That’s a little less severe than I would have expected but doesn’t suggest it was easy to avoid detection.
Note that I didn’t claim the ancients weren’t affected by violence etc. I just firmly believe they weren’t affected to the same level as us post-modern office dwellers. Just like first-time hunters are pretty shaken by taking a life and the adjacent gore, but seasoned hunters aren’t in the least.
True - but it doesn’t suggest that being detected would ruin your life.
I don’t know I think the Greek states were fairly honor/reputation based, I’m not sure someone who was a citizen and expected to serve, would be doing well socially/economically/politically after a desertion.
Searching on “PTSD in the Ancient world” provides copious links to various historical records of symptoms going back to Mesopotamia. Here’s a research paper I found:
Oh wow, thanks!
There is part in Herodotus where he writes of a Spartan who was in the court of a Persian satrap (governor). Some of the Persians are doubting how good the Spartans are, and the Spartan readily admits that on-on-one, the Spartans are no better than anyone else. But when the Spartans fight as a unit, they become much stronger.
Which makes a lot of sense. Hoplite combat in a phalanx was ALL about the formation. Your shield protected the guy on your left, and his the guy on his left, and so on. The whole thing was about basically not breaking and running, and keeping the press up and going, while the hoplites in the first few ranks stabbed with their spears and if they had to, their swords. Eventually one side or the other would suffer enough casualties that they’d start to back off or move sideways or otherwise not keep their formation solid. Once that happened, the other side had an advantage and without some sort of redress, they’d probably break first and run.
So being ironclad in the sort of discipline that would allow a formation to stay together in the face of casualties and a tough enemy would pay huge dividends in that sort of warfare. And in large part, it was true up through about the US Civil War - even though firearms replaced spears, the men still fought in large formations and keeping cohesive formations was a critical step for command and control, as well as for morale and combat effectiveness.
A lot of the time (most of the time?), the side that could keep their soldiers together and fighting was the side that won, not necessarily the one with the better weapons, taller/fitter/smarter soldiers, more clever generalship, etc…
Dr. Bret Devereaux, a specialist in Roman history who posts an excellent blog about ancient and military history discusses the matter here: Fireside Friday: April 24, 2020 – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
His conclusion is the PTSD as currently defined was very rare in ancient and medieval warfare, given the very few references to plausible cases in the very large historical record. (Herodotus does mention an Athenian who was struck blind by combat shock, but he mentions it as an outlandish story, not as a common event).
He speculates that both society and the experience of battle itself has changed so much over the centuries that modern observations don’t really generalise (he notes, for example, that the widespread and well-documented “shell-shock” of WW1 also doesn’t really match the modern definition of PTSD).
I’ve been listening to the podcast The History of Rome by Mike Duncan. He describes how the least experience, young and enthusiastic were in the front rows, with the more experienced, stong soldiers behind them to ‘shore up’ the gaps and keep the line. At the back were the oldest, most experienced soldiers, who were also less strong and agile. There job was to ensure obody ran away, beacuse in every army when it gets to killing up close, soldiers run away.
I would just like to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread. Fascinating and informative — SDMB at its best!
I agree it was a great thread I didn’t have much to contribute but I thoroughly enjoyed the reading
Yeah, I don’t know… seems like this is the sort of historical inquiry that would demand a multi-disciplinary approach, and I don’t see any indication the Doctor (of history?) consulted with any mental health professionals. He cites some modern diagnostic guidelines which… cool, but I don’t see much in the way of consideration for what sort of literary evidence we would expect to see for ancient PTSD. He also seems to disregard out of hand the notion that professional or citizen soldiers might be re-exposed to trauma—willingly or not—and still remain minimally functional as soldier or in civil society in spite of it. In particular, this assertion of his:
As I read and understand that, an individual who is voluntarily recounting the trauma – much less re-exposing themselves to it by going out to fight again – without significant reactions (read the guidelines – these are really very significant reactions) doesn’t fit the criteria.
…is utter bullocks. He wouldn’t have even needed to talk to mental health professionals to see his error. He could have just talked to honest to god living professional soldiers. I myself have had PTSD since 2006, and I wasn’t medically retired from the military for it until 2019. It wasn’t, in my case, a sudden break, but a withering down precisely because I was exposed to trauma and other psychological stresses over and over and over again throughout my almost 14 years in the military. In fact, I had PTSD of varying degrees of severity throughout the bulk of my time in the military, and even through my deployment to Iraq (which made things worse, but, again, did not lead to a sudden break as I remained largely functional for six more years after that even).
In short, I am not impressed with the Doctor( of History?)'s research on this subject and I daresay he is contributing to harmful stereotypes about PTSD (the notion that people with PTSD are completely dysfunctional, such as would be likely to appear as something remarkable in the historical record when in fact that is just not the case for the vast majority of people actually suffering from PTSD).
