Blood and Tears: The Emotional Experience of Classical Greek Warfare

Blood and Tears: the Emotional Experience of Classical Greek Warfare aims to provide the first comprehensive and scientific analysis of the emotional aspects of Classical Greek military campaigns in the period 490-323 BC.

Previous scholarly analyses fail to fully address the issue, offering either simplistic and inadequate reconstructions (Hanson: 1989), or seminal contributions on single phenomena regulating the emotional experience in war (e.g. cohesion: Crowley: 2012; social pressure: Cairns: 2019, van Wees: 2004).

This study will fill a considerable gap in the scholarship with a fresh, multifaceted approach to the emotional and psychological aspects of Greek military campaigns.

The cultural idiosyncrasies of the Greek culture(s), the interplay of different cultural dynamics, and the difference from polis to polis will be acknowledged to reconstruct a culturally appropriate and solid picture.

The modern notion of morale will be used as a heuristic tool to unravel significant patterns and psychological phenomena hidden in the ancient sources, whilst three case studies – Athens, Sparta, and the Ten Thousand – will frame inter-poleis similarities and differences.

The findings are expected to dramatically advance the promising field of the study of the emotions and psychology of the ancient Greeks, but also to develop a better appreciation of how ancient intelligentsia conceptualised complex socio-psychological dynamics.