Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature

In this volume, literary scholars and ancient historians from across the globe investigate the creation, manipulation and representation of ancient war landscapes in literature. Landscape can spark armed conflict, dictate its progress and influence the affective experience of its participants. At the same time, warfare transforms landscapes, both physically and in the way in which they are later perceived and experienced. Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature breaks new ground in exploring Greco-Roman literary responses to this complex interrelationship.

Drawing on current ideas in cognitive theory, memory studies, ecocriticism and other fields, its individual chapters engage with such questions as: how did the Greeks and Romans represent the effects of war on the natural world? What distinctions did they see between spaces of war and other landscapes? How did they encode different experiences of war in literary representations of landscape? How was memory tied to landscape in wartime or its aftermath? And in what ways did ancient war landscapes shape modern experiences and representations of war?

In four sections, contributors explore combatants’ perception and experience of war landscapes, the relationship between war and the natural world, symbolic and actual forms of territorial control in a military context, and war landscapes as spaces of memory. Several contributions focus especially on modern intersections of war, landscape and the classical past.

Bettina Reitz-Joosse is Associate Professor of Latin Literature at Groningen University, The Netherlands. Her work focuses on the relationship between literary texts and material culture in the ancient Roman world and on the reception of antiquity under Italian Fascism. She is co-author of The Codex Fori Mussolini (2016).

Marian W. Makins is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University, USA. Her research interests include literary responses to war, death and commemoration in the ancient Roman world, as well as classical receptions.

C. J. Mackie is Professor of Classics at La Trobe University, Australia. He has written widely on Roman and Greek antiquity, especially Vergil, Homer and Greek mythology. More recently, he has developed interests in the Gallipoli/Dardanelles region through time, and in classical reception studies. He is co-editor of Anzac Battlefield: A Gallipoli Landscape of War and Memory (2016).