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The Romans seem to have recognized, from an early period, the importance of good nutrition for successful warfare. Throughout the Republic, and despite the massive changes which Roman society and the Roman state underwent between 509 and 31 BCE, Rome’s armies were generally well-supplied with a military diet which remained remarkably stable over the centuries. Based primarily on grain (consumed as puls or bread), supplemented with lentils, vegetables, some meat, and wine, dinner for a Roman soldier in the fifth century would have likely been recognizable to his first century counterpart. However, while the diet remained stable, both the mechanisms of supply and the social and cultural norms associated with it evolved, with substantial implications. This chapter will explore the origins of Rome’s military diet in archaic Italian society and the elite, gentilicial warfare of the regal and early Republican periods before tracking its development down through the late Republic. Focusing on a few key moments and periods of change – most notably the advent of the tributum/stipendium system, the introduction of coinage, and Rome’s wars of overseas expansion – it will argue that Rome’s military diet, like Roman warfare more generally, slowly transitioned from an elite preserve to a symbol of an increasingly cohesive and state-centred activity. Food which was once acquired, prepared, and consumed in a private or family setting, was gradually moved into a more communal, state and army-focused context. Thus, although the practical nature of the Roman military diet and nutrition changed very little over the course of the Republic, the way it was achieved and its associations changed considerably – which has significant consequences for our understanding of how both food and logistics operated (esp. socially) within the Roman military system of the Republic.
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This essay offers an experiment in chronological boundary crossing as way of addressing questions about continuity and change in Central Eurasia. It analyzes the violent transformations of holy sites in Altishahr (more widely known as Eastern Turkistan or southern Xinjiang), examining the 11th-century transition from Buddhist to Muslim rule alongside the 21st-century efforts of the People’s Republic of China to transform sacred Islamic sites into nationalist showpieces and “Silk Road” tourism sites. This juxtaposition calls into question prevailing understandings of the 11th -century transition as a simple refashioning of existing Buddhist sites into Islamic forms, while also placing current Chinese restrictions on Islamic holy sites in a broader historical perspective. Together, these 11th- and 20th century transformations show that shrines act as cultural arbiters, establishing routes by which change has entered Altishahr and stubbornly preserving not just older meanings, but also older ways of knowing. At the same time, they are places where the dynamics of continuous meaning creation come into clear view—where cultural change itself becomes an explicit part of the narratives that bind people together in supposedly stable identity groups such as religions and nations.
This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.
This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.
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This essay deals with the representation and interpretation of Roman military defeats of the Second Punic War in the later Roman tradition, especially in Roman historiography of the late Republican and early Imperial periods. It argues that the ongoing process of reinterpreting these events enabled the Romans to transform these disasters into helpful lessons from their own past. The Roman defeats in this war were not only explained but also used to demonstrate Rome’s outstanding ability to learn and recover from defeats, which caused a rebirth of true Roman spirit and restored unity among the Romans. Remembering acts of collective violence thus became an important part of the narratives the Romans told about their past. As a result, the defeats of the Second Punic War were seen not only as the darkest hours of Roman history but also as a time of national testing in which their defeats helped the Romans to rediscover their own virtues.
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The annihilation of entire people groups represents the most extreme form of collective violence. It is well-known that ancient empires could depict themselves as perpetrators of genocidal violence to demonstrate their power. Literary traditions from those living under imperial dominance, however, have received little scholarly attention. This essay analyzes the violent outlook of the book of Esther, a Jewish narrative within the Hebrew Bible that offers unique insights for the study of collective violence in antiquity. The narrative invents a past in which the Jewish people appear both as both possible victims of systematic annihilation and as the successful perpetrators of large-scale killing. This essay explores the cross-cultural borrowings in the book of Esther and proposes that it adapts a Greek literary pattern: when individual actions call into question the honor and status of imperial agents or imperial rule, collective retaliation and large-scale killing are legitimate means to reestablish the status quo. In adapting and transforming this motif, the Esther narrative sheds light on how Jewish scribes used fictional storytelling not only to refute charges made against their people but also to justify their own group’s exertion of violence. This observation adds further weight to recent scholarly proposals to contextualize the Esther narrative in the late Hellenistic period, and it also hints at the possibility that the book of Esther reflects key aspects of Hasmonean ideology.
