides' history is colored by a critical bias against Athens, with his overarching narrative presented in the Peloponnesian War. All of the speeches and quotations given in Thucydides are meant to create an impression, and are misrepresented when interpreted as if they were a journalistic source.
Now, it's good to hold these ancient atrocities in one hand, but they are not themselves showing a more cruel world of the past. We must compare them with the modern wars if they are to give us some meaningful contrast. Let's take World War 1, for example. We are just going to breeze by each battle and give a death count.
The battle of the Marne, over 500,000 died. 700,000 in the battle of Verdun. Over a million in the first battle of the Somme. 800,000 some in the second battle of the Somme. Kolubara, around half a million. Gallipoli, another half million. Galicia, over 600,000. Third battle of Ypres, exceeding 800,000. A million and a half in the Spring Offensive. Around 1.8 million in the Hundred Days Offensive. 2.3 million in the Busliov Offensive. Estimates have around 16.5 million soldiers as casualties of the first world war.
World War 2 saw some decline in military casualties but also the tragic and steep increase in civilian casualties, with somewhere around 40 million dying as a result of the war. This is due in large part to citizens becoming valid military targets, something that was only hinted at in the first world war. Curtis LeMay, the American commander who organized the systematic firebombing of Japanese civilians said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."
Now perhaps this brutal form of war is more kind, you are thinking, because there is no capture or sale of enemy soldiers or citizens as slaves, but I think that is utterly facile and mistaken. The Geneva conventions explicitly allow compelling prisoners of war to labor, so long as they aren't officers. The US and Soviets forced German prisoners of war into labor. The Germans captured and enslaved the people of Europe on a scale that was unprecedented in history, with fifteen million people enslaved.
Last century is often called the "Age of Genocide" and we can make a list here, too. The Armenians of Turkey, Jewish people of Germany, Bosnians, Mayans of Guatemala, Tutsis of Rwanda, the earlier examples of Tasmania's complete genocide, the genocide of Native Americans, all represent a rising global trend that is very decidedly current and recent, with genocide by no means a universal feature that is continuous through history.
There are currently around two million people in the American prison system, of these around 800,000 do everyday labor like the rest of us, paid in rates best measured by pennies per hour. The trend of mass incarceration in the US is one that has massively increased over the past generation.
With a less biased view of the last century, as well as the present, it is clear that these events of the past were not "terrifically violent" by the standards of the modern era.
Those hardly count as cherrypicked examples when they're so incredibly vague. You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history which could be counted as an example supporting any thesis. These are only vague mischaracterizations and not data points. I have explained to you in great detail how Whiggish history was and is a politically-interested style of writing history that has gone out of fashion for nearly all experts in the field. There are plenty of tribal controversies in the interpretation of history, but this isn't really one that historians currently care too much about at all.
The argument here is incredibly unconvincing and utterly puzzling. Moses is a mythological figure
These vast sweeping claims you're making are not original thoughts that you've gotten from firsthand sources, but rather they are from 18th and 19th century historians. That is, the narrative of gradual improvement over time in what's called Whiggish history. It's very popular among non-historians or amateur historians but 20th century historians were very critical of this view. Experts in the field, the people who are making a career of "looking at historical documents," have largely flipped on this view.
Herbert Butterfield wrote a famous takedown, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). P. B. M. Blaas felt the style had already passed by 1914, in his seminal work on historiography, Continuity and Anachronism (1978). His term for your idea that people in the past acted on the concept of survival of the fittest before its conceptualization is called Presentism, a form of anachronism, and it's the biggest stumbling block for understanding the people of the past.
David Cannadine, the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton said, "Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness."
Frederic William Maitland is widely considered the first of a new breed of historians. The answer to Whiggish history was in fact utilizing more data than ever. For him, that meant actually reading as much of English law as possible and understanding it in its own terms, rather than treating it as a more vague process inevitably leading to the present. Contrary to your claim, the firsthand sources in fact shattered Whiggish pretensions.
