This special issue of thersites addresses artistic representations of war in literature and other media, focusing especially on the role of sensory perceptions and emotions as well as on gender issues. In line with the transcultural and diachronic outlook of thersites, issues of reception are approached either by applying modern theories and methods to the interpretation of classical texts or by comparing and contrasting ancient and modern responses to war and violence and their impact on human beings and society in general. The issue features contributions that range from Homer to postmodern novels and movies, as well as reviews of thematically related recent publications. Within this wide horizon two thematic clusters emerge: One group of papers studies the narratological, aesthetic and psychological dimensions of (fictional) descriptions of battles and other forms of violence in Latin literature, especially in Caesar’s war commentaries and the epics of Lucan, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, while another group of papers looks at novels that directly or indirectly reflect on experiences from both World Wars and the recent wars in Iraq through a complex engagement with classical narratives and concepts derived from classical antiquity.
Table of Content
Prolegomena
Annemarie AmbühlEditor’s Preface i–xxiv The editor’s preface contextualizes the main topics of the present special issue of thersites within classical scholarship and classical reception studies. After a brief overview of recent approaches to the representations of war and violence in the ancient world and their impact on contemporary culture, ongoing research on the role of the senses or sensory perceptions and the emotions in classical literature and culture is critically reviewed especially in connection with war, an issue which has garnered relatively little attention in this field to date. Finally, a preview of the papers contained in the volume outlines various cross-connections and identifies some shared topics and methodological approaches that might also suggest new directions for future research.
Articles
I. Antike und moderne Kriegs- und Gewaltdarstellungen im Vergleich / Classical and modern representations of war and violence compared and contrasted
Pietro VerzinaFantasie violente: il sogno ad occhi aperti in Omero e nel cinema pp. 3–42 Daydreams and visions are much used in fiction; filmmaking is perhaps the best way to represent them, thanks to its most powerful tool: editing. This paper focuses on a particular category of daydreams: violent phantasies. As a consequence of a public humiliation, often involving an erotic frustration, a character visualizes himself killing or harming his opponent, while in the real World such an action would be inappropriate. Taking cinema and visual rhetoric as a useful reference and with the aid of narratology, the paper analyses some scenes in Homer wherein the representation of violent phantasies is particularly interesting from this point of view.
Ayelet PeerHear no Evil? The Manipulation of Word Sounds and Rumours in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries pp. 43–76 In recent years, we have witnessed how scholars have re-read and re-examined Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic and Civil wars, focusing more on the works’ literary merits. In this contribution to the discussion I aim to show how Caesar deploys the motif of hearing to develop his narrative of battle description. Therefore I single out specific words denoting sound such as shouting (clamor), voices (vox), and also the use of rumours (rumor, fama). Caesar probably wished to give his audience a fuller, engaging portrayal of the battlefield, along with its dangers and terrors, so that we, his readers, are able not only to see through the general’s eyes, but also to hear the sounds of war. Sounds are thus significant in conveying the tense atmosphere of war, especially since soldiers are naturally frightened by what they cannot see, but only hear. Yet in this chaos of shouts and voices Caesar would have us remember that only one voice can ease the fears of the soldiers and restore order: the voice of the commander, imperator Caesar.
Mark Allen ThorneSpeaking the Unspeakable: Engaging nefas in Lucan and Rwanda 1994 pp. 77–119 Lucan’s Bellum Civile can be read as an epic that functions in the mode of trauma literature, i.e. a work that explicitly seeks to represent a horror that defies its very representation. Toward this end, this article applies the lens of modern trauma studies to a comparative reading of Lucan set alongside selections from two literary representations of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. By reading these ancient and modern texts alongside each other, we can gain greater insight into some of the shared rhetorical and narrative strategies that these writers from such different time periods have employed. In the face of lingering trauma, these ancient and modern strategies on one hand emphasize speechlessness (nefas and the threat of silence) and yet on the other hand engage the audience and invite them into the space of trauma through the senses of sight, sound, and emotion. The Roman poet Lucan, like his modern counterparts, seeks to guide his readers into a haunting encounter with the deeper traumatic reality of these conflicts such that they can no longer be unwitnessed or ignored.
Rebekka SchirnerIntertextuelle Emotion oder Geschlechter im Krieg: die Lemnosepisode bei Valerius Flaccus im Vergleich zu den Darstellungen des Statius und Apollonios pp. 121–164 The myth of the Lemnian women who murdered the entire male population of the Isle of Lemnos in a divinely induced rage presents an interesting example of the literary portrayal of emotions, their development, and their consequences. In this story of civil war, which is, in fact, a „war between the sexes“, emotions are of particular interest regarding their attribution to male or female characters and to groups or individuals respectively. The most prominent accounts of this mythical story are found in the works of Apollonius Rhodius, Valerius Flaccus, and Statius; modern scholarship has already provided a number of comparative analyses of these different accounts. This article wants to contribute to the scholarly discussion by focussing on the differences between the narratives of these three poets regarding the depiction and development of emotions and their importance for the progression of the mythical plot.
