Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination

The Fear and the Fury

Irene Berti, Maria G. Castello, Carla Scilabra

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350075412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The collected essays in this volume focus on the presentation, representation and interpretation of ancient violence – from war to slavery, rape and murder – in the modern visual and performing arts, with special attention to videogames and dance as well as the more usual media of film, literature and theatre. Violence, fury and the dread that they provoke are factors that appear frequently in the ancient sources. The dark side of antiquity, so distant from the ideal of purity and harmony that the classical heritage until recently usually called forth, has repeatedly struck the imagination of artists, writers and scholars across ages and cultures. A global assembly of contributors, from Europe to Brazil and from the US to New Zealand, consider historical and mythical violence in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and the 2010 TV series of the same name, in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in the work of Lars von Trier, and in Soviet ballet and the choreography of Martha Graham and Anita Berber. Representations of Roman warfare appear in videogames such as Ryse: Son of Rome and Total War, as well as recent comics, and examples from both these media are analysed in the volume. Finally, interviews with two artists offer insight into the ways in which practitioners understand and engage with the complex reception of these themes.

CHAPTER 1

THE THRILL OF ANCIENT VIOLENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

Irene Berti

---

In the trilogy The Hunger Games, the children from the twelve poor districts of a dystopian country called Panem are forced to take part in a deadly gladiator game, eliminating one another until only one survives, while the richest part of the population, the citizens of the Capitol, watch the spectacle on TV. Watching the film series The Hunger Games is thus a form of double voyeurism, as the public not only watches violence, but also both witnesses and participates in the more subtle violence of enjoying watching violence. So, why do we watch?¹

As noted by Anne Rothe, who quotes Martha Woodmansee’s description of Romantic readers devouring gothic novels one after the other in Germany around 1790, the consumption of violence in media is not a contemporary invention, nor is it particularly connected to one specific medium.² In the fifth century BC, Sophocles already recognized that violence both fascinates and repels, intrigues and arouses:³ centuries later, Augustine tells the story of his friend Alypius who, during a visit to Rome from his native North Africa, was reluctantly taken to watch a spectacle in the Colosseum. Unable to decline the invitation although he disapproved of such forms of entertainment, he at first kept his eyes firmly shut. But the roars of the crowd aroused his curiosity and as soon as he watched, he was captivated:

For as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in its savagery and did not turn away but fixed his gaze on it. Unaware of what he was doing, he devoured the violence and was delighted by the wicked contest and inebriated by its cruel pleasure … In brief, he watched, he shouted, he was fired up and he took away with him the madness that would drive him to return again⁴

Violent spectacles, especially when set within an exotic frame, appear to be both fascinating and irresistible. This attraction has been a constant throughout history: Romans watched the gladiator games with incredible passion; public executions were a beloved spectacle in England until the middle of the nineteenth century; and bloody spectacles of dog-, cock- and rat-fighting, as well as wrestling, boxing and other combat sports were (and to varying degrees still are) very popular at any given time or place.⁵ The voyeuristic fascination with the display of pain, as well as with its sensationalism, could be equated to displays of nudity or sexuality; as has been noted by Susan Sontag, for centuries Christian art satisfied these urges with its depictions of hell and martyrdom.⁶ But if the presence and even the enjoyment of violence seem to be a constant in history, the understanding of violence itself (and the spectacle of it) has shifted forms throughout the centuries: while Romantic readers were content with titillating fiction which alluded to violence without revealing too much, today’s audiences appear to be particularly greedy for the gory details.⁷

