This volume offers novel readings of ancient conflict narratives from around the ancient Mediterranean and explores their impact on later habits of understanding and representing war, with an innovative methodological focus on narrative interplay and visualisation.
This volume offers novel readings of ancient conflict narratives from around the ancient Mediterranean and explores their impact on later habits of understanding and representing war, with an innovative methodological focus on narrative interplay and visualisation.
The chapters provide an in-depth analysis of the ways in which interactions between a wide array of conflict narratives including written texts, art, sculpture and drawings result in culturally specific ways of visualising war, especially battle. The volume covers a large range of genres from a variety of ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, Persian, Jewish and Christian, and its innovative focus on interplay offers fresh insights into how modes of visualising war compare across time and space, as well as across different kinds of text. Covering material from the third millennium bce to the present, it also sheds new light on how different ways of visualising conflict have evolved over the centuries and continue to inform habits of visualising war today. A detailed methodological introduction lays the foundation for future studies of conflict narratives, and the volumes envoi sets the agenda for new research on visualising peace.
Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean
appeals to students and scholars working across a range of disciplines, including Classics and ancient Mediterranean studies, war studies, narratology and intertextuality studies.
1. (Inter)Visualising War: an Introduction - Alice König;
2. Bsotn and
Darius Year of Battles: Representations of Warfare in early Achaemenid
Persia - John O. Hyland;
3. Visualising War in Euripides Suppliant Women:
Fog, Clarity and Multiple Perspectives - Jon Hesk;
4. Visualising Battle in
Image and Text: Reading Kromayer against Polybius - Nicolas Wiater;
5. It is
God that Arbitrates the Scales of War: Divine Agency in Judean Portrayals of
Battle against Antiochus IV Epiphanes - Debra Scoggins Ballentine;
6. Model
Wars: Theorizing War in Greek and Roman Tactical Manuals - Courtney Roby;
7.
Divide and Conquer - Andrew Riggsby;
8. Aux Armes, Architectes! Vitruvius and
the Siege(s) of Marseille - John Oksanish;
9. Seeing Multiple in Lucans
Bellum Civile - Hannah-Marie Chidwick;
10. Broken Stories, Broken Bodies:
Fragmentation, Vision, Battle and Narrative in Silius, Martial and Trajans
Column - Helen Lovatt;
11. Battle Narratives for the Roman Dead: Perspectives
on Death and Grief from the Trojan War - Zahra Newby;
12. Cum dico proelia,
significo uictorias: Narrating War in the Panegyrici Latini - Catherine Ware;
13. The Late-Antique Battleground of Faith: Pollentia, Samarra and the
Milvian Bridge - Michael Hanaghan;
14. War Stories are World-Shaping: Tracing
the Feedback Loop between Narrative and Reality - Alice König;
15. Envoi:
From Achilles to Andromache, to Afghanistan, and beyond - Alice König,
Jennie Dunne and Jonathan DYoung.
Alice König is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews (UK). Co-founder of the Visualising War and Peace project, she has published on ancient military manuals, literary and cross-cultural interactions in the Roman empire, and ancient and modern discourses of peace and conflict.
Nicolas Wiater is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews (UK). His research focuses on late Hellenistic and early imperial Greek prose. His publications include The Ideology of Classicism (2011) and Late Hellenistic Literature in Dialogue (2022, edited with J. König).
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