How significant was combat trauma in the ancient world?

At how did ancient societies view people who had been psychologically affected by the

brutal hand-to-hand warfare we associate with the ancient world today?

To talk about this topic I'm chatting with Owen Rees.

Owen has written papers about the possibility of an ancient equivalent of PTSD in ancient

warfare and how that trauma manifested itself differently in ancient Greek culture.

Enjoy!

Owen is great to have you on the show.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited.

PTSD in ancient warfare and classical Greek warfare, this is something you argue that there must have been.

Yeah, to an extent I certainly do.

My work tries to separate the diagnosis of PTSD which should not exist outside of the modern world.

I don't think it fits anywhere else. It's such a socially medically specific issue to the modern day

and psychology can't really be picked apart from the society that creates it and talks about it.

However, the diagnosis to one side, the phenomenon of a psychological injury as a result of military service

and non-combatants, I certainly fit in this model of it must exist but probably didn't look the same as it does now.

So how do you define combat trauma in the ancient world?

Well, at this core combat trauma it's sort of similar to what I've said.

What we're talking about here are psychological injuries predominantly as a direct result of military service.

Military activity, which immediately causes a few problems because how can you prove something has a,

is a direct result from warfare if it's talked about generally.

So you know, this is not an easy topic to address but it kind of gives you the idea what we're looking for is behavioral shifts,

...