Moreover, violence itself, although an intrinsic element of every known human society, is culturally defined. Contextual factors always shape the meaning and significance of violence in the imagination of contemporaries, implying that both the manifestations of and discourses on violence are highly differentiated across time and space; what some call violence may be called ritual or sport by others. In a different cultural context, a human sacrifice would surely be condemned as a brutal murder; even the killing of animals, which went almost entirely unquestioned in Antiquity, is nowadays the subject of considerable debate.⁸ In the same way, the corporal punishment of undisciplined children was until very recently not considered to be violent behaviour at all but, rather, a legitimate means of education, while today most Western countries have adopted extremely severe laws to protect minors. Personal experience also shapes discourses on violence: how people conceive of and give meaning to violence depends on the perspective of those involved: the offenders, victims, spectators, witnesses or authorities.⁹ As Anastasia Bakogianni has demonstrated, for example, a fundamental difference between modern and ancient discourse on war is the fact that, while the majority of Western audiences have no direct experience of war, the audiences of the ancient Greek poleis were much more likely to have been involved in a conflict, or to have suffered the effects of one.¹⁰ Both our responses to the spectacle of war – and theirs – are shaped by this difference.

Definition(s) of violence

In Antiquity, violence was often legally defined with respect to the political and social status of the subjects involved, as well as circumstantial considerations. In classical Athens, for instance, only socially relevant violence was made public. Aggressive behaviour against inferiors, by contrast, was considered to be normal: it offended no one’s sensibilities and was not necessarily registered as violence.¹¹ Needless to say, our modern, Western understanding is very different. The increasing awareness of violence has changed our perceptions of it, as well as its social role. We are much more aware of aggressive behaviour than our grandparents were, and because we are more sensitive to it, we tend to classify as violent behavioural patterns which were not classified as such in Antiquity. The highly heterogeneous nature of violence is precisely what makes the phenomenon so elusive: without referring to a specific cultural context, it is hard to define what violence is.¹² Since various disciplines in the field of humanities (as well as that of the natural sciences) have focused on this phenomenon, there are also a multitude of divergent definitions of violence.¹³ Modern social psychology defines violence in general terms as an alteration of the natural course of events which has destruction and/or sufferance as a consequence, and more specifically as a form of aggression that is usually connected to physical means of coercion.¹⁴ Sociologists describe violence through its relation to power as a social force capable of structuring reality. The body is the focus of this sociological analysis, in its double capacity of offending and suffering; violence is thus defined as the physical act through which a human being damages another human being by means of force. The sociology of violence, meanwhile, focuses on the interaction, in a situation of violence, between offenders and victims:¹⁵ violent relationships are one-sided social interrelations based on force, rather than mutuality.¹⁶ Generally speaking, violence could be defined as an action (usually intentional) that is intended to damage someone or something. Although the term ‘violence’ usually implies the use of physical force, there are many possible ways of ‘damaging’: physical aggression – implying blood, killing, torture, violation and constriction of the body – as well as the destruction or subtraction of material properties, are only some of the more ‘spectacular’ forms of violence.¹⁷ The anthropologist David Riches notes that ‘in everyday usage, the perpetrators of harm rarely speak of “violence”: it is rather a term enunciated by victims and witnesses’.¹⁸ It is thus clear that the term has strong pejorative connotations, conveying the unacceptability and illegitimacy of harmful behaviour. Trying to identify what social behaviour counts as violent, Riches proposes that the term ‘violence’ refers, in its primary sense, to ‘matters of contested physical hurt’,¹⁹ usually with the purpose of humiliation of other humans, often intended to gain dominance over others.²⁰

From this somewhat minimalistic definition of violence, this volume wishes to begin.

Violence from a transcultural perspective

While we tend to stigmatize and expel violence from our societies and condemn any manifestation of it (while still enjoying watching it!), violence was (to a certain point) inherent – although not always consciously so – to ancient societies, which allowed many forms of aggression to be tolerated and even positively accepted.²¹ The Greek-Roman world was a violent one, as not only the literary sources concerned with political history and war chronicles show. Everyday life was also full of physical and psychological coercion, as papyri, defixiones and occasionally funerary epigrams testify.²² Violence between genders, as well as oppressive and threatening behaviour against the weakest members of society appear to have been a common experience, one that was often thematized in ancient literary sources. The fear of pirates, assassins or bandits was often the subject of comedies and novels.²³ Rape, murder and theft were punishable by law, but still frequently occurred. Corporal punishment and torture, though usually not permitted against citizens, were normally used on slaves and foreigners; the enactment of the death penalty through extremely violent methods like crucifixion, beheading, apotympanismos (a capital punishment similar to crucifixion) and katakremnismos (throwing the victim from a rock) were relatively frequent, publicly performed and considered to work well as a deterrent.²⁴ Ancient iconographies reflect this violent world and often depict extremely crude scenes, taken both from mythology and (less frequently) from reality: images of legendary wars against both human and superhuman enemies decorated temples and vases, while warriors and violence against animals (in the form of sacrifice or hunting) were ubiquitously celebrated.²⁵

