Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     An important strand in the history of terrorism is Herostratic crime. This phenomenon, consisting of a violent act or series of violent acts motivated in whole or in part by a craving for notoriety or self-glorification, can be traced from the destruction in 356 BC of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, by the arsonist Herostratos. The man identified in ancient sources as Herostratos is a shadowy figure of whose life nothing is known before he was apprehended, tortured, and executed. The death penalty was accompanied by a postmortem sentence of the type that came to be known in Latin as damnatio memoriae, the damnation of the condemned man's memory through the imposition of a ban on the mention of his name. Soon after the death of the temple destroyer this prohibition was flouted by Classical authors; through the ages and around the world the terrible name of Herostratos became paradigmatic of the morbid quest for eternal fame through crimes of violence. New attacks made against lives and monuments seemed to be motivated by personal vanity, whatever highsounding phrases the criminal might launch in justification. Writers who tried to understand these puzzling outbreaks of murder and destruction often invoked Herostratos as an archetype.
     The recognizable features of these crimes for fame, and the commentaries that these acts have inspired, make it possible to attempt a definition of what can be called the "Herostratos syndrome":
     -- Herostratos and his followers share a desire for fame or notoriety as long lasting and widespread as can be achieved. This desire may be appeased by publicity for the criminal's name but often, preferring to elude detection by retaining anonymity, he is satisfied with the celebrity that arises from his act. These alternative or combined means of gratification, publicity for the name or for the crime, reflect the same underlying Herostratic impulse, that is, a drive to maximize a sense of power. The criminal feels an enhancement of power in the form of self-glorification (the achievement of name recognition) or self-aggrandizement (the demonstration of capacity for destruction through accomplishment of a flaunting act that will live in infamy). Herostratic violence may be perpetrated by a person acting alone or in conjunction with others who may or may not share his thirst for fame.

     -- The aim of the crime is to cause the public to experience panic, distress, insecurity, or loss of confidence.
     -- A famous person, property, or institution is often chosen as victim or target. As the Roman essayist Valerius Maximus observed in his discussion of searchers after negative fame, a killer may hope, by his attack, to absorb the celebrity of his prey -- to be known, for example, as "the man who assassinated Philip of Macedon." The same mechanism operates in arsonists and other destroyers of well-known monuments, such as the Temple of Artemis.
     -- A feeling of loneliness, alienation, mediocrity, and failure may trigger an envy directed against those perceived to be more successful or prestigious. Envy is exacerbated by an ambitious, competitive spirit and the conviction that avenues to success are unfairly blocked.
     -- The Herostratic criminal may be afflicted by self-destructive compulsions: to confess; to taunt or to more overtly aid the police who pursue him; and to commit suicide or suffer death either in the course of the crime or by execution. Since his ultimate goal is glory, the remnant of the criminal's life becomes contemptible as a value in itself; it is a pawn to be traded for accomplishment of his motive.
     -- Herostratic violence may acquire a sacrilegious dimension when the criminal strikes a religious shrine or a secular target that has iconic significance.
     -- The craving for fame may combine with other motives, personal and/or ideological, in inducing a criminal act.
     In November 2001, Ego-net, a German Web site commenting on the "age-old phenomenon of terrorism," referred to Herostratos as "the first terrorist who entered history."¹ This claim appears to be justified because the nature of the crime at Ephesus satisfies most of the criteria of the definition of terrorism espoused by a leading expert on modern terrorist activity, Walter Laqueur, who has written in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, "Over the centuries, terrorism has appeared in many guises. It is not an ideology or a political doctrine, but rather a method -- the substate application of violence or the threat of violence to sow panic and bring about political change."² Laqueur's definition would fit perfectly the outrages of Herostratos and his followers, except that their need for self-glorification is satisfied by 

causing public panic or dismay, whether or not any of these criminals may also seek or avow a purpose to effect political change. In an earlier work, in fact, Lacqueur referred to Herostratos's motive as a common factor in the "new" terrorism: "Many terrorist acts are committed by individuals following in the footsteps of Herostrat [sic], the citizen of Ephesus in ancient times who burned the local temple simply so that his name would be remembered forever."³
     In Terrorist Lives (1994), Maxwell Taylor and Ethel Quayle express their belief that "a core element in any account of terrorism is that it involves the use of violence to achieve political ends." Yet their analysis of terrorist groups in Ireland, Europe, and the Middle East, based on interviews with their members, reveals significant convergences of modern terrorists' motivations with those of the politically unaligned Herostratic criminal. The ideologically committed terrorists whom Taylor and Quayle have studied appear to act under the influence of a commitment even more fundamental than political allegiance -- belief in the "just-world phenomenon":

This is a widely recognised feature of our interpretation of the world as it impinges on us. We like to think that virtue is rewarded, that a hard working life should result in a comfortable retirement, that those who cheat or steal to our disadvantage are ultimately caught. . . . In one way, many terrorists and their supporters would claim that what they do is a response to an unjust world. . . .