II. Literarische Kriegsdarstellungen und Antikerezeption im 1. und 2. Weltkrieg / War narratives and classical receptions from World War I and II
Manuel MackasareGanymed im Weltkrieg. Walter Flex’ Wanderung zwischen Klassizismus und Kriegserleben pp. 167–197 The present article examines antiquity-related elements in Walter Flex’ novel Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The wanderer between the two worlds). This elements are identified as historical ideas of a technocratic Roman culture and an ‚unspoilt‘ Greek culture, where the first one supersedes the last one. Apparently, the subtext of the novel is dominated by an essential problem, which gained its by then most strained manifestation during World War I: The questioning of the humanistic-classicistic ideals, which characterized the 19. centuries’ academic milieu, by the increasingly technocratic present age.
Marian W. MakinsMemories of (Ancient Roman) War in Tolkien’s Dead Marshes pp. 199–240 The dark, malodorous wetland called the Dead Marshes ranks among the most memorable and enigmatic landscapes in fantasy literature. While one influential line of scholarship connects the passage to Tolkien’s experiences in the Great War, this article argues that the Marshes should also be read as a reception of Tacitus’s depiction of the Teutoburg Forest. The link between the two texts is both simple and complex. Tolkien read Tacitus, and the latter’s influence has been detected elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings; yet Tolkien identified William Morris as an even more important source for the Marshes than the Great War, and the relevant passage in Morris is also a reception of Tacitus. It will be shown that Tolkien comes closer to Tacitus than Morris in his vision of the way landscapes manifest—to sight, hearing, and touch—the memory and meaning of military losses. Recognizing this reception both explains Tolkien’s ascription of such importance to Morris and offers an important example of a modern author reaching outside his own era and genre to participate in a distinctly Roman tradition of representing war-dead, landscape, and memory.
III. Kriegsdarstellungen aus dem 21. Jahrhundert in verschiedenen Medien / Representations of war from the 21st century in various media
Lydia Langerwerf‘And they did it as citizens’: President Clinton on Thermopylae and United Airlines Flight 93 pp. 243–273 Reviewing President Clinton’s speech in commemoration of the victims of UAF 93, held in Shanksville on September 10th, 2011, this paper examines the use of descriptions of the Battle of Thermopylae as a propaganda tool in times of national crisis and war. Reading the speech in the context of the 9/11 memorial tradition and its reception of president Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as well as popular representations of the Spartans’ last stance, it discusses how these manipulations of history are used to propagate certain ideas of citizenship and democratic freedom and silences others. A comparison with Hermann Göring’s use of the myth of Thermopylae in a speech directed at soldiers in Stalingrad (1943) bears this out.
Anke Walter“What it felt like”: Memory and the Sensations of War in Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Power’s The Yellow Birds pp. 275–312 The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel The Yellow Birds on a soldier’s experiences in the year 2004 during the American War in Iraq are both constructed around a very similar story pattern of two friends who go to war together and are faced with bloodlust, cruelty, death, mutilation, and the duties of friendship, as well as the grief and silencing of a bereft mother. While the narrative and commemorative background of the two texts is very different – including the sense of an anchoring in tradition, the role of memory, even the existence of a coherent plotline itself – both the Augustan epic and the modern novel employ strikingly similar techniques and sensory imagery in their bid to convey the fundamental experience of warfare and of “what it felt like” as vividly as possible.
Christian RollingerPhantasmagorien des Krieges: Authentizitätsstrategien, affektive Historizität und der antike Krieg im modernen Computerspiel pp. 313–341 This paper deals with the aesthetic and sensory representation of ancient war and war-related violence in modern video games. Focusing on the well-known video game series “Total War” and those games set in ancient times (“Rome: Total War”, “Total War: Rome II”, “Total War: Attila”), the paper analyses the strategies employed by game developers to produce a sense of historicity in the player. By combining factual accuracy in the graphical representation of archeological minutiae, incorporating well-known narrative, visual and contextual tropes of antiquity, utilizing visually resplendent and almost photorealistic graphics and incorporating acoustic clues such as spoken Latin and a soundtrack reminiscent of film classics, the game developers are successful at achieving ‘affective historicity’ (Winnerling 2014) – an acceptance on the player’s part of the game setting’s historic authenticity based on a combination of sensory impulses rather than a strict adherence to historical fact by game developers.
Reviews
Martin DinterRev. Anastasia Bakogianni & Valerie M. Hope (eds.), War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict, London 2015 pp. 345–350
Christian RollingerRev. Jacqueline Fabre-Serris & Alison Keith (eds.), Women and War in Antiquity, Baltimore 2015 pp. 351–353 (coming soon)