Thank you for this! I treat young people with long term ongoing trauma, so not the same population or cause of their symptoms, but I have always conceptualized PTSD as (mal)adaptive: if these kids lived in a world where violence and hypervigilance kept them alive—such as prehistoric times or societies where war is a constant—they would be more likely to survive than not.

As with many diagnoses, PTSD is contextual. It’s a problem in our modern society, but wouldn’t necessarily be one historically.

Fantastic post. Thank you for taking the time to write this!

Fantastic read, lots of great stuff to think about here.

I was reminded of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast “King of Kings,” in which he examines the events of the Greco-Persian wars. This is a topic he finds immensely fascinating, pointing to how, quite often, the details of ancient combat seem so brutal as to be implausible for any modern human to psychologically endure. An interesting foil he presents is a battle fought during the Napoleonic wars during which soldiers on either side came too close for practical ranged gunpowder warfare and, finding great individual difficulty in using their bayonets for their intended purpose, instead retreat in order to resume firing their muskets at distance. This would be comical if it did not allude to a more disturbing truth about these soldiers’ experience: Seeing the face of a man you are about to kill, and/or corporeally delivering the killing blow (with all of the physical sensations that accompany such an act) requires more stomach than pulling a trigger, and this generation of soldiers did not seem to have it.

This of course raises the question of whether it was the widespread introduction of gunpowder that would fundamentally change the soldier’s relationship to killing forever. It is worth noting that the 18th century (during which the Napoleonic wars were fought) saw the widespread adoption of the flintlock in gunpowder warfare, reducing significantly the time required to fire a shot, and it is my lay understanding that this shift prompted the dramatic reorganization of combat away from melee weapons altogether for infantry. If this is accurate, then it makes the 18th century a fascinating period with regards to the topic at hand, as the combat experiences of these soldiers would reflect a truly paradigmatic transition in the history of warfare, and I would be fascinated to learn more about individual accounts.

But to return to the question of ancient PTSD, I’ve heard it said that the issue of trauma could not have been recognized by a contemporaneous society because society itself stood perennially traumatized. I’ve not been exposed to any evidence that supports this, though I would certainly be open to investigating any such evidence.

My knowledge of history starts and ends with classical Greece and the Roman Republic, as I’ve read cover to cover the great works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Livy. I’m often astounded by disparate reactions within these primary texts toward violence—where on the one hand an especially brutal moment is recorded scientifically and without comment, or even sometimes with an acknowledgement of understanding or approval, and on the other, a seemingly less brutal incident is detailed alongside moral outrage and disgust. Putting aside the very real (if not more likely) possibility of political bias in each author’s coloring of events, it’s difficult for me, the lay reader, to effectively tease out any reliably consistent assumptions regarding contemporary attitudes toward violence.

Something that first struck me when first reading primary depictions of hoplite warfare was the frequency with which a battle concluded with 1.) one side being overcome with terror and running away, and 2.) few deaths. This detail alone, notwithstanding accounts of military leaders attempting to preclude the sway of Phobos (terror) over the minds of their troops, reveals to us a commonality between the Ancient Greek and Napoleonic soldier, and with ourselves: Melee warfare is fucking terrifying, and to be given over to terror on the battlefield is not unusual.

But here’s the rub: Following this reading of Ancient Greek warfare, it’s easy to imagine their great wars as successions of bloodless skirmishes, closer to armed games of chicken where the side with the better position, greater numbers, or stouter heart would de facto prevail as the enemy, perceiving that there could be no victory, simply retreated to fight another day.

This is of course mistaken. For every battle that ended with one side throwing down their weapons and sprinting for the shelter of the wooded hills, our primary sources offer contrasting scenes of fields watered with blood, and death counts in the tens of thousands. Any attempt at downplaying the brutality of Ancient Greek warfare must contend with the fact that the Peloponnesian War (and the subsequent Greek wars leading up to the rise of Macedon) saw the practically absolute decimation of the male population of Greece.

