Late Bronze Age warfare was characterised by chariotry, which was the key factor to achieving victory. As Liverani (2011) notably argued, chariotry led the aristocracy to develop a sort of ‘chivalry code’. That code ritualised conflicts and implied justifications for waging war on another country. Religion was the key factor in legitimising a war, as it has been in all world history. The famous Tukulti−Ninurta Epic is a masterpiece of war justification written in the Assyrian court in the XIII century. The Babylonian court − often considered isolated from the Late Bronze Age cultural milieu − developed a similar literary taste for war justification poems. Therefore, this researcher will compare a complete composition, such as the Tukulti−Ninurta Epic, with Babylonian examples of historical epics. Nowadays, many of these examples allow us to credit Babylonians as part of the complex system of Late Bronze Age culture as well as Assyrians, Hittites and Egyptians.

Fascinating but difficult objects of study, religious and historical myths and epics define the world views and identities of human societies. Sumero-Akkadian mythological and epic literature fulfils this role as a set of explanatory and normative narratives that are among the most important sources of information for the study of the ancient Near East. In this regard, Ninurta’s 3rd millennium myth Lugal.e and 2nd millennium Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta I offer an interesting vision of the imagination of war in Syro-Mesopotamia. Ninurta and Tukulti-Ninurta’s fights against their enemies – with their causes and consequences – can be read not only as myths and epics, but also as expressions of diplomacy and war rules of their time.

This article discusses how the image of a king’s leading divine military supporter evolved from the Early Dynastic to the Old Babylonian periods. All observations are done exclusively on the material of royal inscriptions and hymns. The article distinguishes three possible stages in the evolution of the god supporting a king on the battlefield image. In the first stage, the central divine military supporters were local deities. In the second stage, deified kings made war by their own credit as heroic beings. Mentions of gods assisting on the battlefield were rare; most often, it was the supreme deity. In the last stage, some deities gained features of professional war gods and at the same time associated with (capital’s) local gods as their aspects. It could be partly influenced by changes in the royal deification practice.

The Assyrian Empire is often perceived exclusively as a cruel and bloodthirsty war machine. Although administrative sources belie this conception, the idea of Assyria as a violent land has been largely conveyed by the sources of royal propaganda, especially by royal inscriptions. In these types of narratives, emperors are portrayed as unstoppable conquerors who, thanks to the benevolence of the god Aššur, manage to subdue and overwhelm a multitude of territories. It is therefore not surprising if within these inscriptions particular emphasis is given to the descriptions of the struggles against Babylon, the eternal Assyrians’ antagonist. A decisive change in the Assyrian narratives takes place from 681 BC with the ascent to the throne of Esarhaddon who, unlike his predecessors, establishes with Babylon a policy aimed at inclusion and not at violent submission. To achieve his goal, the king enacted a reformulation of the old Assyrian narrative, rewriting and representing in a different light the violent acts committed against Babylon by Sargon II, his grandfather, and Sennacherib, his father. Therefore, this paper will reflect on the changes in the narration of the past and the present within the Neo-Assyrian sources, putting a particular emphasis on the role attributed to the deities within the imperial policies.

Military conquest was a major part of the ethos of the Assyrian state. War was treated as a never-ending process which served as testimony of who was righteous and who was guilty. The royal scribes emphasised the contrast between the just Assyrian king and the wicked enemy. Assyrian ideology significantly differentiated ‘self’ and ‘other’, the enemy was a part of chaotic power and hence the object of Assyrian punishment. The Neo-Assyrian kings went to war in the name of their gods and with their support, giving its military activities the necessary ideological legitimation. War was ideologically motivated and presumed all possible violence. A direct method of propagating the power of the Assyrian king was through public atrocities. It was a sophisticated method of psychological warfare. Enemies were tortured, violently killed, their bodies were desecrated and denied proper funeral rites. The acts of cruelty were not merely a vindictive means of exacting revenge, but were meant to act as a warning to other subjects who might ponder defying the Assyrian empire. Torture become a conscious and planned act of waging war. These acts of cruelty towards all armies, and indeed all the nations, happened so often, and were practiced with such a detailed plan, that the question naturally arises, was it merely cruelty which accompanied all forms of military activity at all times, or it was something more, a way of conducting realpolitik, i.e., an ideological tool used, extremely successfully, to increase the power of the Neo-Assyrian empire?

Herodotus regularly uses narrative processes in order to explain peace and war. In this framework, religious elements play an important role, especially in the course of the Persian Wars. The plain of Marathon in 490 BCE is one example of this that clearly explains the Persian defeat. The author uses an ethical composition: the defeat is symbolically the fault of the Phoenicians from the Persian fleet who stole a statue of Apollo on the island of Delos, but the Persians, who disturb the balance between men and gods with their act of pride, are also guilty. Herodotus chooses the Phoenicians as narrative mediators of the Persians’ downfall, because they are always present at cultural, moral or physical borders. From the Greeks’ point of view, the Phoenicians stealing the statue of Apollo is an omen of the barbaric defeat in the course of the First Persian War.

