Tonio Hölscher, Krieg und Kunst im antiken Griechenland und Rom. Vier Triebkräfte kriegerischer Gewalt: Heldentum, Identität, Herrschaft, Ideologie (Münchner Vorlesungen zur Alten Welt 4), Berlin, Boston 2019

In his comprehensive book „Krieg und Kunst im antiken Griechenland und Rom“, classical archaeologist Tonio Hölscher examines how the phenomenon of war was depicted in Greek and Roman antiquity. Hölscher does not, as one might have expected, restrict his analysis to official monuments such as reliefs on public buildings, but also uses sources of a more private nature, such as pottery or objects from sepulchral contexts. Unlike many previous works, Hölscher doesn’t set a narrow time frame to his study. Instead he covers a remarkably long period, beginning in Archaic Greece and ending in the Roman imperial period.

Hölscher begins with a short introduction that sets out a sophisticated methodological framework and allows him to approach the representation of war in ancient art from various perspectives. The author then divides the study into four chronological chapters. Chapter I deals with Archaic Greece. Based on a thorough study of vase paintings, Hölscher shows among many other aspects how war was perceived as an “Anti-Ordnung” (p. 13) in the early Archaic period. Hölscher demonstrates this perception of war as the absence of order through the analysis of an Attic krater, which shows a chaotic battle scene that does not even allow to discern different parties of combatants. Besides, Hölscher stresses the ambivalent character of archaic depictions of mythical heroes, such as Achilles. These heroes were imagined as representatives of aristocratic values, but the vase paintings also showed how their remarkable abilities led to violence, crime and terrible excess. In the second chapter, Hölscher deals with the Classical period and shows how people in this period started to depict armed conflicts in large-scale official monuments. These new monuments often presented glorious wars of the past and present, which helped constitute the identity of the single poleis as well as the entire Hellenic word. This is a clearly different method of politicizing martial images than the method which was used in the Hellenistic period and in the Roman Republic, which are the subject of Hölscher’s third chapter. In the Hellenistic period, official war monuments mainly focused on the kings of the new monarchies, whose immense power they propagated. Depictions of soldiers are relatively rare in the time after Alexander’s death. The reason for this phenomenon according to Hölscher lies in the fact that the Hellenistic armies mainly consisted of mercenaries, who did not possess the same political relevance as the armed citizens who had fought for their poleis in the Classical period. In the last chapter, Hölscher examines depictions of war in the Roman imperial period. Here, he argues that images of the emperor at war often express typically Roman virtues such as virtus, clementia or providentia. This orientation towards traditional Roman values might explain why for example the reliefs of Trajan’s Colum usually depict the emperor in rituals or symbolic acts indicating his virtues, and not in combat.

This short summary can only sketch a few basic ideas of Hölscher’s highly instructive book. Without doubt, the author ably offers a broad overview over ancient depictions of war that describes all major developments in this area of ancient art. Hölscher’s book not only offers thorough discussions of the most recent research literature, but also provides a variety of new and innovative theses, which might well be the basis of future approaches to the subject.