To me personally, the most interesting case study in Ancient Greek attitudes toward combat is easily Sparta, whose stances toward military death and glory are as well-known as they are bizarre. It is my (again, lay) understanding that popular conceptions of Sparta were about as sensationalized and incredible in 491 BCE as they are today. We must accordingly take what we know about Sparta with a reasonable degree of skepticism. But I do suspect that there is something further to be gleaned from primary accounts of Sparta with regards to the theory of the traumatized society—from their extreme religiosity (itself something of a curiosity in its day, as Athens took no issue with exploiting Spartan piety by paying off the oracle at Delphi to manipulate Spartan kings seeking counsel in war), their single-minded, seemingly suicidal fixation on the glory of death in combat, their rampant pederasty, their unique relationship to, and correspondent terror of, slave labor by way of the helots, their ostensible, though frequently undermined rejection of any measure of personal convenience or luxury, and lastly their issues surrounding reproduction (namely that despite childbearing being heavily incentivized by the state, the Spartan population would continue to dwindle)—all of this, to me (neither a historian nor a psychologist), hints at the possibility of Sparta being a highly dysfunctional society, filled with deeply troubled individuals unable to ground either their own suffering or the suffering of others (both rival Greeks and the helots that Sparta mercilessly subdued) within any broader social or cultural context. For them, trauma likely existed as a Thing without a name, permeating all aspects of quotidian life so as to be not distinguishable as a discrete, and therefore non-essential, feature of reality’s landscape.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. I’d love to read yours and others’ thoughts on the matter.

Psychotherapist here. I can not find a fault in this post, which is amazing because misinformation is usually everywhere when it comes to mental disease. Frankly, I'm a little bit envious of how well written this text is.

This was fascinating, thank you very much.

I'd like to add that traumatic brain injury, such as concussion from an explosive blast, seems to be a major risk factor in PTSD. Soldiers in modern wars are exposed to explosive blasts at a much higher rate than in ancient wars. Think of soldiers in WW1 being shelled by unprecedented artillery in trenches, (later suffering "shell shock"), soldiers in WW2 exposed to artillery, tanks, mines, (later suffering "battle fatigue") and contemporary soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq being severely concussed from experiencing IED strikes while inside an armored fighting vehicle, (later suffering "PTSD").

Another potential factor in an increased incidence of PTSD is that modern medicine and the advanced medical evacuation system in Western armies mean that many soldiers survive traumatic injuries that would have killed soldiers of earlier generations. As Plato said, "only the dead have seen the end of war."

The technologies of war and medicine in the 20th and 21st Centuries may play a role in the incidence of PTSD, compared to ancient times.

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/co-occurring/traumatic-brain-injury-ptsd.asp

​

What about PTSD related to experiences other than combat? Has the experience of surviving disasters or violent assaults changed as much as the experience of combat?

I was deeply engrossed in this incredible answer until I was hit by:

"in many Ancient Greek societies, war was considered something that was fucking glorious"

Reading that in itself, was fucking glorious. Thankyou so much for this answer! Going to be diving deeply into your other answers, as some of them are related to mental illness in the loved ones around me. Thankyou for sharing your knowledge.

Additionally, in Ancient Greek society, war was a communal effort, done next to people you knew before the war in civilian life and continued to know after the war; in contrast, in modern war situations, where recruits are found within a diverse population of millions, there is a constantly rotating group of people in a combat division who may not have strong ties. Additionally, with the rise of combat that revolves around explosive devices and guns, fighting has changed, and Crowley argued, made people more susceptible to PTSD; these days, if soldiers are in a tense, traumatic situation, it is better for them to be spread out so as to limit the damage when under attack. This, Crowley argues, leads to many more feelings of self-blame and helplessness - the kind of thing that might lead to negative posttraumatic cognitions - because blame for events is not spread out amongst a group in quite the same way.

While this may be applicable to Ancient Greece, I don't think that it's necessarily applicable to all pre-modern warfare. For example, Geoffroi de Charny wrote:

In this profession one has to endure heat, hunger and hard work, to sleep little and often to keep watch. And to be exhausted and to sleep uncomfortably on the ground only to be abruptly awakened. And you will be powerless to change the situation. You will often be afraid when you see your enemies coming towards you with lowered lances to run you through and with drawn swords to cut you down. Bolts and arrows come at you and you do not know how best to protect yourself. You see people killing each other, fleeing, dying and being taken prisoner and you see the bodies of your dead friends lying before you. But your horse is not dead, and by its vigorous speed you can escape in dishonour. But if you stay, you will win eternal honour. Is he not a great martyr, who puts himself to such work?

