Reddit reviews Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

First off, let me say thank you for your service.

PTSD in the Roman army is actually the topic of my Master's thesis, so I can at least give a fairly well-researched answer in that department. In short, the answer is very likely yes- though perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Anyone looking for the presence of a modern psychological disorder in the ancient world must tread the path carefully. After all there are around 2,000 years worth of differences in culture and medicine separating the traumatized Vietnam veteran from the traumatized Roman legionary. One has to take into account the fact that a Roman soldier's entire worldview and manner of thought was informed by the world in which he lived. It is not enough to simply create a list of symptoms and check off each instance resembling them in the ancient primary sources as evidence for PTSD. For instance, a woman who is seen at a funeral wailing at the top of her lungs, tearing her dress, scratching her face, and ripping out her hair would almost certainly be thought of as traumatized today. However these reactions were so normative in Roman culture that such scenes were even professionalized. Essentially this is what the most notable works on this topic have done so far. In comparing ancient Greeks or Romans side by side with Vietnam veterans, they run the risk of wholly decontextualizing historical actors from the stage on which they belong. That being said, Achilles in Vietnam by Johnathan Shay and From Melos to My Lai by Lawrence Tritle are both excellent works of scholarship which delve into the topic of PTSD in ancient Greece far more than this young history grad can do in a single Reddit post. They also do quite a bit to drive home the terrible toll that combat can take on soldiers and the difficulty of returning home to life as a civilian.

So, instead of simply looking for parallels, I think it is better to look towards the way psychologists themselves approach the problem of applying Western diagnoses to people from a foreign or non-Western background. One of the biggest criticisms psychologists have towards the "official" definition of PTSD found in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, sporadically re-published and updated by the American Psychiatric Association) is that it is almost entirely based on the observation of American trauma victims and their attendant symptoms. Only recently have researchers conducted enough studies of trauma reactions in foreign cultures to begin a meta-analysis of data that can bring us closer to understanding PTSD from a universal, rather than Ameri-centric, point of view. So with that thrown out there, let's get back to the Romans.

As any cross-cultural psychologist might tell you, the same disorders can have wholly different origins and be expressed in a wholly different way based on an individual's personal and cultural experience. When it comes to Roman soldiers, the violence of warfare was not such a problem as it might be to an American soldier. This was due to many reasons, not the least of which were desensitization (death was not uncommon nor unseen in the ancient world), the reward system of the Roman military (which encouraged excessive, even suicidal, violence), and the lack of any inherent moral contradiction in warfare. A modern soldier going to war must, to more or less of an extent, overcome the strictures society has put on him/her saying "it is wrong to kill." A Roman soldier had much fewer scruples. This is not to say that they were not afraid of death in battle (this is well-attested to), but rather that personal guilt or shame generated by the act of killing another human being was highly dependent on the circumstance of the kill. As a Roman soldier, your duty was to kill and route the enemy- no ifs, ands, or buts. As a result, we usually only see instances in which Roman soldiers end up killing their own comrades, or even family members, as having a particularly traumatic aura about them. For this very reason almost all the literature which appears to describe PTSD in the Roman military occurs in the context of civil war or mutiny.

So then, what was traumatic to a Roman soldier, and how did that trauma manifest itself? There is a lot more work to be done, but sources from the 1st cent. BCE to the 2nd cent. CE overwhelmingly point to public shame, as opposed to personal guilt, as the most likely catalyst for posttraumatic behavior. Roman soldiers would go to great lengths to obtain esteem in the eyes of their peers. In the ambition for glory he might even commit acts of shame as a kind of gamble which, when lost, came at the price of psychological stability. The kicker was not the acts themselves, but how those acts affected his social standing. Troops leading a successful mutiny were not so ashamed if the ordeal were a success. But if they mutinied and failed, their public shame would mentally torture them (that is, until they were executed by their superiors). As the Republic became the Principate and the Principate became the Dominate, the legions found their own fates intimately bound to matters of state and politics. This rose the stakes ever higher. When the short-lived emperor Otho had the previous emperor, Galba, murdered and just 3 months later failed to beat back yet another contender to the throne, he chose to commit suicide. Many of the ordinary soldiers who had betrayed Galba to back Otho followed suit.

