Regular Episode
#129 – MINIONS, MOBS & MYRMIDONS
June 21, 2017

#129 – MINIONS, MOBS & MYRMIDONS

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow are joined by Dr. David Perlmutter and Caitlin Mongrain for a discussion that goes well beyond the little yellow guys in overalls. From the faceless rabble of ancient Greek epic poetry to the stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire, henchmen — minions, mobs, myrmidons — are one of fiction’s most durable tropes. But as this conversation makes clear, the trope has some deeply uncomfortable real-world roots.

David is a professor and Dean of the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University, where his research has focused for 25 years on political communication and visual persuasion. Caitlin completed her master’s at Texas Tech in 2015 and teaches Latin there. The two co-authored a chapter comparing ancient and modern henchmen for an anthology on villains in popular culture — which gives this episode an unusually wide chronological range: roughly 1200 BC to the present day.

⚔️ Defining the Henchman

What exactly is a henchman? David and Caitlin sketch out the archetype: loyal followers who execute the villain’s will without much apparent inner life, deployed in waves, dressed alike, and startlingly ineffective against any protagonist worth the name. They distinguish between professional henchmen (the Joker’s crew, stormtroopers) and flash henchmen — mobs that coalesce around a single cause and then disperse, like the torch-wielding villagers storming Castle Frankenstein.

The proposed distinction: henchmen are loyal to a leader; mobs are loyal to a cause. Minions, henchmen, and myrmidons are treated as variations on the same species — different genera, same family.

🏺 The Myrmidons: Henchmen Zero

Caitlin makes the case that the Myrmidons — the soldiers sworn to Achilles in Homer’s Iliad — may be henchmen zero in Western literature. A key insight: in the ancient Greek moral universe, the concept of the hero had nothing to do with ethics. Heroic status was conferred by divine parentage or divine favor, not virtue. The Greek ideal of kalos kagathos — “beautiful and good” — conflated physical attractiveness with nobility, leaving the common soldier like Thersites (the only named common man in the Iliad) explicitly ugly and morally beneath notice.

Caitlin notes that ancient depictions of soldiers, such as the famous Warrior Vase from Mycenae (c. 1200 BC), show organized, uniformed troops with remarkably little individual identity — more idea than person. Heroes and leaders, by contrast, are identified through labeling and heavy symbolism. The Myrmidons themselves are organized into sub-units with lieutenants, but their exact numbers remain unclear; the Iliad comes down through oral tradition and the scale of Bronze Age warfare is genuinely uncertain.

🧪 The Science of Following

David draws on research from his book 📚 Visions of War 💵 to explain why the henchman role has real biochemical and social underpinnings:

– Uniform dress as a unit-cohesion technology goes back at least to Neolithic rock art, where opposing groups are visibly differentiated by headdress, weapon, and clothing.
– Oxytocin — the so-called “cuddle hormone” — rises in chimpanzees facing an opposing group when they are surrounded by close allies, providing a biochemical reward for group membership under threat. Stress hormones similarly decrease in the presence of trusted companions during confrontation.
– Veterans across cultures consistently report that the bonds formed under fire were among the most significant of their lives — a finding that cuts across the individualist/collectivist cultural divide.
– Music, chanting, and synchronized movement (what historian William H. McNeill called “muscular bonding”) have accompanied group fighting since before recorded history.

🕹️ The Wild Hunt and Modern Henchmen

Caitlin introduces the other end of the chronological range: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the Polish-inflected action RPG whose spectral antagonists, the Wild Hunt, function as henchmen in the classical sense — they act without independent motivation, subordinating everything to their leader’s will. The game’s protagonist, Geralt, was himself once a captive of the Wild Hunt, adding an interesting wrinkle to the usual hero/henchman binary.

The chapter David and Caitlin co-authored explicitly pairs the Myrmidons with the Wild Hunt as bookends: henchmen zero and henchmen (very nearly) last, separated by roughly three millennia of storytelling tradition. The 🎬 Troy 💵 (2004) film, with Brad Pitt as Achilles, is cited as a recent popular-culture take on the Myrmidons.

🪖 Real-World Henchmen: The Dark Century

The conversation takes a sobering turn when David argues that the 20th century was, in effect, the century of the henchman — and that henchmen very nearly destroyed the world. Several threads emerge:

– The aesthetic appeal of belonging: David describes a French veteran of the Charlemagne Legion of the Waffen-SS who wrote a memoir describing being “entranced” by the image of the SS soldier — an appeal strikingly similar to ISIS recruitment videos that invited young men to “be in their own action movie.”
– The Nuremberg defense — “I was following orders” — as the explicit real-world articulation of henchman logic.
– Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, in which subjects administered what they believed to be lethal electric shocks when instructed by an authority figure — raising the question of whether henchmen are primarily following orders or primarily conforming.
– The role of early indoctrination: the Hitler Youth as a systematic pipeline for creating loyal followers from childhood.
– David’s article “Face-Lifting the Death’s Head” on the visual culture of SS memorabilia and its modern audience.