There's definitely a feeling of powerlessness there and, I think, also one of isolation. Knights fought as a unit, but he doesn't describe the experience of battle in those terms.

Good post.

One thought I'd like to add is that is that when discussing psychological disorders in a historical context it might be more useful to use a broader definition.

By including the DSM criteria, when you present the question as, "Did ancient warriors get PTSD?", you're asking: Did ancient warriors experience symptoms that modern insurance companies would reimburse? Like you said, it's not an answerable question and, even if it were, I don't think the answer is very meaningful because the concept of PTSD is embedded in modern western (specifically, American) institutions. Whereas asking, "Did ancient warriors experience psychological stress from combat?" is potentially more knowable, and the answer could provide insight into how the psychological experience of warfare changed or didn't, and why that is.

The issue with using the DSM criteria of PTSD is that the criteria are determined by more than just statistical analysis: the DSM is a document negotiated by stakeholders in the field, including insurance companies, that decide where to draw the line between what's diagnosable and what's just a collection of subclinical symptoms. So you sometimes have someone with psychological symptoms that resulted from their combat experience that doesn't qualify as PTSD—so what is it? There's continued debate today about the conceptualization of PTSD and the DSM is not the best arbiter of that definition because it doesn't necessarily reflect scientific consensus.

The other issue with using the DSM criteria is one you touched on: psychological disorders are culturally and structurally mediated. Across cultures disorders may present with different symptoms or symptoms may look differently, and the DSM is predominately based on research with western populations.

With a broader conceptualization of posttraumatic stress you can potentially make comparisons between warriors' experiences through history. Technically, since PTSD was conceptualized following Vietnam, if you asked did WW2 veterans experience PTSD, the glib answer would be no—but WW1 soldiers experienced what was described as "shell shock", and WW2 experienced "battle fatigue", and /u/theCroc described soldiers in the 19th century experiencing "nostalgia". A concept of PTSD existed before the DSM, and it evolved with the time and the cultural conceptions of what's a normal response to war and what's out of the ordinary. So I would be interested in historical evidence looking at whether warriors experienced psychological stress characterized by hyperarousal and avoidance (the two broad categories of PTSD).

Or more broadly: did warriors experience any psychological symptoms following combat that were considered out-of-ordinary responses for the times (e.g. u/hastybear describes knights experiencing a decrease in empathy)? Something like hyperarousal may not be as much of a symptom when life is still dangerous (compared to the distinction between deployment and home that exists for modern servicemen/women today).

Fascinating read. I have been studying medieval literature for a while and what seems to be missing from many history books is that many knights and men at arms came back from wars and crusades with major psychological issues. Waking up screaming in the night from nightmares was a very common symptom, as was withdrawal and a decrease in empathy. One thing that has struck me is that the effects of combat seem to produce different effects on combatants as the cultures vary. So would a diagnosis of PTSD today fit the symptoms of several centuries ago?

A few thoughts in response.

in many Ancient Greek societies, war was considered something that was fucking glorious, and societies were fundamentally structured around the likelihood of war in ways that modern America very much is not.

I think it would be fair to note that that ancient Greece had a more nuanced positions that war is always glorious. War is fairly often painted as undesirable and in a negative light. For instance, Achilles' words to Odysseus in the Odyssey (Alexander Pope's translation):

Rather I'd choose laboriously to bear

A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,

A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,

Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead.

He shows deep regret for his choices and calls into question the worth of the honor and glory won in war.

I'd also note that Lysistrata by Aristophanes have some antiwar elements.

Still, I do think your basic point stands that the ancient world was more fully-war like than modern America, which may influence the level of trauma felt by the ancient warriors.

I imagine that we should be able to either help confirm or refute this claim thought by comparing various modern armed forces to each other for rates of PTSD. For instance, modern Israel sees pretty continuous (and often brutal) conflict, and has universal conscription. Do you know if there's been a comparative study between the two armed forces?