None of the anguish above necessarily indicates the presence of PTSD, so I'll return here to the psychology. Cross-cultural psychologists have observed that, regardless of cultural background, people who suffer persistent emotional disturbances in the wake of a traumatic event exhibit intrusive memory symptoms in some form. Here in the US, these are closely related to what we commonly call "flashbacks." For the Romans, people experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts. These individuals show up in historical, philosophical, and even medical texts. Josephus, who was an outsider to Roman culture, also describes this phenomenon in his history of The Great Revolt. Those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer. Insomnia, depression, mood swings, being easily startled, frequent eye movement, alertness all day and night, paranoia, avoidance of crowds, suicidal thoughts/attempts, loss of appetite, shaking/shivering, self-hatred, and impulsive violence have all turned up in association with these individuals. Since in almost every case the person experiencing these things had made himself an object of public shame, the "ghosts" in question often came in the form of those he had killed or wronged in the past. These would either appear spontaneously to the sufferer, or would come in the form of vivid, frightening nightmares. The key component to these experiences, as with modern cases of PTSD, was that the sufferer had no control over his own symptoms. Thoughts or vivid memories would occur unexpectedly and uncontrollably. It is easy to see why the Romans, who were religiously superstitious to begin with, would attribute such things to the foul play of malicious spirits.

You were asking specifically about the experience of close-quarters combat for ancient soldiers, and there are some interesting tidbits there too. Like I said before, all evidence points to the fact that, unlike modern combatants, Roman soldiers were neither repulsed nor disturbed by the violence of combat. Contrary to what we might expect today, violence against others appears to have had a healing effect on soldiers suffering from the impact of shame. After a mutiny under Germanicus had died down, his soldiers violently hacked to death their own ringleaders. Tacitus writes, “The troops reveled in the butchery, which they took as an act of purification.” (Ann, 1.44) Tacitus later continues,

> Even yet the temper of the soldiers remained savage and a sudden desire came over them to advance against the enemy: it would be the expiation of their madness; nor could the ghosts of their companions be appeased till their own impious breasts had been marked with honorable wounds. (Ann, 1.49)

Violence was not simply a way to regain honor, but to the Roman soldier was a rite of absolution, which could bring peace to those suffering from intrusive memories. Killing or death in battle allowed for the redemption of public shame and the healing of trauma. Even suicide, also viewed as an honorable, redemptive reaction to public shame, might be thought of as a sort of healing method for the traumatized Roman soldier- if only the medicine were not so strong.

Anyhow, I hope that this answered some of your questions. If you would like links to my sources for the above claims I'll be happy to give them, but since it is late and I'm sleepy I decided to leave most of it for later, pending interest/objection. :)

I really, really recommend Achilles in Vietnam if you're interested in this stuff. A little bit dated now, but to me it was really eye-opening in how it approached PTSD, especially with how it connected the Vietnam-era soldier with the hero of The Iliad, Achilles. But the common thread that seems to crop up isn't that PTSD is primarily caused by people killing enemy combatants. The act of killing isn't necessarily the traumatic part. It's the amount of active combat that modern soldiers are a part of continuously, and the betrayal of accepted expectations of how war goes or is supposed to go. Even professional soldiers in the medieval time would spend much of their soldiering on campaign on the march, traveling, posturing, setting up for battle and then - if battle was refused - marching again. It was still hard and shitty, and sieges were godawful, but it wasn't continuously being attacked or having the potential to be attacked by enemy combatants. They weren't lying awake every night wondering if a bomb or an artillery shell or a bullet would get them the next day. Guilt and regret definitely have their place in the minds and hearts of returning soldiers, but for PTSD it seems more to be about - for many men and women, anyway - that there's a hypersensitivity that turns on in active combat that doesn't get turned off back home, etc.


The Crusades are interesting, as the crusaders were in enemy territory for the most part... But they had conquered parts of the Holy Land to shack up in, with fortified castles and cities, and those fortified areas were (largely) secure. There's a book... can't remember what it's called, but it's a written account by an Arab nobleman of his stupidly crazy adventures during this period, and at times he mentions the crusading Europeans - who he always laughs off as timid, unwilling to really commit to battle unless ambushed or surprised.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003L77XA4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Achilles in Vietnam was the first book he did on the subject.