The Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean

Hannah-Marie Chidwick, ed. The Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. 9781350240872.

Reviewed by Allyson Blanck, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, ab10542@nyu.edu.

The Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Hannah-Marie Chidwick, expands a recently growing movement towards an embodied military history. Responding to a conversation evolving from the work of scholars such as Elaine Scarry, Kevin McSorley, and Joanna Tidy, who have identified the problematic erasure of human bodies within the discipline,¹ this contribution frames its focus as “‘putting the bodies back in’ to the study of war” (p. 7). Motivated directly by the bodies of the soldiers and military communities surrounding them, this collection puts many unexpected facets of the interaction between battlefield and body at center stage. Military history has typically focused on the mechanisms through which groups of anonymous bodies are employed to create change, bring destruction, defend or seize territory, and produce innovations that emerge from these systems of combat. However, such processes are fundamentally built upon the same basic building block: the individual combatant. When considering testudo formations, large scale battle tactics, or hoplite warfare, it is easy for individual, daily contributions to fall aside. This volume not only explores the many realities of military embodiment and experience, but also how the core of military history ultimately rests upon the bodies of human agents.

The volume is divided into three sections, each focusing on a specific facet of the combatant. The first section, “Brutality in the Field,” comprises articles discussing physical experiences of military combat. However, the road begins not with an examination of a classical text or an ancient artifact (this will come later) but by presenting the modern artist Helen Snell’s photographic work, framed by introductory commentary from Chidwick (Ch. 1). As the first Artist in Residence of the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, in the United Kingdom, Snell produced a series of work that offers an important visual background for the largely textual analysis that follows (p. 17). This is a rare and effective feature of the book, and Snell’s black-and-white images color more than just the immediate descriptions on the opposing pages; they remain with the reader, leaving a lasting visual impression that enriches the reader’s experience of the remaining chapters. This approach invites readers to reconsider the role of visual experience in embodied scholarship (p. 19). Chidwick beautifully underscores that “one viewpoint—like one human sense—is never enough” (p. 8), affirming that investigation of combatant bodies requires a multifaceted approach. The emotional depth that these images evoke visually complements the academic prose of the following chapters, and sets a tone for what I believe is the central apparatus of this volume—the examination of the visual and the emotional contexts of combat, as expressed through the body in art, literature, and physical human remains.

Early on, the volume makes an important point about the emotional capacities tied to ancient Mediterranean military life. As Fiona McHardy (Ch. 2) reveals in her discussion of battlefield decapitation and mutilation, the emotional investments of combatants are reflected not only in their actions but in their bodies. In addition to the physical discipline required, military service involves powerful emotional motivators, particularly evocative in circumstances of wounding and mutilation (p. 33). The discussion of decapitation as a “graphic illustration” of power dynamics in battle is particularly salient (p. 35). McHardy outlines mutilation as the height of military shame and dehumanization, emphasizing that despite the depersonalization of soldiers within large military systems, it is the body that bears the full weight of violence, marking it as both a tool and a victim of war. These visceral and brutal realities act as cornerstones for the volume, appearing not only in this chapter but also as part of a larger discussion on the post-combatant body.

Rebecca Redfern and John Pearce (Ch. 3) offer a valuable perspective on Roman military life in the frontier of Britain, explored through the concept of injury recidivism. While most sources of evidence for individual soldiers’ lives are epitaphs, often disconnected from the bodies to which they were meant to belong, Redfern and Pearce demonstrate the impact of osteology and how in-depth study of specific human remains can contribute to our understanding of soldiers’ daily lives. The study exposes the types of injuries regularly sustained by soldiers as recorded through osteological examination (p. 68) and finds that many individuals who were identified as combatants not local to the region showed evidence of one or more healed major injuries (p. 69). The analysis paints a portrait of the injuries military members faced, including the expected sharp force trauma and parry fractures, but also a large number of unexpected vertebral injuries likely caused by bearing heavy loads or falling from a great height—injuries not typically associated with military service and combat (p. 68). While the work of Redfern and Pearce cannot restore dismembered osteological context, it does provide a new window into Roman military life which emphasizes the possibility of multi-perspective and cross-disciplinary research.

