The story of the rise of civilization—which is mass aggression socially defined—is told within the Epic of Gilgamesh:

Book 1: Focuses on the downward aggression of Gilgamesh against his subjects.

Book 2: The focus is on mankind’s search for an antidote to the oppressive Gilgamesh—Enkidu, the wild free spirit—the tyrant’s peer in aggression, who becomes the king’s accomplice after they discover they have so much in common.

Book 3-5: Focus on man as the predator that challenges his own environment, essentially detailing the notion that civilization itself is a form of aggression against the natural order.

Books 6-8: The focus is on the price paid for defying and overturning the natural order.

Books 9-1: The lesson of the lone vision quest of Gilgamesh is that man will never achieve balance with the natural order in the wake of his disturbing it, unless those who ascend to the highest human positions look upward for counsel and outward for challenges, away from and beyond the world of men, and that only the ruler [top aggressor] of a civilization who does so can alleviate the suffering of his people, to become a deliverer rather than an oppressor.

The entire epic is a tale of domesticated mankind as a failed state, without engagement with a higher or outer totality, indicating that hierarchal and horizontal violence are abominations caused by man’s domestication. This fits well with the idea that the first settled people would have folk memories of a time –reflected in the person of Enkidu—when all aggression was outward as the hunting people explored and exploited a wider, wild reality, rather than exploiting each other in a circumscribed, domesticated field of experience. Thus far there is very little evidence to support the notion of primitive peoples employing aggression within their familial group, where it is a gross and ever present aspect of civilized life, with the people of Uruk in the epic shouting so painfully to heaven of their unjust suffering as to stir the gods to action.

This much-examined epic tragedy seems to confirm the warnings of heedless tyranny among domesticated man as Agamemnon fills the role of Gilgamesh turned distant, materialistic monster—not even much of a man any longer. The corrupting effects of power have diminished this king beyond heroic redemption, so the story focuses on a murderous litany of horizontal aggression between heroes, with the greatest of heroes—the doomed Enkidu as Achilles—sitting out much of the action, as his natural strength is now so far removed from the remote hierarchal structure of the evolved State that he cannot relate to it in terms that are not either monstrous or sacrificial.

So, where the violence tree in the epic of Gilgamesh takes the pyramidal form of the pine, with, at its nadir, a downward focus, and its apogee, an upward focus, the violence tree in The Iliad is more of a weeping willow, its spreading branches of horizontal strife eventually sweeping the ground of their own melancholy weight, with no ascendant prospect.