The Brutality of War and the Limits of Violence in Archaic and Classical Greece

尽管身体暴力是战争的构成要素，但古典学家和古代史学者直到最近才开始研究古希腊战争中的暴力。战争中暴力的演变和程度仍然存在争议。一些学者认为，直到公元前5世纪晚期，战争都是相当小规模的，暴力被规则和惯例有效地控制住了；而另一些人则强调，即使是古代战争的特征也是暴力行为的范围，并指出消灭敌人一直是一种选择。不同的思想流派对五世纪和四世纪的发展有着截然不同的看法，他们要么将其解释为对既定规则的公然破坏，要么将其解释为自荷马时代以来未曾改变的普通形式的军事冲突。这场关于古代战争性质的争论一直受到双方预设的支配，似乎已经停止了。从文化科学的角度来看，一种新的方法有望更富有成效，使我们能够包括心理历史以及社会和政治发展等方面。该项目旨在重建古代和古典希腊在战争中实施暴力的条件和背景。它将严肃地对待来源中关于暴力实践的含糊不清和相互矛盾的陈述，并将它们与希腊城邦中关于正义、权力和荣誉的话语结合起来考虑。因此，我们应该更清楚地了解暴力的原因，以及希腊人在思想和实践中对暴力态度的变化。该项目将为古希腊世界的战争史提供新的见解；更重要的是，它将对古代暴力史做出重大贡献。

Even though physical violence is the constituting element of war, classicists and scholars of ancient history have only very recently begun to make a study of violence in ancient Greek warfare. The evolution and the extent of violence in warfare are still disputed. Some scholars assume that until the late fifth century BCE wars were fairly small-scale and violence effectively contained by rules and conventions; while others stress the range of violent acts that characterised even archaic warfare, and point out that the extinction of enemies had always been an option. The different schools of thought view the developments of the fifth and fourth centuries very differently, interpreting them either as the blatant breaking of established rules, or as ordinary forms of military conflict unchanged since Homeric times.This controversy over the nature of ancient warfare has been governed by presuppositions on both sides and appears to have ground to a halt. A fresh approach from a cultural science perspective promises to be more fruitful, allowing us to include aspects like the history of mentalities as well as social and political developments. The project aims to reconstruct and contextualise the conditions under which violence was practised in warfare in Archaic and Classical Greece. It will take seriously ambiguities and conflicting statements in the sources about the practice of violence and consider them in conjunction with discourses of justice, power and honour in the Greek city states. As a result, we should gain a clearer understanding of the causes of violence and the changing attitudes towards it among Greeks in both thought and practice. The project will deliver new insights to the history of warfare in the Ancient Greek world; more importantly, it will make a significant contribution to a history of violence in Antiquity.