Summary

In the course of ancient history there does seem a trend away from corporate punishment toward individual punishment. This trend paralleled and may have derived from the growth of the power of the state. The emphasis on individuality in death showed no clear trend since there were early and late examples. Because Axial Age formulations have usually obliterated earlier religious manifestations, it is tempting to see in traditions flowing from that time sanction for more concern with individual expression. And yet any ethical system will inevitably ask the one to conform to the norms of the many.

Thus we are left with many hundreds of thousands of named individuals and a smaller number of identified groups in the ancient records who acted in many ways as we still do. Did the people of the past think of themselves as people composed of emotions, histories, and ideas, acting in a world which they could manipulate? Sometimes they did, and in general with ancient texts, one can assume that planned purposes were being fulfilled, rational ideas were being pursued, even in the worship of gods which seem to monotheists to be mostly imaginary. We moderns do not always understand what the purposes were as we cannot share religious practice or faith in exactly the way understood by ancients.

Individualism is a matter of degree, and the degrees of assertion of separateness may in fact be greater in our societies than in ancient ones. A modern observer writes, ‘‘Identity, like love, is a story, not an absolute’’ (Munthe 2003). And stories can change. Though humans in most societies are flexible in their self-definitions, now stressing how like their peers they are, now stressing their differences from others, the ancient range of flexibility appears to be similar to those in later periods where the individual has also been claimed to have been invented.