The project has kept steady progress in the twenty-one months of its duration. As planned, the first work-package of the project involved collecting precise data on the recurring emotions in campaign accounts and how ancient commanders and authors used them. Key terms including fear (φόβος), faintheartedness (ἀψυχία), eagerness (προθυμία), and discouragement (ἀθυμία) have been attentively studied, considering variables such as literary genre, recurrence in specific contexts, association with specific behaviour and tropes. The sheer number of recorded instances of these terms has been challenging; we are talking of tens of thousands of passages to read, contextualise and analyse; the data collection took much more time and energy than expected, and the full survey is still under compilation.
The first article focuses on athumia and its usage in military contexts. Athumia denoted a strong feeling of discouragement and sadness, which had a strong relationship with the inability to act or perform satisfactorily on the field. After corroborating this pattern in different literary genres, the article discusses how athumia is presented in discussing emotions and their management in warfare. Not only does the concept (in the noun, adjectival, adverbial and verbal form) recur often in accounts of military campaigns, but it also appears consistently when commanders are shown to be aware of soldiers' emotions and trying to manage them. This trend suggests that athumia might have become a productive concept in emotional management in warfare in the fifth century BCE, when the term appears in tragedy and historiography. The article is now in peer review.
A second article focuses on the importance given to emotional management in fifth and fourth-century leadership. The article is centred around three parts. First, it shows how emotional management was common and embedded in everyday leadership practices. Fifth- and fourth-century leaders are associated with numerous stratagems aiming to consolidate the emotional state of their troops, and there are also several examples of entire strategies devised to take advantage of emotions. The representation of leaders stemming from reported speeches corroborates this notion. Although the speeches in historiographical works are later re-elaborated, there is a clear trend of military leaders displaying their knowledge of emotions and exploiting them. This trend implies that emotional management had become a characterising feature of military leadership in the fifth century BCE. The third part confirms the proposed reading, expanding the field of research to tragedy and epics. The display of knowledge and awareness of the emotive aspects of warfare is attested in tragedy from the 460s BCE but only implied in Homer. Accordingly, it is concluded that this was a novelty of fifth-century leadership, denoting some consideration and development of leadership since the second quarter of the fifth century. The article is now in peer review.
The monograph is progressing, although much slower than initially planned. The work on athumia has shown the limits of adapting the modern notion of morale to Greek warfare. A similarly comprehensive notion did not seem to exist, notwithstanding the similarities with athumia. As such, the examination needed to be enlarged to a wider pool of evidence to allow for a better understanding of how emotional categories, notions, and definitions interacted in Greek warfare. The work is still in progress, and the final results will be published as planned, but the timeframe needs to be shifted.
As planned, I have participated in academic conferences in Spain, Italy, and the UK, presenting my work to colleagues and testing its validity. I organised a panel for the Celtic Conference in Classics 2024, held in Cardiff. With my co-organiser, we are publishing the conference papers as an edited volume.
I have also presented my research to a lay audience at several outreach activities, including participating in éStoria, one of the most important conferences on historical divulgation in Italy.
