“Nobody’s innocent. Nobody.” — Agamemnon, Troy (2004)
After watching The Odyssey, I found myself returning to Troy for the third time. I have always enjoyed the film for its epic scale, Greek mythology, costumes and battles, but watching it again made me notice ideas that had previously slipped past me. Perhaps that is the beauty of returning to an old story: the film has not changed, but our experiences have. This time, I found myself thinking less about who would win the war and more about Troy and human nature.
One exchange in particular stayed with me. As Troy falls, King Priam pleads with Agamemnon:
Priam: “Please. The children. Spare the innocents.”
Agamemnon replies:
“Nobody’s innocent. Nobody.”
It is a brutal answer.
Although Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy is based upon the world of Homer’s Iliad, this particular exchange should not be mistaken for a direct quotation from Homer. The film adapts, rearranges and invents parts of the ancient story for cinema. Yet Agamemnon’s words raise a question that would not feel out of place in Greek philosophy at all.
Are any of us truly born innocent?
The uncomfortable memory that made me question innocence
The relationship between Troy and human nature took me back to a strange memory from my childhood.
During the summer, ants would sometimes march along our kitchen. As a young child, I remember taking a table knife and chopping some of them in half. I cannot explain why I did it. I wasn’t angry with the ants. They had done nothing to me, and there was no sophisticated thought behind my behaviour. At the time, it simply felt like an action I could perform.
As an adult, of course, I look at it differently.
It wasn’t morally right to kill a living creature for no reason, yet the child holding that knife did not possess the same understanding of suffering, empathy and consequence that the adult remembering it possesses now.
I have noticed similar impulses in very young children. Babies and toddlers may grab a pet dog’s ears, pull a cat’s tail, pinch someone or bite when frustrated. The animal may clearly be uncomfortable, yet the child might not fully understand the pain being caused.
Does that make the child cruel?
As developmental psychologists have shown, physical aggression can emerge surprisingly early in childhood. Behaviours such as hitting, kicking and biting can appear during the first years of life, while the ability to regulate emotions, understand another person’s distress and control impulses is still developing. Research into early childhood development has also found links between weaker inhibitory control and higher levels of physical aggression. This does not mean that young children are naturally cruel; rather, it shows that the ability to stop an impulse and recognise its consequences develops gradually alongside empathy and social understanding.
So perhaps my childhood memory wasn’t evidence that I had been born cruel. Perhaps it demonstrates the enormous difference between having an impulse and possessing the moral understanding to question it.
That distinction interests me because morality may not begin with the absence of aggressive instinct at all. It may begin when we develop enough awareness to recognise that another living being can suffer—and enough self-control to choose not to cause that suffering.
Were humans born to fight?
This is where Troy and human nature becomes particularly fascinating to me.
I have often wondered whether human beings were designed to be slightly barbaric because, at some stage in our evolution, we needed aggression to survive. Our distant ancestors could not call the police when threatened by another person. They could not visit a supermarket when hungry or lock themselves safely inside a modern house.
Humans had to find food, defend themselves, protect their children and escape danger. Fear and aggression therefore have obvious survival functions.
Perhaps there is a little Achilles hidden within humanity after all.
But that does not necessarily mean humans were born only to fight.
Aggression is one part of the human story. Cooperation is another.
Our ancestors survived through groups, families and communities. People shared knowledge, food and protection. Children required years of care before becoming independent. Human beings learned from one another and passed information between generations.
In other words, survival was not simply about being the strongest warrior.
Sometimes survival meant having somebody beside you.
This is why I have started questioning my earlier belief that love must have been a secondary human emotion. Perhaps love, attachment and cooperation were part of survival all along.
Agamemnon’s dangerous philosophy
When Agamemnon declares that nobody is innocent, he sounds almost philosophical. Yet we should remember what is actually happening in the scene.
Priam is asking him to spare children.
Agamemnon’s response removes the distinction between the people responsible for the war and those who had no power over it.
That changes the meaning of his statement completely.
Looking at Troy and human nature in this way, I no longer hear “Nobody’s innocent” simply as a profound truth. I also hear it as a warning.
If we decide that nobody is innocent, we can justify almost anything.
Priam represents another side of humanity. He has lived through war, watched his kingdom collapse and suffered devastating losses, yet he can still recognise vulnerability in another human being.
His instinct is mercy.
Agamemnon’s instinct is domination.
