thersites. Journal for Transcultural Presences and Diachronic Identities from Antiquity to Date
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Sailing with the Gods: serious games in an ancient sea
Full text linkMaritime safety in the ancient Greek world was created through symbols and social practice as well as the science of seafaring. The human connections forged through ritual, myth and image enabled communication and granted authority to the civic institutions that offered legal and economic benefits. A gaming application offers a route to modelling the triangulation of seascapes, civic institutions, and narratives through which people and goods moved around the ancient Mediterranean. The game was inspired by the promise of maritime safety given to initiates into the mystery cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace, where grants of proxenia and theoria represent the civic counterparts of mystic promises and tales of supernatural intervention. The flexibility that characterizes ancient proxenia recommends the framework of a game; the bridge between imagination and strategic outcomes that characterizes serious games maps onto the ancient realities of the maritime success enabled through ritua
Feminist heroines for our times: Screening the Amazon Warrior in Wonder Woman (1975 – 1979), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995 – 2001) and Wonder Woman (2017)
Full text linkWonder Woman (1975 – 1979), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995 – 2001), and Wonder Woman (2017) are films all feature a female action hero alongside Amazon characters based on the Amazons from Greek mythology. This paper discusses the pilot episode of Wonder Woman from 1975, the Xena: Warrior Princess episode ‘Hooves and Harlots’ (1995) and Wonder Woman (2017) in the light of contemporary feminism, to understand how far these popular media texts can be seen to promote feminism through their depictions of all-female Amazon societies, and their Amazonian female protagonists. My analysis is supported by viewer responses obtained from screenings and online questionnaires
Review of Anastasia Bakogianni, Valerie M. Hope (eds.), War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict
Full text linkReview of Anastasia Bakogianni, Valerie M. Hope (eds.), War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict
Dall'epitaffio al sogno: dal Marcello di Properzio al Pompeo di Lucano
Full text linkIn the well-known episode of Pompey's dream before the battle of Pharsalus (BC 7,7 ff.), Lucan used a section of the elegy written by Propertius (3,18,9 ff.) to celebrate the premature death of Marcellus, nephew of Augustus and his designated heir. This elegiac model, hitherto never reported, serves to better understand the overall meaning of one of the most famous passages of Lucan's poem
Hear no Evil? The Manipulation of Words of Sounds and Rumours in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries
Full text linkIn recent years, we have witnessed how scholars have re-read and re-examined Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic and Civil wars, focusing more on the works’ literary merits. In this contribution to the discussion I aim to show how Caesar deploys the motif of hearing to develop his narrative of battle description. Therefore I single out specific words denoting sound such as shouting (clamor), voices (vox), and also the use of rumours (rumor, fama). Caesar probably wished to give his audience a fuller, engaging portrayal of the battlefield, along with its dangers and terrors, so that we, his readers, are able not only to see through the general’s eyes, but also to hear the sounds of war. Sounds are thus significant in conveying the tense atmosphere of war, especially since soldiers are naturally frightened by what they cannot see, but only hear. Yet in this chaos of shouts and voices Caesar would have us remember that only one voice can ease the fears of the soldiers and restore order: the voice of the commander, imperator Caesar.
Ganymed im Weltkrieg. Walter Flex’ Wanderung zwischen Klassizismus und Kriegserleben
Full text link (Engl.) The present article examines antiquity-related elements in Walter Flex’ novel Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The wanderer between the two worlds). This elements are identified as historical ideas of a technocratic Roman culture and an ‚unspoilt‘ Greek culture, where the first one supersedes the last one. Apparently, the subtext of the novel is dominated by an essential problem, which gained its by then most strained manifestation during World War I: The questioning of the humanistic-classicistic ideals, which characterized the 19. centuries’ academic milieu, by the increasingly technocratic present age. (Dt.) Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht antikisierende Elemente in Walter Flex’ Erzählung Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten. Zusammenfassend lassen sich diese identifizieren als im historischen Bewusstsein verdichtete Vorstellungen eines technokratischen Römertums und eines ‚urwüchsigen‘ Griechentums, wobei letzteres von ersterem verdrängt wird. Hierin zeigt sich, dass der Subtext der Erzählung dominiert ist von einer essenziellen Problematik, die im Zuge des Ersten Weltkriegs ihre bis dato forcierteste Ausprägung erlangte: Die Infragestellung der das gelehrte Milieu des 19. Jahrhunderts prägenden humanistisch-klassizistischen Ideale durch eine zunehmend technokratische Gegenwart
“What it felt like”: Memory and the Sensations of War in Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds
Full text linkThe Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel The Yellow Birds on a soldier’s experiences in the year 2004 during the American War in Iraq are both constructed around a very similar story pattern of two friends who go to war together and are faced with bloodlust, cruelty, death, mutilation, and the duties of friendship, as well as the grief and silencing of a bereft mother. While the narrative and commemorative background of the two texts is very different – including the sense of an anchoring in tradition, the role of memory, even the existence of a coherent plotline itself – both the Augustan epic and the modern novel employ strikingly similar techniques and sensory imagery in their bid to convey the fundamental experience of warfare and of “what it felt like” as vividly as possible
Recensione a: A. Eckert, Lucius Cornelius Sulla in der antiken Erinnerung. Jener Mörder, der sich Felix nannte, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016
No full textPreface
Full text linkThe editor’s preface contextualizes the main topics of the present special issue of thersites within classical scholarship and classical reception studies. After a brief overview of recent approaches to the representations of war and violence in the ancient world and their impact on contemporary culture, ongoing research on the role of the senses or sensory perceptions and the emotions in classical literature and culture is critically reviewed especially in connection with war, an issue which has garnered relatively little attention in this field to date. Finally, a preview of the papers contained in the volume outlines various cross-connections and identifies some shared topics and methodological approaches that might also suggest new directions for future research
Phantasmagorien des Krieges: Authentizitätsstrategien, affektive Historizität und der antike Krieg im modernen Computerspiel
Full text linkThis paper deals with the aesthetic and sensory representation of ancient war and war-related violence in modern video games. Focusing on the well-known video game series “Total War” and those games set in ancient times (“Rome: Total War”, “Total War: Rome II”, “Total War: Attila”), the paper analyses the strategies employed by game developers to produce a sense of historicity in the player. By combining factual accuracy in the graphical representation of archeological minutiae, incorporating well-known narrative, visual and contextual tropes of antiquity, utilizing visually resplendent and almost photorealistic graphics and incorporating acoustic clues such as spoken Latin and a soundtrack reminiscent of film classics, the game developers are successful at achieving ‘affective historicity’ (Winnerling 2014) – an acceptance on the player’s part of the game setting’s historic authenticity based on a combination of sensory impulses rather than a strict adherence to historical fact by game developers