I'm trying to very politely tell y'all in this thread that this crap is the Newtonian Physics of history. Sure, Edward Gibbon and other ye olde history is a decent starting point, but if that's all you have you're pretty much out of touch with the field.
Does a bacterium "practice survival of the fittest" in a way that matches the expressly Darwinist ideology of Hitler? Of course not. And neither does a Chimp.
Platonism is the first sin of Rationalist discourse. The idea that logic has a direct connection with reality only makes a computer programmer into an instant master of all disciplines. If we accept the more conventional philosophy of Formalism where logic has a much more vague and obscure correspondence to reality, the study of logic becomes just any other field.
The argument that "people have always been shitty" is ignorant equivocating that tells me you think there is nothing to gain from the topic, because if people do not change then History is a worthless project. What very little we know about ancient witch hunting in Rome is utterly irrelevant to the easily illustrated current trend of increasing shittiness.
You are making a mistake of extreme naivete by presuming that people of the past reasoned in the way that we do. In fact, the mass slaughter of civilians as a strategy to win a war is a defining feature for modern warfare, in stark contrast with a relatively far more innocent past. Battles were most often not fought at all, and sieges often resolved without bloodshed. The farther we go back the more ritualistic warfare tends to be. In the anthropological setting warfare is much more about display and the definition of boundaries, and obviously the very concept of survival of the fittest is one that does not even come into play until the 18th and 19th centuries
The only problem with this "gotcha" is that most people don't really appreciate just how recent of a phenomenon witch crazes are. It is by and large constrained to the early modern period falling between the 16th and 18th century. However, the tendency of early modern people for scapegoating and blame does not end there and we see a fair continuity into the recent era, with most mentions of cat burning happening in the 19th century. The early industrial era is where we see a heyday of pogroms against Jewish populations in Europe, and by the time we are seeing high industrialization in the 20th century the elimination of scapegoats is now carried out as a biological imperative justified by science.
The two conclusions that are inescapable is that science and rationality may have forestalled persecutions based on superstitious nonsense, but it was also easily turned into an instrument of persecution. And the second conclusion is that the recent past centuries show increasing, rather than decreasing persecutions.
This is not some "Noble Savage" view, as the Greeks were indeed an example of relative high civilization compared to their contemporaries, and I have applied none of the typical virtues that are associated with such a narrative. The Noble Savage trope is largely praising the imagined warlike and masculine qualities of populations that are seen as less civilized. The Noble Savage is innocent only of the effeminate quality of civilization.
This talk about efficiency might lead somewhere fruitful, even if your argument is confused and pointless: We just have stronger weapons / swords and nukes are equally efficient. I have no idea what you even mean, but let's think about this more. A nuclear bomb is in fact far less efficient than a sword as it requires vast amounts of industrial development, mining, and energy to create and deliver with any effect. The same can be said about a rifle, it requires far more energy and labor to manufacture than a machete, and requires a constant supply of ammunition to function. The immediate conclusion upon a moment reflecting on the efficiency of weaponry is that we're investing much more energy into increasingly less efficient weapon systems, as if it is a race to spend more and more resources to gain tactical advantage. That is, kill at increasing distances. Look at the current conflict in Ukraine. The largest proportion of infantry kills are taking place by remote controlled suicide drone, something that is wildly inefficient. A lot of these drones are now even being controlled via fiber optics to prevent signal jamming, and so you see the trees in no man's land just draped with miles and miles of wasted fiber optics.
If what you claim is indeed true, and warfare is always equally brutal across all eras (or this parallel view, that the past was indeed more brutal), then the added inefficiency of modern weaponry seems to show that in terms of wealth and resources, we are nonetheless committing more resources than ever to weaponry. I cannot think of a single ancient empire which stockpiled weapons and bombs with even a fraction of the commitment of modern nation states.