The sense of a "just world" seems to lie at the very heart of the social and psychological response to political violence of both terrorists and their victims.⁴

It [terrorism] is, at least initially, a means to achieve something which is intrinsically desirable and important to the person involved. That desirability may relate to nationalist or political aspirations, but as far as the person is concerned, its attainment will result in a better world, either for the individual or for his community. Seeking for ". . . a place 

in the sun . . ." or some similar phrase has occurred more than once in interviews about this subject.⁵

Whatever else terrorism might be, it is a highly effective means of gaining attention in the media; indeed, the amount of attention is positively correlated with the severity of a terrorist attack.
     The former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, referred to "the oxygen of publicity" as being a vital requirement for the sustenance of a terrorist organization, and there is a clear recognition on the part of all sides that terrorism is a war largely fought in the media.⁶

My distinct feeling was that I was really making a deep mark on the reality of the country, and this sensation was given to me by the newspapers and magazines, through the mass media. When you do certain things, and these things turn into big paragraphs in the papers; and when you see that because of the things you explode, fights and chaos happens [sic] between the politicians; all this summed up gave me a sensation of great power. It gives you the feeling of being powerful.⁷

     The videotape of Osama bin Laden that recorded for broadcast his rejoicing in the destruction of the World Trade Center seemed at least as much designed to satisfy the al-Qaeda leader's desire for self-aggrandizement as to spread terror or recruit killers. The elusive Osama does not seem bent on surrendering his life for the cause, but even suicide bombers may be moved, like Herostratos, by a wish to enhance and perpetuate their own sense of importance. Avishai Margalit, in her article "Suicide Bombers," argues that the Palestinian terrorists' self-sacrifice may now be encouraged less by the "idea of winning a place in paradise" than by the prospect of living on in human memory:

If it is easy to question whether being a shahid [martyr] secures an immediate entrance to paradise, no one can doubt that being a shahid secures instant fame, spread by television stations like the Qatar-based al-Jazeera and the Lebanon-based al-Manar, which are watched throughout the Arab world. Once a suicide bomber has completed his mission he at once becomes a phantom celebrity. Visitors to the occupied territories have been struck by how well the names of the suicide bombers are known, even to small children.⁸

different from others in the community from which they come. . . . Violence and brutality may characterise the criminal, yet, as with the terrorist, we would be unlikely to place the criminal within the category of clinical abnormality."¹⁰
     Despite Walter Laqueur's rather cursory suggestion that Herostratos and criminals in his mold belong among the "deranged,"¹¹ it is striking that, with the principal exception of German Expressionist Georg Heym, virtually none of the writers who have produced imagined portraits of Herostratos through the ages present him as insane. He is, instead, a man who has become a menace because he believes that life has cheated him.
     It should be further noted that, under American criminal law, Herostratic criminals may be prosecuted as terrorists, for a political dimension is not a prerequisite to a finding of an act of terrorism. American criminal statutes recognize that terrorism may have the objective of intimidating the public rather than an aim to influence governmental policy. In the year following the September 11 attack, at least thirty-three states amended their criminal codes to address the enhanced threat of terrorism. Many of the legislative enactments followed federal law by defining "act of terrorism" as a violent felony intended either to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence or affect governmental policy or conduct."¹²
     In Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome I provide the first detailed examination of the history and literature of Herostratos and his followers. The book has three principal purposes:
     -- Description of the birth of the Herostratos tradition in the Hellenistic era and its spread throughout the world over more than two millennia.

