The Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean

Hannah-Marie Chidwick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781350240858
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350240889
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume explores a broad range of perceptions, receptions and constructions of the soldierly body in the ancient world, putting the notion of embodiment at the forefront of its engagement with ancient warfare. The 10 chapters presented here respond directly to the question of how war was embodied in antiquity by drawing on detailed case studies to examine the sensory and bodily experience of combat across wide-ranging time periods and geographies, from classical Greece and Rome to Roman Britain and Persia. Together they illustrate how the body in war is a vital universal element that unites these vastly different contexts.

Although the centrality of the human body in war-making was recognized in antiquity, a body-centric approach to combat has yet to be widely adopted in modern Classical Studies. This collection brings together new research in ancient history, classical literature, material culture, bioarchaeology and art history within a theoretical framework drawn from recent developments in War Studies that places the body front and centre. The new perspectives it offers on brutality in battle, the physical expression of warrior identity, and post-combat remembrance and recovery challenge readers to re-assess and expand their existing ideas as part of a broader ongoing 'call to arms' to revolutionize the study of ancient warfare in the 21st century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Writing the Body into Ancient Warfare
• Part I Brutality in the Field
• 1 Fighting Fit: Visualizing the Body of the Combatant
• 2 Battlefield Decapitation and Mutilation in the Ancient Greek Imagination
• 3 Bodies of the Military Community: A Perspective from Roman Britain
• Part II Embodying Soldierly Identity
• 4 Clothing the Shami Prince: The Dress of Parthian Horsemen
• 5 Roman Milites and Defeated ‘Barbari’: Soldierly Bodies, Dress and Identities in First-Century Tilurium, Dalmatia
• 6 Embodying Military Femininity and Virgil’s Camilla
• Part III The Post-Combat Body
• 7 Rethinking Ancient Greek War Monuments: Bodies, Violence and Nature
• 8 Astyanax’s Fate and Second-Phase Warfare in the Iliad
• 9 Repairing and Reconstructing the Body of the Combatant: The Commission, Design and Manufacture of Assistive Technology for Wounded Soldiers and Veterans
• Conclusion: Beyond the Body of the Combatant
• References
• Index
• Copyright