In the legendry, literature, art and popular cultures of the English-speaking peoples, Robin Hood has become the iconic outlaw hero. But the tradition of the robber who fights on the side of the poor against injustice and oppression is powerful around the world, in many cases long predating the earliest mention of the forest archer. Some of these traditions were in existence before any known contact between the countries that sustain them. Whether they developed in one place and were spread through the networks of oral storytelling along trade and migration routes, or whether they arose independently as broadly similar human responses to similar social, economic and political circumstances is not known. Perhaps we never will know. But it is possible to trace the earliest known expressions of the outlaw hero and the tradition that sustains such figures in the Roman Empire, in China's Northern Song Dynasty and throughout Europe since the Dark Ages.

Outlaws of Empire

In ancient Greece, banditry was originally considered to be just another way of earning a living. By the time of the Roman Empire however, it had become an especially heinous crime and those who followed the calling were nonpersons, denied all legal rights and liable to be crucified or thrown to the beasts in the gladiatorial arena for the grisly pleasure of the spectators.