How current veterans can use ancient visual arts to recover from PTSD
The post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis was officially introduced in the 1980s, but the condition has existed for millennia. Ancient Assyrian texts from Mesopotamia, more than 3000 years old, describe soldiers afflicted with symptoms that resemble PTSD. These soldiers were said to have been hearing and seeing the ghosts of enemies they killed in battle (Becker, 2015). Another example would come centuries later in ancient Greece. A Greek soldier named Epizelus was struck with blindness after he witnessed a comrade being struck down by a ‘giant’ in the Battle of Marathon. This was in spite of the fact that Epizelus was not physically wounded himself (Becker, 2015). In the same battle was the Greek playwright, Aeschylus of Athens. Aeschylus survived, but lost his brother in the fighting (Thinkingliketheancients, 2015).
The Ancient Greeks had an interesting way of coping with war trauma, ritual reintegration through Greek drama. Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia trilogy, where a cycle of tragedy was set in motion when the warrior king Agamemnon returned home only to be murdered by his wife, because he had sacrificed their daughter before leaving to fight in the Trojan War. Another Athenian playwright, Sophocles, served as an officer in the wars against the Persians. He would go on to write the play Ajax, which ends with the suicide of one of the greatest heroes of the Trojan War. According to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, this play reads like a textbook example of traumatic stress. Writer and director Bryan Doerries would come to discover the therapeutic potential of this play after arranging a reading of it for hundreds of marines in San Diego. Doerries, who had previously turned to ancient Greek texts in college to cope with the loss of his girlfriend, was so inspired by the reception of the reading that he started the “Theater of War” project with funding from the Department of Defense. Since then, the play was performed over 200 times around the world to give voice to the struggles of combat veterans, and help foster dialogue and understanding with their families and friends. Dr. van der Kolk attended one of these readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While he was there, there were Vietnam veterans, military wives, as well as recently discharged men and women from recent conflicts in the Middle East, who all lined up to behind the microphone. Lines from the Ajax play were quoted as people spoke of their struggles. Doerries would go on to say that “Anyone who has come into contact with extreme pain, suffering or death has no trouble understanding Greek drama. It’s all about bearing witness to the stories of veterans”(van der Kolk, 2015).
In modern times, the default treatment for PTSD is traditional therapy and medication. But another ancient solution has been right under people’s noses this whole time. One key factor to this that PTSD may have in fact been more prevalent in ancient times. In modern warfare, military personnel may fight without even seeing the eyes or faces of their enemy. Soldiers thousands of years ago generally did not have this luxury. Back then, the enemy was literally going to be right up in your face. Their expressions and screams are present as you strike them down, and the memory will linger forever. So in this way, one could argue that the ancient Greeks veterans in particular knew what they were doing when writing their iconic plays. And in those days, you wouldn’t have much difficulty seeking out veterans to perform in or attend these performances. Most Greek males were citizen soldiers who seen their share of combat in their lives.
Bonus: JRR Tolkien was a veteran of the first world war, and his experiences are said to have had an impact on his writings. For me as a kid, one of the more obvious examples of this comes from Gandalf in Lord of The Rings, when he shouted “You shall not pass!”. This may have been in reference to the infamous French battle cry “Ils ne passeront pas!” (They shall not pass) in the Battle of Verdun. In addition, descriptions of areas like the Dead Marshes mirror the devastation on the Western Front.
Works Cited
van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma: Key takeaways, Analysis & Review. Instaread.
Becker, R. A. (2015, January 26). Ancient mesopotamian texts show PTSD may be as old as combat itself. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/ptsd-may-old-combat/
Meadows, D. (2009, July 29). Marathon post traumatic stress disorder. rogueclassicism. https://rogueclassicism.com/2009/07/29/marathon-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/
Thinkingliketheancients. (2015, February 13). Thinking on loss, pain, and Aeschylus. Thinking Like the Ancients. https://thinkingliketheancients.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/thinking-on-loss-pain-and-aeschylus/