Description: Violence had long been central to the experience of Hellenistic Greek cities and to their civic discourses. This volume asks how these discourses were shaped and how they functioned within the particular cultural constructs of the Hellenistic world. It was a period in which warfare became more professionalised, and wars increasingly ubiquitous.
Review Quotes:
"The twelve chapters, penned by a cast of senior scholars and younger colleagues commissioned by the editors, cover a fair amount of ground: from discussions of public spaces which served to nurture and incite the military spirit among the youth, through visual representations of violence in Hellenistic sculpture, to philosophical, religious, and socioeconomic discourses that in some way justified patterns of violence and the seemingly unavoidable quotidian presence of war in a Hellenistic city, and finally to literary reflections on violence in Hellenistic poetry and drama, to end, somewhat surprisingly, with an interesting chapter on Catullus, carmen 11. While the volume is understandably selective in its scope, many papers offer food for thought." - Andrej Petrovic, Uinversity of Virginia