     -- Identification and analysis of criminal cases in which the desire for fame in the mode of Herostratos has been or can persuasively be suggested as a contributing motive. The wide-ranging cases of destruction and killing to be cited include the attempted explosion of England's Greenwich Observatory in 1894; the 1950 burning of Kyoto's Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which is the subject of Yukio Mishima's novel of the same name; the Taliban's destruction of the giant Buddhas in Afghanistan; the demolition of the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina; the assassination of a royal, Empress Elisabeth of Austria; the celebrity killing of John Lennon; some American political assassinations; the Unabomber; and the Columbine High School Massacre. Many of these cases have inspired explicit comparisons with Herostratos, either in contemporaneous reportage or subsequent literature. A separate chapter will be devoted to commentators who have recognized Herostratos's pertinence to the attack on the World Trade Center.
     -- A critique of the principal works of literature that are either based on the life or tradition of Herostratos or contain illuminating references to his crime. Among the authors considered in Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome are Cicero, John of Salisbury, Chaucer, Montaigne, Cervantes, Sir Thomas Browne, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Glucksmann, Alessandro Verri, Fernando Pessoa, Miguel de Unamuno, Sigmund Freud, and Mark Twain. Many genres, such as fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, essays, and journalism, are discussed with particular emphasis on literature since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the world's interest in Herostratos began to intensify, perhaps as a result of Romantic authors' interest in crime themes.

     Like the Cain and Abel myth, the Herostratos tradition is remarkable for "the extraordinary longevity and variousness of its appeal."¹³ The rich imaginative literature that has clustered around the sketchy early accounts of the Ephesian arson deepens our understanding of criminal instincts driven by a hunger for fame. New aspects of the strange compulsion are revealed as time passes and brilliant writers continue to turn to the Herostratic conundrum. The Roman essayist Valerius Maximus, for example, was the first to detect the link between the destruction of an iconic building and the assassination of a prominent leader, both crimes being intended to absorb instantly the fame 

of the target. The Greek satirist Lucian revealed a new facet of Herostratos's psychological malady when he emphasized its fundamentally suicidal character. It remained for Mark Twain to look beneath avowed political motivation for the assassination of an empress to discover the morbid passion for infamy. Further surprises date from our own time. A decade before the World Trade Center attack, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's musical Assassins (1991) reminded us, if we were listening, that a human mind obsessed with fame had, during President Nixon's administration, conceived the idea of hijacking a jetliner for the purpose of crashing into the White House.

* "Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome" first appeared as the introduction to Albert Borowitz, Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (Kent State University Press, 2005).

1 "Der Alte vom Berge u. A. Terrorismus -- ein uraltes Phanomen: Woher kommt der Terrorismus?" ("The Old Man of the Mountain and Others. Terrorism, an Age-Old Phenomenon: Where Does Terrorism Come From?"), Ego-Net, Nov. 2001, http://www.berlinx.de/ego/1101/art3.htm (accessed Jan. 14, 2003).

2 Walter Laqueur, "Left, Right, and Beyond: The Changing Face of Terror," in James F. Hoge Jr. & Gideon Rose (eds.), HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? TERRORISM AND THE NEW WAR 71 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001).

3 Walter Laqueur, THE NEW TERRORISM: FANATICISM AND THE ARMS OF MASS DESTRUCTION 265 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

4 Maxwell Taylor & Ethel Quayle, TERRORIST LIVES 8 (London: Brassey's, 1994).

5 Id. at 35.

6 Id. at 7, 16.

7 Id. at 149-50. The attraction of fame was also emphasized by a terrorist trainer interviewed in Pakistan in 2002 under the supervision of Professor Jessica Stern: "One becomes important due to his work. Successful operations make a militant famous and glamorous among his fellow men." Jessica Stern, TERROR IN THE NAME OF GOD: WHY RELIGIOUS MILITANTS KILL 217 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

8 Avishai Margalit, "The Suicide Bombers," 50 (1) New York Review of Books 38 (2003).

9 "Mind of the Suicide Bomber," CBSNews.com, May 25, 2003, a summary of a report in 60 Minutes, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/23/60minutes/main555344.shtml (accessed May 12, 2004).

10 Taylor & Quayle, supra, note 4, at 13, 57.

11 Laqueur, supra note 3, at 265. Other criminals Laqueur brackets with Herostratos as deranged are John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Reagan, and the would-be assassins of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

12 The federal definition of "international terrorism" includes violent acts that appear to be intended "(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping." 18 U.S.C. §  2331. A typical State statute, Code of Virginia §  18.2, under which the first of the Washington sniper cases was prosecuted, defines "act of terrorism" as a felony committed with the intent to "(i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; or (ii) influence the policy, conduct or activities of the government of the United States, a state or locality through intimidation or coercion." See Donna Lyons, "States Enact New Terrorism Crimes and Penalties," National Conference of State Legislatures, State Legislative Report 27, no. 19 (Nov. 2002): 1-4.

13 Ricardo J. Quinones, THE CHANGES OF CAIN 3 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).