ETA: I know this is tacky, but seeing as we’re drawing off blogs from laypeople (as a PhD in some manner of history is when it comes to mental health) here is how I described the culmination of my ten plus years of living with PTSD while on active duty in my blog post (which I consider to be no less authoritive on the subject of PTSD than a historian’:
No sense beating around the bush: you have PTSD. You have it from something that happened to you while serving on active duty in the Navy. It is in all respects service connected and, if you want to get technical, combat-service related, too. But it doesn’t really keep you from doing your job right away. Just makes it a little harder. There’s that extra bit of emotional capital you have to expend to do the job. But over the years–give it a decade–the accumulated strain of multiple deployments and the persistent demands of “unusually arduous sea duty” finally wear you down to the point you have nothing left to give. The things that used to be just minor distractions have become a constant, buzzing noise, at times rising to a cacophony that drowns out all others, be they orders from your superiors or the pleas of your subordinates. You feel stabbing, phantom pains at night, and crushing pain in your chest during the day. It was hard enough trying to sleep when you were just standing watch 8 hours a day between your day job or running drills on a live nuclear reactor late into the night: now it’s so bad that you can barely handle routine paperwork—and sometimes not even. There are people that you are responsible for, too, and as you look into their eyes and see the pleading in them, you can tell that you’re failing. Every few seconds, it’s like someone is jabbing you in the chest with a pencil or grinding a first into your sternum. You might almost think it’s a heart attack, but you know it’s not: it’s been with you for ten years and counting, just growing more intense with time.
If it seems off-putting or crude that I wrote it in the second person (as it does to me now), perhaps that’s just a sign of trying to depersonalize as a sort of coping mechanism.
Yeah, PTSD is broadly misunderstood and I’m not sure even professional diagnosticians are particularly good at recognizing it without fairly broad experience and a deep dive into a patient’s history. Most people seem to think that it is a condition that arrises from a specific traumatic event—and until recently the diagnostic criteria was even written in a way to more-or-less require that as a prerequisite—but in fact PTSD can be a result of constant, inescapable stress that rises to a level of producing emotional trauma without a specific inciting event, and of course people will often repress specific memories of an event which complicates any attempt at this kind of diagnosis.
I personally think that a lot of the ‘Cluster B’ personality disorders would often be more accurately characterized as various presentations of PTSD or C-PTSD rather than just independent developmental disfunctions but psychologists have all kinds of half-baked hypotheses while there is a bright line distinction. I certainly have no faith in a historian “diagnosing” the incidence of PTSD based upon historical accounts of people using medieval or earlier vocabularies to describe affect and trauma without reference to a modern understanding of these terms. I suspect that in the pre-modern period trauma was widespread and frequent, dealt with by family and community ties, and religious faith and practice to some greater or lesser degree of success. It certainly isn’t as if modern psychotherapy and psychiatry hold all answers to treating these conditions.
Stranger
That was something I was wondering as well. If you are raised in a society with a strong “warrior culture”, does that alter your susceptibility to PTSD?
Does the nature of combat matter with regards to PTSD? Is there a difference between fighting one on one (or even in a formation) with melee weapons compared to modern warfare? The main difference I can see is that modern warfare, by comparison, is loud, sudden, and often indiscriminate. A mortar shell or sniper’s bullet fired from a hundred yards away. I would think that modern combat would create a higher level of constant stress due to the unknown, even if you aren’t in active combat. After all, a random sword isn’t going to just appear and lop your head off when you don’t expect it.
A random sling bullet very well might.
Also, pre-modern battles weren’t all that quiet.
I’ve mentioned before that while I retired from a full career in the Army, I went in right after Vietnam ended and retired right before 2003 Iraq kicked off, I did get deployed into a combat zone (Gulf War I) and was engaged in what I have always referred to as “light kinetic activity” with the enemy. Why? Mostly because I don’t feel comfortable calling myself a combat veteran–the older guys I knew in my career had been involved in real shit in Vietnam, and younger guys who stayed in after me or are even just now retiring, were involved in real shit in Iraq 2/Afghanistan. I also never developed any PTSD that I recognize, but some people who were in Gulf War I with me obviously did, but they also had different experiences from me.
All that being said I’ve known a lot of people with PTSD related to military trauma. I also think I know enough about melee warfare to say there is almost no way it wouldn’t produce similar trauma. There were a lot of mental health studies done on Gulf War veterans and something many of them actually struggled with tremendously, were feelings of guilt and depression over having killed another human. I do wonder if it’s possible an ancient society like Rome’s which didn’t have nearly as strong of a moral code against killing as modern society, might not feel as much guilt, but I’m sure they would still experience a lot of trauma from war.
One aspect of ptsd that I have always suspected but have nothing to back it up would come with men feeling guilty about not being brave enough in battle. This is something that few men talk about. I have never experienced war so the closet thing I can compare to it is seeing how young men acted in street battles where some weapons were involved. You listen to the talk after the battles and it seldom matches what I witnessed. By and large most men seem to be ok with this and at the high school reunions the tales of valor were always exaggerated. Seldom did they talk about being scared shitless and retreating.
A high school friend of my father’s went into the army for WWII – Pop was navy. Before the war he’d been an avid deer hunter. When he got back, unscathed, he sold his rifles and never went hunting again. He said he’d seen enough killing.
The classic hastati, principes and triarii of the manipular legion.
Generally it was a combination of age and wealth- the hastati were the youngest and poorest troops, the principes somewhere in the middle, and the triarii were the oldest and wealthiest. The hastati and the principes were generally armed more or less like a later Legionary, but the Triarii were spearmen.
This system even spawned an expression rem ad Triarios redisse , "it has come to the triarii " meaning that things are desperate and the hastati and principes have failed, and the triarii are having to fight.