Cultural Perceptions of Violence in the Hellenistic World

Michael Champion, Lara O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367595210
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351803304
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Violence had long been central to the experience of Hellenistic Greek cities and to their civic discourses. This volume asks how these discourses were shaped and how they functioned within the particular cultural constructs of the Hellenistic world. It was a period in which warfare became more professionalised, and wars increasingly ubiquitous. The period also saw major changes in political structures that led to political and cultural experimentation and transformation in which the political and cultural heritage of the classical city-state encountered the new political principles and cosmopolitan cultures of Hellenism. Finally, and in a similar way, it saw expanded opportunities for cultural transfer in cities through (re)constructions of urban space. Violence thus entered the city through external military and political shocks, as well as within emerging social hierarchies and civic institutions. Such factors also inflected economic activity, religious practices and rituals, and the artistic, literary and philosophical life of the polis.

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1 ‘War is the father and king of all’

Discourses, experiences, and theories of Hellenistic violence

Michael Champion and Lara O’Sullivan

Violence has an irreducibly Janus-like character, inscribing antagonistic contradiction at the heart of social life. Janus, famously, looks both ways and stands guard over the gates of war, looking forward and backwards, holding past and future together, or, perhaps, pointing to the instability of time, especially under the sign of violence. The gates of war close and break time’s continuity. Janus-like violence can be figured as destructive or creative, it can fragment or unify, it creates and erases boundaries, produces and arises from powerful emotion and obliterates the capacity for feeling, it is coldly rational or passionately burning. The oppositional pairs can be multiplied, and point to the way violence ‘makes and unmakes’ the world, bodies, subjects, cultures, and social formations.¹ The suspicion arises that the tendency to think of violence in such contrastive pairs is itself a feature of the phenomenon, as violence forces interpreters into long-established categories while they simultaneously and often helplessly recognise the ultimate futility of such conceptual schemes in the face of violence.

Perhaps, then, it is Proteus, not Janus, to whom we should refer. In the Odyssey (4.410ff), Proteus takes on the forms of everything in the earth, thereby also breaking all terrestrial form and embodiment. He is only given fixed shape, and his civilising prophecy enabled, through an act of violence. If Proteus symbolises fluid identity, violence destroys him, erasing his shifting subjectivity. But if identity is stable, Proteus’ violent instability is rectified through violence, opening up against violent flux the possibility of knowledge and interpersonal communication.² We might well see the Proteus episode figuring violence as flux: Proteus’ shapes represent violence and uncontrollable nature – rushing water, blazing fire, tall trees and wild animals, lions, snakes, leopards, boars. Yet as Menelaus wrestles with Proteus, his perception of his foe is mediated through norms of heroic combat, and the consequent production of cultural knowledge is grounded in violent struggle. Proteus, of course, shifts from his Homeric identity to that found in Stesichorus, Aeschylus, Herodotus, and Euripides.³ Here we find him not as the fluid shape-shifter of the chaotic sea but instead as an Egyptian pharaoh and host of Helen, a representative of culture and order, and an embodiment of the violence that enforces social cohesion, simultaneously threatening as an ethnic potentate associated with Helen, herself a violently contested and destabilising cultural figure.

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To reference Janus and Proteus at the head of this collection is to point to the tensions embodied in cultural discourses of violence, the difficulties and potentials involved in creating meaning from the painful and destructive fact of brutal violence, the cultural particularity of representations of violence, and the way perceptions of violence, and associated ecologies of order and cultural knowledge, are themselves bound up in violent systems and processes. This book aims to investigate such tensions in cultural discourses and representations of violence, including but not limited to warfare, in the Hellenistic world (323–31 bce). Violence had long been central to the experience of Greek cities and to their civic discourses.⁴ This volume asks how these discourses were shaped and how they functioned within the particular cultural constructs of the Hellenistic world which were themselves affected by new political structures and institutions, increasingly professionalised warfare, increasing cosmopolitanism, and expanded opportunities for cultural interaction in cities through (re)constructions of civic space.⁵ In his magisterial work on Hellenistic warfare, Angelos Chaniotis has observed that ‘more wars were fought in [the Hellenistic period] than in any other earlier period. . . The Hellenistic Greeks were continually confronted with the problem of violence’.⁶ This violence saw pain and brutality embodied and institutionalised in new ways. As the contributors to this volume argue, it affected all levels of civic life, including economic and political activity and religious practices and rituals, and it left its mark on the cultural production of the period, in art, literature, philosophy and historiography.

The contributors thus probe cultural discourses, performances and institutions to investigate the cultural mechanisms that perpetuated violence, or sought to explain, control or justify it in the Hellenistic period. They engage particularly with the reimagining and reshaping undertaken within the old, established cities as they negotiated the new challenges posed by Hellenistic violence. In the epilogue to the volume, we draw out themes and potential new research questions arising from the individual studies. In this introduction, we frame the following chapters by identifying key features of Hellenistic life which relate to the new experiences of violence. We also position studies of Hellenistic violence, albeit briefly, within wider discussions especially from the domains of narrative and performance theory, and studies of violence and affectivity, mimesis and trauma, hoping to strengthen foundations for more detailed conversations between ancient historians and modern cultural theorists.

