[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This volume provides fifteen essays on what might be more aptly described as representing war, given that most contributors consider literary descriptions, including texts that do not necessarily evoke a ready mental image. Readers should not expect an art history, and indeed only a handful of chapters deal with explicitly visual material. Alice König provides both an introduction– (“(Inter)Visualising War”) and conclusion (“War Stories are World Shaping: Tracing the Feedback Loop between Narrative and Reality”) to the volume, asserting in both that war media should be seen as recursive, with visualizations of warfare past and present molding and perpetuating attitudes towards war and peace in the future.
John Hyland (“Bīsotūn and Darius’ Year of Battles: Representations of Warfare in Early Achaemenid Persia”) examines the military narrative of the monumental trilingual royal inscription of Darius I, which describes the numerous engagements fought during the tumultuous opening of his reign. The narrative drew on various Near Eastern narrative techniques sprinkled with Achaemenid innovations; the battles are organized by both precise date and structured chronologically and geographically across a four-cornered map, providing the sense that Darius’ victories encompassed the known world. The narratives for each battle are extremely brief, even reticent, and omit the royal heroics and gruesome casualties present in earlier Assyrian narratives, simply attributing victory to Ahuramadza. The inscription had little influence on Greek battle descriptions, but the understated prose presented the reader with a record of consistent victory that needed no embellishment.
Jon Hesk (“Visualizing War in Euripides Suppliant Women”) considers the escalating warfare in the plot where Theseus launches a war to recover the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes. Hesk focuses on Theseus’ description of a “fog of war,” where he proclaims the impossibility of recounting precise deeds. The fog is thickest along the frontline, as elsewhere in the play a messenger who watched from a distance is able to provide a more detailed description of the fighting. The play includes a pointed critique of democratic decision-making, with a Theban herald proclaiming that voters only approve war because they cannot envision themselves dying in it. The play concludes with a mass funeral flaunting the high costs of conflict.
Nicolas Wiater (“Visualizing Battle in Image and Text”) unleashes a curious polemic against Johannes Kromayer’s map reconstructing the Battle of Trasimene (217 BC). He explores how the famous Schlachten-Atlas emerged out of a dispute between scholars and military officers over ownership of the discipline of military history.[1] Kromayer’s famous collaboration with Georg Veith, an Austrian artillery officer who co-authored the Italian and African volumes of the Atlas, is oddly ignored. Wiater rails against the decision to display modern places to orient the reader, rather than imagine a pristine map. Kromayer generously printed maps featuring the conjectures of other scholars, but Wiater is furious that these were displayed on a smaller scale than his own reconstruction. The chapter does not bother to reproduce the map in question. The fairest criticism is that Kromayer’s location and reconstruction of the battle are simply incorrect. But Wiater’s radical conclusion is that we should just read Polybius’ raw narrative and leave it at that.
Debra Scoggins Ballentine (“It is God who Arbitrates the Scales of War: Divine Agency in Judean Portrayals of battle against Antiochus IV Epiphanes”) parses three basic sources, the Book of Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees and finally Josephus. Daniel imagines a war that involves direct intervention by divine beings against Seleukid forces. 1 and 2 Maccabees, meanwhile, recount actions by Judean fighters who nonetheless enjoy evident divine favor (although 2 Mac. 3.24–27 does have divine beings rough up the Seleucid governor before he can despoil the temple, an administrative rather than military intervention). Meanwhile, Josephus presents the conflict as a largely secular affair, although the Maccabees engage in appropriate religious ritual and prayer.
Courtney Roby (“Model Wars: Theorising War in Greek and Roman Tactical Manuals”) explores Greek tactical manuals, especially Asclepiodotus, who provided detailed descriptions of formations and drill for the by-now defunct Macedonian phalanx, even going as far as to illustrate the manuscript with a variety of tables, where individual soldiers could be illustrated with alphabetic letters. The imperial author Aelian likewise depicted soldiers as circles and arrows. By the time the manuals were written, Macedonian-style armies had largely ceased to exist, and the treatise are epistemic artifacts that conjure imaginary, if historically flavored, armies.