In the first of three papers in the next subsection, “Embodying Soldierly Identity”,  Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones (Ch. 4) examines the functional design of Parthian horse riders’ clothing and challenges assumptions about ancient dress and combat. This chapter reveals how military clothing was both a functional necessity and a visual marker of identity, connecting the body with its military purpose. Scholars tend not to consider concepts such as “design” in ancient contexts and Llewelyn-Jones aims to “access the functionality of the clothed body” (p. 79) and how combatants’ choice of clothing was highly connected with their military mission. In the case of the Parthians he finds the clothing design to directly respond to the connection required between horse and rider (p. 80). The use of silk and other woven fabric layers provided not only an optimal combination of strength and function for the rider’s mobility but also a distinctive visual silhouette (p. 87–89). Llewelyn-Jones describes the Parthian’s clothing as a mediator of conversation between rider and steed, reaffirming the crucial study of clothing design (p. 92).

Clothing was involved in every aspect of military life, both on and off the field. Ewan Shanks Coopey and Danijel Džino (Ch. 5) also investigate clothing, focused on Roman Dalmatia and the site of a Roman legionary camp in Tiliurum. Dress became a functional tool for identity construction and performance of a Roman body for members of the military community (p. 102). Through excavated metal fastenings and representations of similar items on funerary sculpture—largely sword belts, other types of buckles, and fibulae, some of which had distinctly Roman features (p. 103) Coopey and Džino show how these objects were identity-fortifying in nature. Such a perspective provides an essential material aspect to understand the visual scaffolding which holds together not only the clothes, but the identity of the combatants as military members. The objects offered their wearer a visual “marker of membership within the Roman military community…using dress to overcome potential ethnic and cultural differences” (p. 107), further establishing and strengthening the unique combatant identity of Romano-Dalmatian soldiers (p. 115).

Next, Chidwick (Ch. 6), in her capacity as a contributor, explores gender and military bodies through a lens of femininity and gender normative attitudes within military spaces. Here, she addresses the enigmatic existence of military women through the Virgilian figure of Camilla. She presents Camilla as a literary figure who out-males her peers, and in fact “is deemed even more masculine than the Trojans fleeing her” (p. 125). Through this analysis Chidwick ultimately demonstrates that Camilla is a figure who transcends, commandeers, and embodies all of the traditional male gender roles of military combat within her femininity. This chapter shows how the military body, as shaped by gendered expectations, reflects both the cultural values of a given society and the ways those values are embodied and performed in battle. Yet, as Chidwick points out, Camilla eventually becomes “visually unrecognizable as human female” (p. 131), a dramatic expression of how military identity can be intentionally shaped and transgress gendered norms.

The volume’s contributors communally ask readers to rethink the act of looking at bodies in both victory and defeat, suggesting that the way we view and represent these bodies is integral to understanding the experience of warfare in the ancient world. As Lucia Nováková (Ch. 7) notes, “the body can be likened to a battlefield,” a site scarred by both physical wounds and emotional trauma (p. 139). Yet the idealized male nude form, as it is often depicted in Greek military art, reflects a culture that prioritized the idealized body as the epitome of military prowess. The bodies of the sculptures are so idealized that in fact “the weapons of the victorious soldiers did not seem to harm their opponents: there are no visible devastating injuries on the body” (p. 148). This is a curiously sharp contrast to the visceral descriptions of Astyanax (following in Ch. 8), the healed wounds of the Romano-British soldiers (Ch. 3), and the use of decapitation to underscore victory and defeat (Ch. 2). However, the volume overall navigates these complexities with nuance, exploring these clashing aspects of combatant life, literature, and material.

From here, the book turns to its final section “The Post-Combat Body,” examining the non-active combatant and the communities around them. Hannah Sorscher (Ch. 8), in particular, brings attention to the role of poetry as a form of emotional expression, providing a space to articulate the deeper, often more personal, consequences of war, and the emotional aftermath of combat. This discussion considers baby Astyanax’s fate in theIliad, and draws attention to how literary and artistic representation can illuminate the internal, emotional landscape of post-combat life. Hector and Andromache’s conflicting laments portray the types of emotional and corporeal violence that could be inflicted on women and children in the aftermath of battle (p. 159). By examining the inconsistent portrayals of Astyanax’s future, the chapter underscores the emotional weight carried by the bodies of the conquered. Examining the post-combat experience, particularly in the context of “second-phase warfare” (as defined by Kathy Gaca²) highlights how the bodies of the vanquished—especially those of women and children—are targeted and manipulated, both physically and symbolically even beyond the battlefield itself (p. 160). This perspective forces us to consider a different kind of literary visual, perhaps even a kind of “ekphrasis of experience” that relies on the potential of bodies and the many ways those bodies might be treated in a second-phase warfare environment.

