Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (2024)

an introduction to the special issue of The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms

The Roman conduct of war appears to have been a ritualized affair. This thesis is concerned with unfolding this ritual pattern and discussing the socio-psychological significance this may have held for the Roman soldier at war. It investigates the various rituals that the soldier would have been witness or participant of: the lustratio, auspicium, devotio hostium, and passum sub iugum. The comparative analysis and source collection of these rituals may already offer new insights. Its Republican chronological scope results from this. Literary sources form the primary focus of this approach, intermittently supported by the disciplines of archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphy. Accordingly, it attempts to position these rituals in the course of warfare, as it would feature for the soldier. From the vantage point of trauma studies and the principle of narrative understanding, this thesis offers an alternative interpretation of the significance ritual may have had for the Roman soldier’s experience of battle. Thereby, it explores new avenues of study to the experience of ritual and battle. This thesis argues that the various rituals that featured in the preamble and summation of battle had significant potential to shape the individual’s anticipation, experience, and memory of the event. The rituals that the soldier would be witness or participant of, aided him in the creation of a meaningful narrative of events, thereby having the potential to offer psychological relief. - RMA Thesis.

M. Lagogianni-Georgakarakos (ed.), Glorious Victories. Between Myth and History. National Archaeological Museum , 2020

The Independent Scholar, 2023

This paper proposes a radical departure from previous studies of Agathias, an under-studied Late Antique author who offers us a unique perspective of the 6th century when we consider the milieu in which he wrote his Histories. Agathias, this paper argues, exhibited signs of trauma from the news of constant warfare in Italy and the Caucasus and the barbarian raids on Constantinople, all of which he tried to process and resolve by creating a narrative, which was filled with inconsistencies and moralizing tangents. Agathias’ Histories is more than his impartial and accurate retelling of events; it is his attempt to make sense of his trauma with the writtenword

The Fall of Cities: Commemoration in Literature, Folk Song, and Liturgy, 2016

I follow the thread of the theme of the sacked city from its earliestmanifestation in Mesopotamian historiography to the Iliad, showing thatthe Greek epic picked up on many themes originating in early second millennium Mesopotamia, and reworked them to new purposes. As withthe Hittites, the Greeks used the claim of responsibility for the destructionof a famous city to position themselves on the world stage and to placethemselves in world history, conceived of as a series of cities destroyed inturn. The deepened understanding of the tradition behind the Homericepic improves our ability to appreciate the innovations as well. Furthermore, I suggest that we take into account not only the interplaybetween female personal lament and male epic in the Iliad, but alsopossible influence from an indigenous liturgical lament tradition originallycognate with the Mesopotamian one, but diverging decisively when itbegan to be used to celebrate in cult a city whose ruined walls becamethe locus of cultural memories about a lost age of heroes.

E. Solomon (ed.), Contested Antiquity. Archaeological Heritage and Social Conflict in Modern Greece and Cyprus, 2021

If “the past is a foreign country”, then Greece’s classical past could be described – and it has been – as an ideal, as well as idyllic land, colonized by the West. This paper employs post-colonial theory combined with discussions of trauma as a historical agent in order to investigate ways in which contemporary Greek museums and archaeological sites strive to attract the colonial gaze by reclaiming ownership of the nation’s (neo)-classical past; at the same time, however, this exercise may be seen as an effort to alleviate the pains of modernity as experienced by a people who has never overcome the trauma of its separation from its famed antiquity. As a result, Greek archaeological spaces – both museums and sites – can be described as “sites of trauma”, as the placescapes where the unlived experiences of an imagined past become revived. A number of examples are discussed, including the Benaki and Acropolis Museums, as well as several clusters of antiquities preserved “in situ”, mostly within the urban grid or incorporated in buildings and other structures, such as Athenian metro stations. Such cases of incidental archaeology, the paper contends, are devised in order to suture, in the psychoanalytical sense of the term, Greek national imaginary onto the very sites where the nation experienced the trauma of its separation from its past.

Religious Studies Review, 2011

This Open Access volume reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.

Students of Greek warfare can scarcely avoid becoming saturated with the agonistic model of hoplite battle. In various manifestations it has dominated scholarship for over seventy years, and through all that time it has provoked very little criticism before some recent work of Peter Krentz, which has provided much of the groundwork for the present study. 2 Our purpose here will be to undertake a more thorough survey of the long history of scholarship on the matter; this should reveal some of the intellectual background from which the idea arose, as well as the ancient evidence which has most

This thesis studies the evidence related to warfare and warriors in the Early Iron Age of Greece, from the eleventh to the early seventh century B.C.E. It argues that “warrior” identity, as expressed through burial with weapons or depictions of armed men and combat in pictorial painting and literature, is connected to violent action in order to create, maintain, and reinforce the relationship between authority and violent action. The forms that this violent action took were variable, from interregional conflict to overseas raids. This is outlined in Chapter 1, which is followed by two chapters summarizing the palatial (Chapter 2) and postpalatial (Chapter 3) background to the Early Iron Age.Chapters 4 to 7 present the evidence. In order to provide a more thorough analysis the focus is limited to the regions of Attica, central Euboea, the Argolid, and Knossos. The study of warfare in this period has been dominated by the study of weapons; in this thesis the approach focuses on the contexts in which these weapons are found, burials (Chapter 4), sanctuaries (Chapter 5), and occasionally settlements (Chapter 6). In these chapters the particular treatment and emphasis on weapons and armour is considered based on an understanding of these contexts in the period. In Chapter 7, representations and the treatment of warriors and warfare in Early Iron Age pictorial pottery is considered, as is briefly the literary evidence from the end of this period, which form the means by which contemporary people came to understand warfare. Chapter 8 discusses the evidence, while Chapter 9 summarizes the conclusions.This thesis shows that while warrior identity and the practice of war are closely related, in these areas of Early Iron Age Greece there are variations in the identification of men as warriors and in the intensity with which war is fought. Throughout the period, these regions express warrior identity in broadly similar ways, but with variations in duration, accessibility, and meaning. The eighth century is particularly a period of change with the intensification of warfare manifest in the destruction of settlements, but these changes are not restricted to this century, and are in many ways similar to the preceding centuries on a larger scale.

Pallas. Revue d'Etudes Antiques, 2020

Collective Violence and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean, eds. S. Ammann, H. Bezold, S. Germany, and J. Rhyder, pp. 159-188, 2023