Military, political, and cultural shifts which occurred across the Hellenistic age altered the landscape of violence, creating both new spaces for the escalation of violence and new pathways for the deflection of violence. The most obvious form of violence – warfare – was ubiquitous throughout the Hellenistic world, shaping the lives of communities and individuals, and capturing the imagination of writers and artists. The transition from the small city-states of the Classical age to the large kingdoms created by the fragmentation of Alexander’s global empire completely changed the spatial and temporal scale of military engagement. Conflicts became more expensive and complex: Hellenistic armies were large and diverse bodies, in which the role of mercenaries was increasingly crucial. Such factors led to a very high degree of professionalisation and technological sophistication in the exercise of war. No less importantly, they changed the ways the violence of warfare was perceived by actors, victims and bystanders.

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The ubiquity of warfare did not necessarily constitute a major break from the Classical experience, but some of its drivers were new. For the common soldier, bearing arms promised recognition and advancement, as in the case of the cleruchs of Ptolemaic Egypt, who received a (taxable) allotment of land for their military services.⁷ At the very top of the social and political ladder, the personal imperatives of individual potentates were key. Their armies constituted their primary support base and demonstrated prowess in war served to legitimise the assumption of the royal diadem.⁸ The Suda entry on kingship (basileia) famously defines that institution in terms of warfare – it is neither nature nor justice which gives monarchies to men, but the ability to command an army and to handle affairs competently – and it is a definition formulated expressly with reference to the kings of the early Hellenistic period, whose claim to power based on victory was so differently formulated from the hereditary rule of Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon.⁹ The historical record gives substance to the Suda’s definition. The first of the new dynasts after Alexander to adopt the royal title did indeed predicate its adoption on battlefield success, for Antigonus Monophthalmus and his son, Demetrius Poliorcetes, were publicly acclaimed as kings in an elaborate charade that coincided with the announcement of Poliorcetes’ naval victory at Cyprus in 306 bce. Even after the establishment of new hereditary dynasties, military prowess remained important to the perception of royal status. Theocritus’ Encomium not only lauds Ptolemy II’s ancestry but constructs for him a warrior-image:

All the Pamphylians

and the warriors of Cilicia he commands, and the Lycians

and the Carians, who delight in war, and the islands of the

Cyclades, for his are the finest ships sailing the ocean. All the

sea and the land and the crashing rivers are subject to Ptolemy,

and round him gather huge numbers of horsemen and

huge numbers of shield-bearing soldiers, burdened with glittering

bronze.

(Theoc. Id. 17.88–94, trans. Hunter)

Throughout the age, the territorial rivalries of the new Hellenistic kingdoms ensured the continued prevalence of warfare, as did the intrusion into the Greek world of new and ideologically attractive targets of aggression in the form of the Gauls, who were readily cast by royal propagandists and Greeks alike as the barbarian successors of the Persians. The resulting prevalence of warfare is discernible in contemporary literature, from the plots of New Comedy with their frequent backdrop of war and sieges – the backstory of Menander’s Perikeiromenē, for example, took place ‘when the war and evil times waxed always worse in Corinth’ (ll. 124–25)¹⁰ – to the fragmentary remains of the historical traditions. What appear to be the opening lines of one history, composed perhaps towards the close of the Hellenistic age,¹¹ are preserved on a statue base of the writer Philippus; Phillipus laments that ‘all conceivable calamities and continuous mutual slaughter have occurred in our time throughout Asia and Europe and the peoples of Africa and the cities of islanders’ (FGrH 95 F1 = IG iv 1² 687). His view is unlikely to have been atypical.

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Warfare was not only widespread but also, from the standpoint of the poleis of the Greek world, newly dangerous. Developments in military technology heightened the vulnerability of the polis itself. The Hellenistic age saw the invention of the helepolis, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Cultural Perceptions of Violence in the Hellenistic World
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• 1 ‘War is the Father And King of All’: Discourses, Experiences, and Theories of Hellenistic Violence
• 2 Violence, Public Space, and Political Power in the Hellenistic Polis
• 3 Ideology of War and Expansion? A Study of the Education of Young Men in Hellenistic Gymnasia
• 4 Poleis on the Brink: Violence and Greek Public Finances in Ps.-Aristotle’s Oikonomika Ii
• 5 Kings and Gods: Divine Narratives in Hellenistic Violence
• 6 Violence in the Dark: Emotional Impact, Representation, Response
• 7 Compassion and Violence in Hellenistic New Comedy: the Case of Terence’s Self-Tormentor
• 8 Violence in Hellenistic Sculpture
• 9 ‘A Pleasure to Gaze on Great Conflicts’: Violence and Epicurean Philosophy
• 10 Eros and the Poetics of Violence in Plato and Apollonius
• 11 Violence in an Erotic Landscape: Catullus, Caesar, and the Borders of Empire and Existence (Carm. 11)
• 12 Epilogue: Violence and Its Emotional Representation in the Hellenistic World
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index