Visualising War Across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay Between Conflict Narratives in Different Media and Genres

This volume offers novel readings of ancient conflict narratives from around the ancient Mediterranean and explores their impact on later habits of understanding and representing war, with an innovative methodological focus on narrative interplay and visualisation.

The chapters provide an in-depth analysis of the ways in which interactions between a wide array of conflict narratives – including written texts, art, sculpture and drawings – result in culturally specific ways of visualising war, especially battle. The volume covers a large range of genres from a variety of ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, Persian, Jewish and Christian, and its innovative focus on interplay offers fresh insights into how modes of visualising war compare across time and space, as well as across different kinds of text. Covering material from the third millennium bce to the present, it also sheds new light on how different ways of visualising conflict have evolved over the centuries and continue to inform habits of visualising war today. A detailed methodological introduction lays the foundation for future studies of conflict narratives, and the volume’s envoi sets the agenda for new research on visualising peace.

Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean appeals to students and scholars working across a range of disciplines, including Classics and ancient Mediterranean studies, war studies, narratology and intertextuality studies.

Alice König is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews (UK). Co-founder of the Visualising War and Peace project, she has published on ancient military manuals, literary and cross-cultural interactions in the Roman empire, and ancient and modern discourses of peace and conflict.

Nicolas Wiater is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews (UK). His research focuses on late Hellenistic and early imperial Greek prose. His publications include The Ideology of Classicism (2011) and Late Hellenistic Literature in Dialogue (2022, edited with J. König).