Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons^™

Combat Trauma And Tragic Catharsis: An Aristotelian Account Of Tragedy And Trauma, Edward J. Hoffmann

Honors Bachelor of Arts

This essay argues that the Greeks experienced and understood combat trauma, and that they used tragedy and the catharsis that it effected as a means of restoring the order of souls traumatized in war. Our examination of the horrors of hoplite warfare should leave us with no question that ancient warfare was no more clean, decent, or glorious than modern war. To treat the trauma induced those horrors, the Greeks did indeed practice certain societal mechanisms, which our own society seems to so sadly lack. One of these was Attic tragedy. Certain of the tragedies explicitly speak to military experience, …