Material Responses to Collective Violence in Classical Greece

The visual qualities of the Greek Classical style—poise, balance, harmony—and its post-antique legacy can belie the violence of its time. In fact, there were many violent representations in Classical Greek art (480–323BCE). This essay first discusses some of the main iconographic and stylistic characteristics of explicit images of collective violence in order to correct misperceptions and probe how depictions related to norms, expectations, and memories. It then extends discussion to material responses that are less dependent on pictures. Organized around different participants in collective violence—warriors, the gods, and mourners—it reveals how material culture offered different ways in different contexts for people to engage with and respond to acts of collective violence. Objects were a mechanism for shaping a rhetoric of just war and for focusing the community on moments of triumph and acts of sacrifice. Although objects offered a medium for individual responses and even dissent, taken together the material responses to collective violence operated at so many different time scales and in such a variety of spaces in the cityscape and the landscape that they served to promote both the cohesion of a community through shared memories and its participation in ongoing violence.