This paper proposes an alternative way to reconstruct worshippers’ participation in the Eleusinian Mysteries by exploring their resilience in the observance of the mysteries during a series of military events. In this paper, I would like to reconstruct the history of some of these aspects by looking at the concrete details of ancient stories of divine signs and support, as well as on how certain military and political actors may have influenced and facilitated the celebration of the Mysteries during the Classical period. First, I shall start by discussing the evidence concerning recent theories about the development of psychological resilience in uncertain times, and will then turn to two case-studies which I believe, are indicative of this process. The first part of this study will focus on the myths of divine support that shaped the historic realities and personal as well as collective resilience of the military participants just before the battle of Salamis (Herodotus 8.65). While, the second part of this investigation will attempt to reconstruct worshippers’ resilience by discussing the impact of Alcibiades’ strategy to provide a military escort for the ritual procession to Eleusis during the Peloponnesian War.

It has long been demonstrated that Silius Italicus in composing his Punica relied primarily on Livy’s Ab urbe condita libri; nevertheless, his poetic version of the Second Punic War is enriched by the introduction of a large number of divine interventions. The purpose of the present paper is to analyze in particular how in the last books of the poem Silius cunningly employs prodigies and omina as a tool to overcome a political problem, i.e. to legitimate Scipio’s potentially debatable military strategy, without damaging neither Africanus’ public image nor the one of his opponent Quintus Fabius Maximus.

The Latin epic entitled Punica, written by Silius Italicus between 83 and 103 A.D., resumes several Greek epic’s mythological themes. I will focus on an episode dealing with the intervention of god Pan, just before the storming of Capua (XIII, 314-347). When the gates are wide-open for Roman devastation of the city, at this very moment, Jupiter unexpectedly choses to send Pan, a quite minor goat-god, for a pacifying intercession. Unlike his part in contemporary epic (Argonautica III, 44-58), Pan is not an instigator of panic, but the opposite : he turns out to be the deciding protagonist in a crucial event of Roman history, playing the part of a peacemaker, vouching for an extended romanity ; a positive and happy figure borrowing from both Greek and Roman culture, Pan is a vivid example of mythological, political and artistic conciliation, and also an achieved case of altérité incluse in Roman context.

Literary traditions about the story of the Caudine defeat (321 BC) are quite jumbled. Some of the problems of the historical reconstruction involve religion. In particular, the causes of the defeat (allegedly, the Roman hybris), the omens, the alleged prophecies, the Roman behaviour, the prodigies that surround it, and the religious-juridical nature of the deal struck after the defeat present many interesting points. In this article, it is argued that Roman historiography (and Livy in particular) used, among other features, religious characterisation in order to present and strengthen the version chosen by the authors. This does not help in better defining the circumstances of this defeat, but sheds light on ancient narrative techniques used to characterise the ‘historiographical earthquake’ that the Caudine Forks story represents in ancient historical writing.

The Historiae adversus paganos, written by Orosius in the early fifth century CE, have their core in the humanae miseriae, that derive from Adam’s sin and that God constantly punishes. Orosius specifically emphasizes the bellorum miseriae, collecting all the wars that followed one another over time (from the Assyrian king Nino to 416 CE). Among many examples, this paper will be focusing on Chapter 8 of Book 3 of Orosius’s Historiae, that has long been overlooked. It consists of Orosius’s reflection on Roman wars before the Pax Augusta, with a specific focus on the Punic Wars. The author compares the belligerent state in which Rome was raging to a dread disease. Such a health condition prevented the Romans from lucidly analysing their situation, and recourse to pagan gods fomented their malaise. Only after the Pax Augusta could Rome recover from that disease, the cure for which came directly from God.

At the end of the IV century, the Syriac author Cyrillona wrote a poem, which was likely intended for liturgical purposes, about the scourges which were wasting the oriental part of the Roman Empire: Huns and locusts were for those times among the most terrible things that a society could tolerate. His vivid voice from his years shows us the way to withstand the situation. The community is lost, and it cries to his God via two personified characters: the Earth and the Church. The creation, this material world, is a possible way to directly contact God and try to find an intercession. By moving the previous analysis forward, our aim is to understand how a community could handle this situation in the poetic way that Cyrillona outlines. The preacher, the singer of this homily is the handler of the community: he leads it through the prayer by encouraging and inspiring his audience, i.e. the congregation. The external context is the attractive city of Edessa and in particular his “theological school” configured probably by Ephrem himself. The rich imaginary poetic world drawn up by Ephrem is developed and expanded by Cyrillona in order to create with his poems a liturgical space where the leader can take the hand of the congregation and carry it out of the tremendous time of the scourges. With Ernesto de Martino, we can say that Cyrillona is the magician of the community, the only one which can take risks for the whole congregation and re-establish the previous order.