We return to, and conclude with, the soldier as Jane Draycott (Ch. 9) explores how wounded bodies were managed post-combat. In a sobering reminder, Draycott explains why studying the bodily reality of military combat is so essential, emphasizing that “a single moment in combat could change the course of someone’s entire life, fundamentally and permanently altering their way of inhabiting their body and in doing so rendering them a combatant for life” (p. 177). From the discussion in Chapter 3, it is clear that many bodies experienced trauma in military service, but Draycott’s analysis finds very few literary descriptions of the realities of wounded combatants once they return home. While the evidence for prostheses is generally limited, the texts do leave a window open for a possibility which the study explores thoroughly. There is also a promising engagement with cross-disciplinary thinking and approaches which move beyond the traditional boundaries of classical scholarship. Particularly exciting is the appearance of disability theory, such as a discussion in this chapter which likens the combatants’ search for reconstruction as parallel to the modern narrative of “supercrip” (p. 177). Draycott’s work, and all the chapters of this volume, provide a jumping board from which many avenues of military history could continue exploring the embodied combatant.

As a whole, the perspective on the body in this work questions the accepted limits of the “combatant” categorization: Who qualifies as a combatant? When? And at what emotional cost? However one approaches these questions, it is clear that representations of combat subjects, literary, visual, and material, are often directly linked to social memory and the expected emotional, instinctive response of the viewer (or listener). The Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean is a compelling and insightful exploration of the intersection between the body and warfare in the Mediterranean world. Through a combination of archaeological evidence, literary analysis, and art, the volume offers a rich, multilayered understanding of how combatants’ bodies are not only the site of physical conflict but also embody complex emotional, cultural, and political forces. The volume does expand upon the accepted narrative of military life, but there is still room for further discussion of topics such as military family units, field medicine, disability, and mobility (in a physical, social, and geographical sense). The chapters, while in many places accessible to a general audience, are sufficiently in-depth for the serious scholar of military history to consider, and there are novel methodologies which can produce further insights with application to new material. Military history so often forgets the body, and this volume has succeeded at its goal of replacing that central pillar.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Writing the Body into Ancient Warfare / Hannah-Marie Chidwick (pp. 1–14)
I. Brutality in the Field
1. Fighting Fit: Visualizing the Body of the Combatant / Helen Snell and Hannah-Marie Chidwick (17–28)
2. Battlefield Decapitation and Mutilation in the Ancient Greek Imagination / Fiona McHardy (29–44)
3. Bodies of the Military Community: A Perspective from Roman Britain / Rebecca Redfern and John Pearce (45–74)
II. Embodying Soldierly Identity
4. Clothing the Shami Prince: The Dress of Parthian Horsemen / Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (77–97)
5. Roman Milites and Defeated ‘Barbari’: Soldierly Bodies, Dress and Identities in First-Centruy Tilurium, Dalmatia / Danijel Džino and Ewan Shanks Coopey (99–117)
6. Embodying Military Femininity and Virgil’s Camilla / Hannah-Marie Chidwick (119–36)
III. The Post-Combat Body
7. Rethinking Ancient Greek War Monuments: Bodies, Violence and Nature / Lucia Nováková (139–57)
8. Astyanax’s Fate and Second-Phase Warfare in the Iliad / Hannah Sorscher (159–74)
9. Repairing and Reconstructing the Body of the Combatant: The Commission, Design and Manufacture of Assistive Technology for Wounded Soldiers and Veterans / Jane Draycott (175–88)
Conclusion: Beyond the Body of the Combatant / Annemarie Ambühl (189–96)
References (197–230) 
Index (231–35) 

Notes

1. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kevin McSorley, ed., War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Joanna Tidy, “War Craft: The Embodied Politics of Making War,” Security Dialogue 50, no. 3 (2019): 220–28.

2. Kathy Gaca, “Reinterpreting the Homeric Simile of Iliad 16.7–11: The Girl and Her Mother in Ancient Greek Warfare,” AJP 129, no. 2 (2008): 145–71.