Andrew Riggsby (“Divide and Conquer”) explores how divisions within the Roman army might be visualized in both text and sculpture. Riggsby begins with administrative documents, where soldiers were divided into cohorts and centuries, and listed within their centuries according to rank and seniority. Riggsby admits that this is hardly surprising, but more interestingly, when soldiers were discharged, they recapitulated these administrative forms on private laterculi monuments. Even when no longer in the army, they still imagined themselves and their relationships to other veterans using the army’s administrative categories. This is a rare instance in the book that proves the editors’ contention about world-shaping representations. Next, Riggsby considers two visual depictions of combat: Aemilius Paullus’ Pydna Monument at Delphi and Trajan’s column in Rome. In each instance, different types of soldiers appear fighting alongside each other: Italian socii and Roman legionaries on the Pydna monument, and auxiliaries, legionaries, and Germanic bodyguards on Trajan’s column, in each case far more intermingled than would be expected in actual combat. Riggsby concludes that the visual goal was to aggregate and compress the experience of battle, albeit from a bottom-up perspective, focused on frontline soldiers, rather than formations and officers.
John Oksanish (“‘Aux armes, architectes!’ Vitruvius and the Siege(s) of Marseille”) considers Vitruvius’ description of the Caesarian siege of Marseille, which can be read synoptically against Caesar’s commentarii. Vitruvius gives the besieged far more agency and success, flooding mines, using incendiary weapons to set fire the advancing agger and entangling and then disabling Caesar’s bespoke tortoise ram. These setbacks are either elided by Caesar or merely attributed to bad luck. Vitruvius’ narrative may be designed to highlight the skill and agency of the Marseillan engineers (and therefore engineers in general), although his refusal to identify either side as a hostis elides the bitterness of civil war.
Hannah-Marie Chidwick (“Seeing Multiple in Lucan’s Bellum Civile”) engages with battle narrative in Lucan, focusing on the theme of “multicity” in battle, which devolves into a churning cacophony of numbers, be they soldiers, ships, formations, missiles or even natural elements. The violence of war could shred an individual soldier into plural component parts, just as the body politic itself was riven by civil war. Chidwick suggests that Lucan’s fractalized and incomprehensible battle scenes serve as a corrective for overly orderly top-down historical narratives.
Helen Lovatt (““Broken Stories, Broken Bodies: Fragmentation, Vision, Battle and Narrative in Silius, Martial and Trajan’s Column”) indulgently organizes the essay as a series of fragments: unconnected paragraphs with no transitions other than bold-faced headings, interspersed with quotes from the BBC series Peaky Blinders. The goal is to compare the violence in the arena described by Martial, where criminals have their bodies broken to recall ancient military heroes, with the cartoonish ultraviolence in Silius’ Punica, where it is possible to lose a foot by tripping over a fallen sword blade, itself still clutched by its owner’s amputated hand (Sil. Pun. 9.387–391). These bodily fragmentations are in turn compared to scenes of decapitation on Trajan’s column.
Zahra Newby (“Battle Narratives for the Roman Dead: Perspectives on Death and Grief from the Trojan War”) examines battle scenes on Imperial-era sarcophagi produced in Attica and Rome. The Attic sarcophagi often feature Homeric scenes, that while technically involving battle evoke more generic themes of death, grief and loss; one could mourn the deceased entombed within like Achilles mourned Patroclus or Priam Hector, even if that loved one had not been killed in battle or even served as a soldier. Meanwhile, the Portonaccio sarcophagus in Rome likely depicts, albeit in a stylized fashion, an actual military event, a combat between Roman soldiers and barbarian warriors, probably during the Marcomannic War, intended for an occupant who had participated in these campaigns.
Catherine Ware (“Cum dico proelia, significo uictorias: Narrating War in the Panegyrici Latini”) examines how speakers presented war and battle in this obsequious genre, with the inevitable result that the emperor emerged triumphant. Variegated rhetoric and historical references might smooth awkward details about a civil war. For example, Constantine’s brief, tawdry conflict with his father-in-law Maximian might be safely discussed with rhetorical allusions to the epic war between Caesar and his father-in-law Pompey.
Michael Hanaghan (“The Late Antique Battleground of Faith: Pollentia, Samarra and the Milvian Bridge”) provides a synoptic reading of battles as described by Christian and pagan authors. He focuses on Constantine’s victory at the Milvian bridge in AD 312 (Eusebius vs. Zosimus), Julian’s death at the Samarra in AD 363 (Sozomen vs. Ammianus), and Stilicho’s victory over Alaric in AD 402 (Prudentius vs. Claudian). Much of the bias is predictable, but with occasional surprises, for example the pagan Zosimus imagines Constantine deciding to engage after observing the flight of owls, transmogrifying the battle into a triumph of traditional augury.
