It’s a familiar trope that ancient times were a lot more violent than modern days. Depictions of Ancient Rome or Midevil Europe are particularly violent and give the impression that you could be stabbed or have your skull smashed by a rock at the drop of a hat (that “hat” often being an iron helmet that could also be used to crush your skull).
But was that really the case? I don’t know if they kept factual crime statistics, but was violent crime far more common back then or is it simply a product of we modern folk thinking we are more advanced and civilized? Or did the average civilian enjoy lives as mundane and boring as most people?
In 500 years, would accounts of our times portray us as living in cities ruled by violent gangs with people killing each other with assault rifles at the slightest provocation?
Wars happened with regularity, and in some cases banditry was an issue. (Read Dickens’ intro to "Tale of Two Cities’, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”)
However if it was a peaceful place in a peaceful time, remember how they kept it that way - civil rights were nonexistant and anyone who caused a disturbance could expect serious attention from the authorities. A head on a pike, public hangings, crucifixion - all “reinforced the learning experience” than causing trouble was bad.
“Ancient times” (especially if, as seems to be the case, you want to include the middle ages under the rubric) covers thousands of years over a lot of geographical territory (the whole inhabited world, I suppose). Very many very different societies existed in various parts of the world over these millennia. No doubt some suffered more endemic violence than others, and some more and some less so than our. It is impossible to make a meaningful generalization.
Actually, it is worse than that. Given the absence of relevant statistical historical data, it is impossible to say much that is reliable about levels of violence even in specific societies over relatively short time periods. Heck, it is hard enough to get an objective grasp of how violent present day societies are!
Remember, though, that the stuff you will see in historical movies, or read about in books (even, often, scholarly history books) is predominantly concerned with exciting events, and those tend to involve violence. Then, as now, most people’s daily life was not exciting or violent most of the time.
I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, medieval and earlier, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s the violence (wars) that get reported. This is especially true the further back you go. It seems to me that a big reason is the simple fact that wars were “news”, and kings liked to put up monuments and inscriptions celebrating their victories, and having scribes and poets write poems about their victories. And since a lot of this was literally carved in stone, that’s what has survived to today, and what gets put in the history books. Nobody was erecting steles in honor of everyday, mundane life.
I’m not familiar with the actual historical data, but I recall that Steven Pinker wrote a book claiming exactly that. In interviews he mentioned that rates of violent death in the 20th century are much lower than in previous centuries, even including WW1, WW2, the Holocaust, and every other example of state-sponsored mass murder. Basically the idea that he was putting forward was that warfare was more common and intense, and that violence was a routine way to resolve conflicts on a smaller scale. Even in times of peace, murder was common, and executions were a routine way to deal with criminals or rivals.
I recall an article by Isaac Asimov quoting a preindustrial historian dismissing a particular king as being unworthy of historical attention because “all” he did was reign peacefully for decades without any wars, rebellions or disasters. Nothing exciting.
Wars were essentially continuous in pre-modern times. Not that wars were going on everywhere at all times, but at any given time about 10% of the population of the world were involved in wars, as a rough rule of thumb. And war was generally in the nature of “total” war.
Genesis 6 states that the world in the years leading up to the Flood was very violent. The fact that it explicitly states this among the very few facts given about that purported time period might indicate that there was a perception among the writer that the “bad old days” were rather bad and that something had “happened” to make it better, like the Flood. The story doesn’t have to be true - the very fact that the author put this down indicates that the very idea in the OP, that the present time (for whatever value of “present”) is treated as more civilized than times past, may have been the prevailing wisdom then as well as now.
Jared Diamond has said that while modern states have horrible wars, these are intermittent, whereas primitive hunter-gatherer societies competing for limited resources often find themselves in an almost constant state of low-level warfare, raiding, and revenge-killing, resulting in a surprisingly high death rate over the long run.
In reply to critics of his book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, he said:
Of course, it’s not just the wars - consider that stuff like wife beating, slavery and corporal punishment for kids were all fairly common in pre-modern times. Add to that the numerous societies that practised human sacrifice, and it’s easy to see that those times were more violent in general.
I was recently listening to the audio version of Pinker’s book. I haven’t finished it because I needed a break from the unrelenting litany of violent tales from the past. He has massive amounts of background evidence for his assertions and certainly makes every period before modern times sound like a bloodbath.
Some of the things he brings up are surprisingly obvious once he mentions them. Although slavery continues today it is no longer as part of ordinary commercial conduct, it’s done by criminals. Churches routinely carried on reigns of terror. Manners were only invented because of necessity, things that are obvious now had to be specifically cautioned against. There were hundreds of capital offences, including minor crimes. For hundreds of years torture was routinely adminsitered.
And all this merely sets the tone for the extreme rates of murder and warfare that such societies participated in.
All in all the book was quite a revelation, although the US didn’t fare as well as most other parts of the world, remaining very violent in comparison.
Add getting mauled by predators, getting kicked by (or just falling off of) a horse, being injured by your own equipment, drowning, you name it… all the stuff that isn’t even intentional! – and I’d say that the answer to the question in the OP may well be “No, they were actually more violent than we think”
I think most of your OP has been pretty well answered, but I’ll just note that there is, of course, no factual answer to this part. It’s quite possible that in 500 years, our cities will be seen as islands of tranquility.
“It’s a familiar trope that ancient times were a lot more violent than modern days”
Not familiar to me. Although a few sources have been cited here (including a fiction author, a psychologist, and a biologist masquarading as a historian) I am just not aware that this is current accepted sociological history.
Here’s a blog I stumbled across that discusses hunter-gatherer mortality and seems to support the Pinker/Diamond/Panda analyses discussed above. (It also looks like it has interesting articles on paleoanthropology in general.)
I scanned the article linked to. Could you suggest just where this supports the idea that " ancient times were a lot more violent than modern days" since certainly masskillings, homicide and cannibalism are well documented in modern times as well.