Discussion

1. How would you describe the relationship between the idealized body of the ancient combatant and the ways we depict the body of the modern soldier? How might this reflect changing attitudes towards war itself?

In the ancient Mediterranean, war could not be conducted without physical bodies. Yes, sometimes warfare was more psychological (i.e., involving intimidation, rather than physical assault) but an armed, embodied presence was still a key part of this psychological threat. The potential to do bodily harm. The “success” of warfare was measured by the number of casualties, by the physical damage to terrain or goods. As such, the soldierly body was an essential component of making war in the ancient world. This necessity was recognised in language, for example the Latin terms for right hand and sword are the same word (dextra, as I discuss in the volume’s introduction), and also in the celebration of a warrior’s paradigmatic physical prowess in ancient art and literature (as Lucia Nováková shows in her chapter).

Today, the body is still an important part of making war. Although the variety of human body types has widened (women can now enlist, for example), actually, the training of the body has not changed dramatically, and certainly the reaction to physical threat or injury has hardly changed at all. We know this, as Rebecca Redfern and John Pearce demonstrate in their chapter on Roman Britain, because of the parallel traumas found on ancient skeletons and modern injury recidivists. 

However, there are vast differences in the way modern Western culture depicts soldierly bodies. We know soldiers have to be fit. We know training can be grueling. We know not every combatant returns from war and, if they do, they may be permanently disabled. But it is not a subject openly discussed in modern culture. I would like to see greater, widespread understanding about the ways that modern warfare affects the body. For example, there is an increase in drone warfare and digital warfare today. You might assume, not incorrectly, that operating a drone puts a safe distance between the physical body and the physical battlefield. In reality, a drone operator still experiences a bodily response to their duties, and the physical distance does not protect them from moral injury in the same way it protects them from a bullet or bomb. Moreover, if you only have a short drive home, it is much more difficult to leave the stresses of work behind at the end of the day—and remember that these stresses might include doing damage to other real human bodies.  

2. Several chapters emphasize the body as a site of suffering, whether through injury or death, and particularly the ability of the combatant to endure trauma. How can this focus on pain and mortality within the body challenge or complicate traditional narratives of idealized heroism in Mediterranean warfare?

Ancient writers were well aware that going to war meant exposing your body to trauma, both mental and physical. As the contributors to this volume explore, frequently the idealized hero in ancient war narratives bore these physical and mental injuries stalwartly in the name of duty and/or glory. After the homecoming, the scars of battle were shown off, in a manner comparable to the modern Invictus games or visually striking prostheses. This is something we see across ancient Mediterranean societies, despite palpable differences between cultural attitudes to war and combat. It makes sense that in a community where war is commonplace and combatants are regularly needed, the fighter of the cultural imagination would not be browbeaten by the demands of serving their state. As such, unfortunately the prototype of the invincible warrior has, suitably, outlasted his opponents well into the twenty-first century.

But we do not need to look too closely to find a more complicated picture of military service in ancient narratives—for example, the Civil War of the Roman poet Lucan, which in its extreme grotesquery and horror challenges the notion of “heroism” in battle. A more nuanced reading of these sources reveals that ancient Mediterranean societies had different attitudes to health and disability than we do today, as Jane Draycott discusses in her work on ancient prostheses. Yes, ancient war narratives valorised a “perfect” body, but they also recognised that the endurance of physical pain and injury is a natural part of everyday life, as well as a part of the hero’s experience. 

3. What impact do you hope your work will have on future scholarship? Do you believe there are particular areas of military history which would benefit most from a perspective taken in this volume? 

This volume seeks to refresh the study of war and combat in ancient history and Classics and to encourage more conversations and investigations. If this volume gets people talking about peace and war with new perspectives, then it has served its purpose. In response to the pioneering scholars before us, the contributions to this volume aim to advance our understanding of the experiences of ancient warfare and, importantly for me, our conception of what a combatant actually is. Let us dismantle the assumption that a “fighter” means an idealized, white, able-bodied male, and that this is the only type of body that should be included in discussions concerning ancient warfare. Moreover, the assumption that war is natural and uncritically necessary as a part of human history. In doing so, perhaps our conversations regarding peace-making and war today will become more nuanced, expansive and critical, too.