An envoi recounts the development of a modern short play Tempus Fugit: Troy and Us, which juxtaposes the experience of a fictional modern military couple dealing with the trauma of the Afghanistan war against Hector and Andromache. The play was commissioned for the British Museum’s 2019–2020 Troy exhibition, and since the publication of this volume enjoyed a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
As is often the case with edited volumes, many contributions are quite good, but the book as a whole falls short of the editors’ unifying ambitions. One problem with trying to establish a feedback loop between narrative and reality is that not enough attention is necessarily paid to reality, which would require deeper engagement with the project of military history. While the quantity and quality of published ancient military history has improved dramatically over the past generation, the overall collapse of the field has meant that few scholars working on the reality of war have managed to obtain positions and establish reputations. Military history remains a blind spot of the field, and often for this volume (Hyland and Riggsby are the most salient exceptions). I realize why I found myself so frustrated with Lovatt’s odd affectation of sprinkling her essay with Peaky Blinders quotes: it appears that the TV show is informing her understanding of war and war trauma, rather than actual historical research into the matter.[2]
Certainly, descriptions of war, even those ungrounded in reality, could be “world building” as König argues. Art and literature that glorified and celebrated war could catalyze a vicious cycle of violence and commemoration. But it is notable how often visualizations failed at their project. Darius’ Bīsotūn inscription proclaimed his divinely-backed military supremacy, but this did not discourage the many future rebels against Achaemenid power, nor dissuade the Greeks or Egyptians or Skythians from challenging Persian armies in battle. Courtly panegyrics describing the inevitable victory of the emperor did little to halt the parade of usurpers and pretenders who tore the Late Empire apart. However much Domitian may have enjoyed the pornography of violence in Martial and Silius, when he campaigned in Germania, he focused on the mundane project of building an extended network of military roads (Front. Strat. 1.3.10). War stories can shape worlds, but we must also account for the fact that sometimes visualizations of warfare were sound and fury that signified less than we might hope.
Authors and titles
- (Inter)Visualising War: An Introduction (Alice König)
- Bīsotūn and Darius’ Year of Battles: Representations of Warfare in Early Achaemenid Persia (John O. Hyland)
- Visualising War in Euripides’ Suppliant Women: Fog, Clarity and Multiple Perspectives (Jon Hesk)
- Visualising Battle in Image and Text: Reading Kromayer against Polybius (Nicolas Wiater)
- ‘It is God who Arbitrates the Scales of War’ – Divine Agency in Judean Portrayals of Battle against Antiochus IV Epiphanes (Debra Scoggins Ballentine)
- Model Wars: Theorising War in Greek and Roman Tactical Manuals (Courtney Roby)
- Divide and Conquer (Andrew Riggsby)
- ‘Aux armes, architectes!’ Vitruvius and the Siege(s) of Marseille (John Oksanish)
- Seeing Multiple in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (Hannah-Marie Chidwick)
- Broken Stories, Broken Bodies: Fragmentation, Vision, Battle and Narrative in Silius, Martial and Trajan’s Column (Helen Lovatt)
- Battle Narratives for the Roman Dead: Perspectives on Death and Grief from the Trojan War (Zahra Newby)
- Cum dico proelia, significo uictorias: Narrating War in the Panegyrici Latini (Catherine Ware)
- The Late-Antique Battleground of Faith: Pollentia, Samarra and the Milvian Bridge (Michael Hanaghan)
- War Stories Are World-Shaping: Tracing the ‘Feedback Loop’ between Narrative and Reality (Alice König)
- Envoi: From Achilles to Andromache, to Afghanistan and beyond … (Alice König, Jennie Dunne, Jonathan D’Young)
Notes
[1] Wiater draws heavily on Roel Konijnendijk, Between Miltiades and Moltke: Early German Studies in Greek Military History, Leiden: Brill, 2023.
[2] It is not hard to find relevant quotes about bodily fragmentation that were not written by a 21st-century screenwriter. Take World War II veteran Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding Behavior during the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 270: “The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps with its space for indicating ‘Members Missing’ … If you asked a wounded soldier or marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer, ‘My buddy’s head,’ or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand.”