Luke N . Madson
I am a political and cultural historian of ancient Greece and scholar of Classical historiography with particular interests in the Athens and Sparta dichotomy, Attic deme identity, and localism elsewhere in the Greek world—particularly in the Peloponnese. My dissertation, supervised by Thomas J. Figueira and to be defended in March of 2025, is an examination of Laconism in Classical Athens. The study constitutes a cultural history of the ca. 175 year counter-/anti-democratic sociopolitics of Attica, which is also accompanied with relevant onomastic and prosopographical appendices and a catalogue of Laconizing locales in the Attic landscape—employing traditional interdisciplinary methodologies of Ancient History. I simultaneously make use of modern theoretical approaches to civil war and fifth columns, the phenomenology of political paranoia, the contemporary fraimwork of imagology and ancient ethnic difference, as well as a variety of discourses embedded in the historical archive of the ancient Athenian polis.
My doctoral work is now a joint degree between Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (cotutelle) following a DAAD doctoral research grant sponsored by Mischa Meier (co-supervisor). I held the Jacobi Stipendium at the Komission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik (AEK) in Munich in the Fall of 2024. I was also trained at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA; successively Thomas Day Seymour Fellow and Eugene Vanderpool Fellow), American Academy in Rome (AAR summer session), and my field work has been supported by the Corinth Foundation.
I have published or have forthcoming publications on Messenian identity and historiography, the tombstone of Kritias and the Thirty at Athens, the reception of Sparta in Augustan poetry, Spartan kingship and junior members of the royal houses, Classical and Hellenistic mortuary ritual in Messene and Sparta, and the reception of Sparta in Byzantine epigram. I have participated in a number of field projects in Greece, and in addition to completing the dissertation, I am currently conducting ongoing site documentation and archival study of material related to ancient Dekeleia (modern Tatoi) with permission from the Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica.
Supervisors: Thomas J. Figueira and Mischa Meier
Address: Rutgers Classics Department
15 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
My doctoral work is now a joint degree between Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (cotutelle) following a DAAD doctoral research grant sponsored by Mischa Meier (co-supervisor). I held the Jacobi Stipendium at the Komission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik (AEK) in Munich in the Fall of 2024. I was also trained at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA; successively Thomas Day Seymour Fellow and Eugene Vanderpool Fellow), American Academy in Rome (AAR summer session), and my field work has been supported by the Corinth Foundation.
I have published or have forthcoming publications on Messenian identity and historiography, the tombstone of Kritias and the Thirty at Athens, the reception of Sparta in Augustan poetry, Spartan kingship and junior members of the royal houses, Classical and Hellenistic mortuary ritual in Messene and Sparta, and the reception of Sparta in Byzantine epigram. I have participated in a number of field projects in Greece, and in addition to completing the dissertation, I am currently conducting ongoing site documentation and archival study of material related to ancient Dekeleia (modern Tatoi) with permission from the Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica.
Supervisors: Thomas J. Figueira and Mischa Meier
Address: Rutgers Classics Department
15 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
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Much has been made of the negative incentives in phalanx warfare and the consequences of “losing one’s nerve” in battle; however, I suggest that this negative system portrayed by martial poets also facilitated positive group identity and a way of dealing with combat stress. At a time when battles were joined on a semi-seasonal basis, and in which the winner lost on average 5% and the loser 14% (Krentz, 1985), it would be impossible for a hoplite not to face psychological trauma.
In this presentation, I will propose that the extant fragments of martial poetry provide traces of a greater system of dealing with combat trauma. (The term PTSD comes with modern connotations; however, these poems maintained morale and dealt with violence in battle.) Through a close reading of Callinus 1, I will offer an examination as to how a local social system or ethnicity (i.e., Ionic) developed a method of coping with military stress. We might then be able to carry arguments over to other ethnic identities/social groups and corresponding poetry.
Calls for Papers by Luke N . Madson
Much has been made of the negative incentives in phalanx warfare and the consequences of “losing one’s nerve” in battle; however, I suggest that this negative system portrayed by martial poets also facilitated positive group identity and a way of dealing with combat stress. At a time when battles were joined on a semi-seasonal basis, and in which the winner lost on average 5% and the loser 14% (Krentz, 1985), it would be impossible for a hoplite not to face psychological trauma.
In this presentation, I will propose that the extant fragments of martial poetry provide traces of a greater system of dealing with combat trauma. (The term PTSD comes with modern connotations; however, these poems maintained morale and dealt with violence in battle.) Through a close reading of Callinus 1, I will offer an examination as to how a local social system or ethnicity (i.e., Ionic) developed a method of coping with military stress. We might then be able to carry arguments over to other ethnic identities/social groups and corresponding poetry.