📱 Flash Mobs and Online Shame Cascades

The group considers whether Twitter shame mobs qualify as a form of henchman — and concludes they represent something slightly new: self-organizing henchmen with no designated leader. A target is identified, the group activates, and conformity pressure does the rest. David connects this to his research on online echo chambers and the recruitment strategies of extremist groups, noting that the internet rescued fringe movements that were dying for lack of a way to aggregate believers in the same physical space.

The broader point: all of us carry henchman potential. The biochemistry, the social psychology, and the ancient shame culture described by Caitlin are features of human cognition, not bugs reserved for the villainous. Recognizing that susceptibility, the guests suggest, is the first step toward not acting on it.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyberage 💵 by David D. Perlmutter
– 📚 Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945 💵 by Charles W. Sydnor Jr.
– 📚 Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View 💵 by Stanley Milgram
– 📚 Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History 💵 by William H. McNeill
– 📚 Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence 💵 by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson
– 📚 War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage 💵 by Lawrence H. Keeley

🔗 Related Links

– Myrmidons (Wikipedia)
– The Warrior Vase, Mycenae, c. 1200 BC (Wikipedia)
– Kalos kagathos — the Greek ideal of beauty-as-virtue (Wikipedia)
– Thersites — the only named common soldier in the Iliad (Wikipedia)
– Wild Hunt in folklore (Wikipedia)
– Milgram Experiment (Wikipedia)
– Halo Effect — the psychological basis of kalos kagathos in modern cognition (Wikipedia)
– Oxytocin and social bonding (Wikipedia)

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

From ancient Greece to modern movies, monsters and villains often get their assistance from mindless mobs of maleficent minions. Are they simply plot devices, or do minions tell us something about the real-world role of the follower when loyal obedience is valued more than heroic ethics? In this episode of Monstertalk, David Perlumtter and Cait Mongrain join us to discuss Minions, Mobs and Myrmidons.

David Perlmutter
David Perlmutter
Caitlin Mongrain
Caitlin Mongrain

Related Works

More References

  • Crockford, C., Deschner, T., & Wittig, R. M. (2017). What is the role of oxytocin in social buffering: Do primate studies change the picture?. In R. Hurlemann, & V. Grinevich (Eds.), Topics for Behavioral Pharmacology of Neuropeptides: Oxytocin. Springer.
  • Wrangham, R. W. (1999). Evolution of coalitionary killing. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 110 (S29), 1096–8644.
  • Wrangham, R. W., & Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic males: Apes and the origins of human violence. NY, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  • Keeley, L. H. (1997). War before civilization. NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Ferguson, R. B. (1997). War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. American Anthropologist, 99 (2), 424–425.
  • Jackson, J. W. (1993). Realistic Group Conflict Theory: A Review and Evaluation of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature. Psychological Record, 43 (3), 395–415.
  • Sherif, M. (1966). In common predicament: Social psychology of intergroup conflict and cooperation. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
  • Rösner, L., & Krämer, N. C. (2016). Verbal venting in the social web: Effects of anonymity and group norms on aggressive language use in online comments. Social Media + Society, 2 (3), 1–13. doi: 2056305116664220.
  • Doosje, B., Ellemers, N., & Spears, R. (1995). Perceived intragroup variability as a function of group status and identification. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 31 (5), 410–436.
  • Hanson, V. D. (2004). The western way of war. Australian Army Journal, 2 (1), 157.
  • Hanson, V. D. (2009). The western way of war: Infantry battle in classical Greece. CA, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
  • Perlmutter, D. (1999). Comrades chapter. In Visions of war: Picturing warfare from the stone age to the cyber age (pp. 89–116). New York: St. Martin’s Press,
  • McNeill, W. H. (1997). Keeping together in time. NY, Boston: Harvard University Press.
  • Silvestri, L.E. (2015). Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone. Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
  • Shils, E. A. (1950). Primary groups in the American army. Continuities in social research: Studies in the scope and method of the American soldier, 16–39.
  • Surbeck, M., Boesch, C., Girard-Buttoz, C., Crockford, C., Hohmann, G., & Wittig, R. M. (2017). Comparison of male conflict behavior in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), with specific regard to coalition and post-conflict behavior. American Journal of Primatology, 79 (6), 1–11.
  • Radice, B. (1968). Pliny and the Panegyricus. Greece and Rome (Second Series), 15 (02), 166–172. Perhaps)

Some books on “henchmen” in real life

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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