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Early Jewish writings are replete with narratives of warfare and collective violence. Yet relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how these accounts of violence affected the way Jews structured their festal calendar. This essay examines the festivals described in 1 and 2 Maccabees that serve to commemorate the most impressive military victories of the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE—namely, Hanukkah, Nicanor’s Day, and Simon’s Day. Paying attention to the similarities and differences between the festal texts of 1 and 2 Maccabees, I argue that the two books employ a common commemorative strategy to foster a positive collective memory of the violence of the Maccabean revolt that could both legitimize the founding figures of the Hasmonean dynasty and compete with the commemorative cultures of other Hellenistic communities. This evidence of commemorative creativity and cultural adaptation by the authors of 1 and 2 Maccabees sheds valuable light on how the memorialization of violence in the ancient Mediterranean was shaped not simply by the ideologies and institutions of discrete societies but also by their intersections and cross-cultural borrowings.
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The history of the ancient Mediterrannean in the first millenium BCE was marked by many battles and can arguably be characterized as violent. Yet what had a lasting impact on people groups and their sense of identity was not just the event of war itself but also the way it was remembered. The significance of memory and commemoration has been increasingly recognized in research on collective violence. In this introduction, I briefly discuss the concepts of “collective violence” and “cultural memory” and point out what makes collective violence a particularly rich topic to investigate from the perspective of cultural memory. The introduction brings the essays in this volume into conversation with each other and highlights aspects at the intersection of war and memory such as victory and defeat, victims and aggressors, triumphalist and victimological narratives, public memories and agents of memory production, and the interrelation between literary, material, spatial, and performative forms of commemoration. The introduction concludes by suggesting how the regional approach of the present volume allows for the exploration of memories of collective violence in a transcultural perspective.
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While the biblical portrayal of Egypt as the violent oppressor of the Israelite people is well known, Egyptian depictions of their northern neighbors have received less scholarly attention. Yet several iconographic and literary sources reflect on the roles of the Israelites and the Hebrews from an Egyptian perspective. This study analyzes Egyptian representations of encounters between Egyptians, Hyksos, and Israelites/Hebrews from the Late Bronze Age to the Ptolemaic period with a focus on violent conflict. By tracing distinctive shifts in the Egyptian evaluation(s), it demonstrates that the formation of ancient Egyptian history always involved processes of rewriting and reconstructing older memories regarding violent conflicts with Egypt’s neighbors.
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The visual qualities of the Greek Classical style—poise, balance, harmony—and its post-antique legacy can belie the violence of its time. In fact, there were many violent representations in Classical Greek art (480–323 BCE). This essay first discusses some of the main iconographic and stylistic characteristics of explicit images of collective violence in order to correct misperceptions and probe how depictions related to norms, expectations, and memories. It then extends discussion to material responses that are less dependent on pictures. Organized around different participants in collective violence—warriors, the gods, and mourners—it reveals how material culture offered different ways in different contexts for people to engage with and respond to acts of collective violence. Objects were a mechanism for shaping a rhetoric of just war and for focusing the community on moments of triumph and acts of sacrifice. Although objects offered a medium for individual responses and even dissent, taken together the material responses to collective violence operated at so many different time scales and in such a variety of spaces in the cityscape and the landscape that they served to promote both the cohesion of a community through shared memories and its participation in ongoing violence.
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This essay proposes that, within the biblical books of Samuel and Chronicles, there are two distinct narrative modes of memorializing the leadership of Israel’s first king, Saul, in war. Whereas 1 Sam 31 and 2 Sam 21 negotiate the remembrance of Saul through their depiction of geographical space, 2 Sam 1 depicts a textualized memorialization of Saul’s heroism performed by David. These two modes, one spatial and one verbal, can be regarded as two different types of sites of memory that are expressed in narrative form in the biblical text. They also serve distinct rhetorical functions. The spatial mode participates in a broader discourse on Israelite identity—specifically, the status of Transjordan and the identification of its population as insiders or outsiders—while the poetic-performative mode contributes to an idealized depiction of another king of Israel: David.