Both are human.
Perhaps that contradiction is one reason stories such as The Iliad have survived for thousands of years. Humanity has always been capable of tenderness and violence, sometimes frighteningly close together.
Priam and Achilles: Homer’s greater lesson
Homer gives us an even more powerful example through Priam and Achilles in Book 24 of The Iliad.
Achilles has killed Priam’s beloved son Hector. Priam then does something extraordinary: he enters the Greek camp and approaches the very man responsible for his son’s death.
Priam appeals to Achilles by asking him to remember his own father.
The scene is astonishing because two enemies suddenly recognise something in each other beyond the war. Priam is a grieving father. Achilles is a son who knows that his own father will eventually lose him.
For a moment, Greek and Trojan become simply human.
They grieve.
Achilles eventually agrees to return Hector’s body and grants the Trojans time for the funeral.
This is perhaps where Troy and human nature becomes much more hopeful than Agamemnon’s declaration suggests. Humanity’s capacity for aggression may be ancient, but so is our capacity to recognise suffering in another person.
Homer does not give us a world populated entirely by heroes and villains. His characters can be proud, jealous, loving, reckless, loyal, violent and compassionate.
Rather like us.
What would Socrates say?
Socrates lived centuries after the period in which the Trojan War was traditionally believed to have occurred, but I would love to know what he would have made of Agamemnon’s statement.
Knowing Socrates, I suspect he would have answered it with another question.
What exactly do we mean by innocent?
He might then have asked whether somebody can be guilty of something they do not yet understand.
That question takes me straight back to the ants.
Socratic philosophy famously connects wrongdoing with ignorance. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates develops the challenging idea commonly expressed as the view that people do not willingly choose evil while fully understanding it as evil. His argument is much more complicated than saying that harmful behaviour should simply be excused. Rather, knowledge, virtue and our understanding of what is genuinely good are deeply connected.
That idea changes the way I interpret childhood behaviour.
A toddler hitting another toddler isn’t necessarily contemplating morality and choosing evil. Their emotional regulation, understanding of other people’s perspectives and ability to stop an impulse are still developing. Studies of childhood aggression similarly show that inhibitory control develops rapidly during the preschool years and is associated with aggressive behaviour.
Perhaps innocence is therefore not about never causing harm.
Perhaps it is about understanding.
The battle between instinct and wisdom
Thinking about Troy and human nature has made me reconsider the idea that humans are simply a cruel species.
Yes, humans hunt.
Humans fight.
Humans become angry, territorial, jealous and competitive.
History certainly gives us enough evidence of our capacity for destruction.
Yet that isn’t the complete picture.
We rescue strangers. We protect children who aren’t our own. We care for animals. We feed people we have never met. We grieve for people separated from us by thousands of years simply because somebody wrote their story down.
The fact that I can now look back at those ants and feel uncomfortable is itself evidence of change. The child acted without fully examining the action. The adult can return to the memory and ask why.
Socrates might have appreciated that part.
For him, examining our beliefs mattered enormously. Philosophy wasn’t simply about producing clever quotations. It was about questioning what we think we know.
Maybe the important question isn’t whether humans are naturally good or naturally bad.
Maybe it is what we do with the nature we have inherited.
Nobody is innocent — but that isn’t the end
After considering Troy and human nature, Agamemnon’s words still fascinate me, but I no longer accept them in quite the same way.
“Nobody’s innocent” can sound like a declaration that humanity is fundamentally corrupt.
I prefer another interpretation.
Perhaps none of us reaches adulthood completely untouched by mistakes, selfishness, anger or moments we wish we had handled differently. That does not make compassion meaningless. In fact, perhaps recognising our own imperfections gives us a greater reason to practise it.
The child who once chopped ants in half grew into an adult capable of wondering whether the ants suffered.
Achilles, the terrifying warrior, was capable of sitting with the father of the man he killed.
Priam, surrounded by destruction, could still ask for innocent lives to be spared.
Human nature contains all of these contradictions.
That is ultimately what I find so compelling about Troy and human nature. Beneath the bronze armour, magnificent temples, gods, kings and legendary battles lies a question that remains remarkably modern: are we controlled by our instincts, or can wisdom teach us to become more than them?
Perhaps we were born with the instinct to fight.
But we were also born with the ability to learn.
And somewhere between those two things lies the extraordinary, complicated experience of being human.
— Earl in the Unknown
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