Notwithstanding the fact that aggressive behaviour was omnipresent in ancient societies, reflections on violence itself do not seem to have concerned ancient minds a great deal. Ancient languages usually lack a single word to express all the meanings we give to the term. Our concept of violence includes a range of contests that are described by the Latin expressions imperium, potestas, potentia, vis and violentia; in Greek literature, the term hybris perhaps comes closest to expressing the modern concept of the use of illegitimate force, although hybris has a much broader semantic spectrum, and includes offences that are not necessarily violent. Many other Greek words (like bia or kratos) imply manifestations of what we would call violence, although they never entirely overlap with our concept.²⁶

How can we discuss violence from a transcultural perspective? In order to avoid a simplistic phenomenological approach, we propose to compare ‘complex entities’ – not violence itself (whatever violence may be!), but the various different concepts of violence, which are found within the frame of what is considered acceptable by any given society.²⁷

Moreover, the fear and the fury connected with and provoked by the expression of violence are emotions. As Angelos Chaniotis has demonstrated, emotions play a fundamental role in history, and even if they are lost forever, they are nonetheless reconstructable because they leave traces, as with any human behaviour they inspire. As far as we know, the basic emotions known to us (fear, anger, love and disgust, to mention but a few) were also known in Antiquity. However, the ways in which em...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• 1 The Thrill of Ancient Violence: An Introduction Irene Berti
• Part I Ancient Violence in Modern and Contemporary Painting
• 2 Ancient War and Modern Art: Some Remarks on Historical Painting from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Antonio Duplá Ansuategui
• 3 Violence to Valour: Visualizing Thais of Athens Alex McAuley
• Part II Embodying Ancient and Modern Violence in Cinema and in Theatre
• 4 Screening the Face of Roman Battle: Violence Through the Eyes of Soldiers in Film Oskar Aguado Cantabrana
• 5 Performing Violence and War Trauma: Ajax on the Silver Screen Anastasia Bakogianni
• 6 External and Internal Violence Within the Myth of Iphigenia: Staging Myth Today Małgorzata Budzowska
• 7 Kseni, the Foreigner: A Brazilian Medea in Action Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho
• Part III Dancing Violence on the Ballet Stage
• 8 Choreographies of Violence: Spartacus from the Soviet Ballet to the Global Stage Zoa Alonso Fernández
• 9 Iocaste’s Daughters in Modernity: Anita Berber and Valeska Gert Nicole Haitzinger
• 10 Dark Territories of the Soul: Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra Ainize González García
• Part IV Violent Antiquity in Video Games and Comics
• 11 Si vis ludum para bellum: Violence and War as the Predominant Language of Antiquity in Video Games David Serrano Lozano
• 12 Waging TOTAL WAR Playing ATTILA: A Video Game’s Take on the Migration Period Fabian Schulz
• 13 Sexy Gory Rome: Juxtapositions of Sex and Violence in Comic Book Representations of Ancient Rome Luis Unceta Gómez
• 14 Archimedes and the War in Itoshi Iwāki’s Eureka Giuseppe Galeani
• Part V Making Reception: Ancient Violence and Living History
• 15 From Ancient Violence to Modern Celebration: Complex Receptions of Ancient Conquest Wars in Las Guerras Cántabras Festival Jonatan Pérez Mostazo
• 16 Drawing Reception Maria G. Castello and Fabio Ruotolo
• 17 Re-enacting Soldiers and Dressing Roman Women: An Interview with Danielle Fiore Carla Scilabra and Danielle Fiore
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright