In ‘Notes’ to Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw answered charges that ancient Britons could not have talked and acted like modern ones. Does anyone believe, he wrote, ‘that 67 generations of promiscuous marriage have made any appreciable difference in the human fauna of these isles’? (G.B. Shaw, Three Plays for Puritans [1901], p. 250). Most of the contributors to this volume argue that the passage of time has made little difference in how combat trauma has affected the human fauna of ancient and modern wars.
In the introduction, K. lays the groundwork for the project. He admits that the Greeks had no words for ‘shell shock’ or ‘combat trauma’ but suggests they did not name it because the pathology was too common to stand out (p. 4).
In ‘War and the City: the Brutality of War and its Impact on the Community’, K.A. Raaflaub distinguishes warfare in archaic Greece (750–480 b.c.e.) from the kind characterising fifth-century conflicts. In the earlier period, ‘war was intermittent, always a possibility but rarely a fact’ (p. 16). In the fifth century, war became increasingly ‘brutal’ and ‘total’ (p. 18). We must, he says, attempt imaginatively to place ourselves within the agony of hoplite combat (p. 22). (To my mind, this agony is best conveyed in the fiction of Steven Pressfield, specifically, Gates of Fire: an Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae [1998].) Raaflaub has much of interest to say about the social dimensions of ancient warfare but little regarding the specific topic of combat trauma.
‘Phaeacian Therapy in Homer's Odyssey’ by W.H. Race offers an insightful reading of Odysseus' stay among the Phaeacians. Race describes how Odysseus was rehabilitated in material, social and psychological ways in what served as a half-way house for antiquity's signature combat veteran (p. 47).
In ‘Women after War: Weaving Nostos in Homeric Epic and in the Twenty-First Century’, C. Pache argues that women in Homeric epic can experience a kind of (metaphorical) nostos culminating in the restoration of home and marriage. Noting Homer's comparison of Penelope to a lion (Od. 4.787–94), she maps Homeric epic on to the real-life experiences of ‘Team Lioness’, the first generation of women sent into combat in Iraq.
‘“Ravished Minds” in the Ancient World’ by L.A. Tritle marshals the resources of history, literature and neuroscience to describe combat trauma and its effects on soldiers from Homeric times to the present. Tritle suggests that the trauma of combat in every age is expressed in culturally available terms. Thus an Athenian soldier who went blind at Marathon expressed the effects of trauma in mythic terms (p. 88).
The outlier in this volume is J. Crowley's ‘Beyond the Universal Soldier: Combat Trauma in Classical Antiquity’. Crowley takes his title from what he refers to as ‘Donovan's famous song’ (p. 105). (Correction: though also sung by Donovan, ‘Universal Soldier’ was written by Buffy Sainte-Marie.) Crowley denies the existence of universal PTSD extending diachronically over time. The values carried into combat by soldiers schooled in the Judeo-Christian tradition, he says, differ substantially from those motivating the pugnacious Athenian hoplite (p. 111). I find Crowley's essay the most persuasive in a volume that, to its credit, offers a place for dissenting views.
In ‘Socrates in Combat: Trauma and Resilience in Plato's Political Theory’, S.S. Monoson pictures Socrates as the ‘an ideal soldier’ (p. 133), whose combat experience underlies the theory of Justice in Plato's Republic. But what constitutes such resilience? Is there a Greek word for resilience? Socrates, she says, demonstrates the ‘ability to remain himself under shifting and trying conditions’ (p. 133). This would seem to make resilience unnecessary, if we think of it as the ability to bounce back from hardship. Perhaps Socrates was resilient in the sense employed by former Navy Seal Eric Greitens, who defines resilience in a military context as the virtue allowing one to profit from suffering (E. Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life [2015]).
In ‘The Memory of Greek Battle: Material Culture and/as Narrative of Combat’, J.S. De Vivo argues that the Corinthian helmet so reduced the ancient soldier's vision and hearing as to provide little opportunity to organise individual experience into a coherent narrative. Instead, he argues, the trophy (tropaion) allowed the soldier to confront the trauma of battle through a declaration of victory. But the connection between signifier (trophy) and signified (combat trauma) is not obvious to me.
In ‘Women and War in Tragedy’, N.S. Rabinowitz discusses the lives of women left behind (like Clytemnestra) and women taken in war (like Hecuba). Violence against women is an extreme behaviour characteristic of ancient and modern warfare (p. 186).
In ‘“He Gave Me His Hand but Took My Bow”: Trust and Trustworthiness in the Philoctetes and Our Wars', N. Sherman argues that trust and trustworthiness are irreducible elements in the maintenance of military solidarity. She shows how Philoctetes was first coerced by the fake trustworthiness of Neoptolemus. The theme of trust could well have been carried over into a discussion of the ex machina appearance of Heracles at the end of the play.
A brief, insightful discussion of combat trauma – or the lack thereof – in Greek Comedy is provided by A.H. Sommerstein in ‘Combat Trauma in Athenian Comedy: the Dog That Didn't Bark’. Sommerstein shows that both Old and New Comedy ‘sanitize’ the features that made combat ‘horrific’ (p. 234). This silence, he says, ‘can be eloquent’ (p. 225), but what this silence expresses is not made clear.
S.L. James argues that at least one New Comedy deals with the subject of combat trauma. ‘The Battered Shield: Survivor Guilt and Family Trauma in Menander's Aspis’ offers a discussion of the fragmentary play by Menander that depicts, she says, ‘the very specific realities of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), survivor guilt, and family trauma – psychological issues that would have been familiar to many in his audience’ (p. 237). Sommerstein earlier denied that war was much a part of the experience of the community in Menander's time (p. 234). This chapter takes a different approach to questions of literature and history.
‘When War Is Performed, What Do Soldiers and Veterans Want to Hear and See and Why’ by T. Palaima discusses war stories, songs and films from the time of Homer to Bruce Springsteen: ‘Write or speak or sing or act in a style that is direct, blunt, matter-of-fact, clear of vision, sincere, urgent, deep of feeling, and humane, and you will have a good chance of being heard by soldiers and veterans' (p. 275).
P. Woodruff closes the book with ‘Performing Memory: in the Mind and on the Public Stage’. He discusses plays of Sophocles, Ibsen and his own ‘Ithaca in Black and White’, which he wrote after returning from the war in Vietnam.
J. Shay's influence permeates this volume (J. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character [1994] and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming [2002]). I am surprised that little attention is paid to the groundbreaking work of J. Keegan, who has provided compelling accounts of how battle looks from the perspectives of individuals in combat (especially The Face of Battle: a Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme [1975]).
This book deserves a careful reading by students, professors, veterans and members of the gradually diminishing audience of so-called ‘educated readers’. There is really nothing like it available elsewhere.