Broadly speaking, what I argued in the last paragraph is the kind of thing that Crowley's paper in Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks argues. There are much more severe injunctions against killing in modern American society than Ancient Greek society, which was not Christian and thus didn't have Christianity's ideals of the sacredness of life - instead, in many Ancient Greek societies, war was considered something that was fucking glorious, and societies were fundamentally structured around the likelihood of war in ways that modern America very much is not.

I'm not as certain about all this. I should point out at the start that I'm not a professional historian, but there are a few issues I'd like to bring up here.

For one thing, while there are stronger injunctions against killing in our modern world, shapers of ideology have found a lot of ways to get around it. Racism and dehumanization of the "Other" are major aspects. To a large extent, since the rise of colonialism, Western soldiers have been trained not to think of the people of countries they're occupying as human, or to think of them as less human than they are. You can see in many accounts of US soldiers from the Vietnam War, when discussing war crimes like My Lai, that many of them simply didn't regard the Vietnamese as people. That's just one example; this mentality can also be found in accounts from soldiers from the Korean War, the Philippine war, or the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's easier to get around the official ideology of it being wrong to kill your fellow man if you train people not to see your "enemies", or subjects, as fellow men.

Secondly, there's the matter of propaganda. In our modern world, war is often treated as "fucking glorious". Watch any Hollywood movie celebrating war, the troops, the dropping of bombs on other nations. Movies play a major role in shaping public perceptions in our societies, much as plays did 2,000 years ago. As such, they can be, and often are, used as an instrument of propaganda. The US military works with Hollywood producers to ensure that the portrayal of the war itself, the soldiers and the "enemy" are as "accurate" from their perspective, or the perspective they want to portray to the public, as possible, and even alters scripts to this end. Movies are a powerful recruiting tool for the military. Military recruitment shot up the year "Top Gun" came out. So, let's say, a thousand years from now, those movies are the only record that remains of the wars waged in our time, and all the records of anti-war voices have been lost. How would that shape future perceptions about our societies, the way our culture handles war? To be sure, accounts of the stress of war have also made it into our film industry, but the overall picture is one of glory and pride and sacrifice and heroism. The negative effects, both on soldiers and the people of the countries they're occupying (on the rare occasion the latter are mentioned at all, let alone allowed to contribute their perspective), are quite downplayed by comparison, and usually qualified with themes of "well, it's hard, but necessary".

By the same token, I don't think we should discount the role of propaganda in ancient writings about war. Julius Caesar's writings on Gaul were in some ways the world's first example of war correspondence live from the front for public consumption. And ancient historians, for their part, made no pretense of objectivity the way modern historians do (I don't think modern historians by and large are completely objective, because they themselves are influenced by their own socially-ingrained assumptions and biases, but at least most of them make some effort to be as objective as possible - ancient historians didn't even try). We rely almost entirely on the accounts of those people to form our perception of ancient war and the people who waged it. Greek chroniclers were obviously going to talk about war in a way shaped by the reigning Greek ideas about war. The problems with this are self-evident, I think.

My point being, despite all the efforts of modern societies to get around the Christian doctrine of "thou shalt not kill", by such means as glorification of war and dehumanization of those whom war is being waged upon, PTSD exists. It exists despite official and unofficial reigning ideologies trying to turn soldiers into unthinking and unfeeling killing machines, trained not to think of the "enemy" as human beings, and trained to think of war as a glorious adventure bringing heroism and pride. If one relies only on Hollywood movies, one wouldn't get much of a sense of it (depending on the movie), but it does. For another, admittedly extreme, example, you can look at Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Despite years of official propaganda demonizing Jews as subhuman and firing up the German people and soldiers for genocide, the Nazis' original hands-on methods of carrying out the "Final Solution" were found to be enormously destructive to the mental well-being of their own soldiers, and thus they had to phase out those methods and replace them with more impersonal industrial means of carrying out their atrocities. You would never get a sense of this by relying on the speeches of German leaders, such as Hitler and Goebbels, or the German press. If all we had to go on was the words of the German rulers and propagandists, we would see Germany of those days in the way they did, as a willingly militarized society wholeheartedly devoted to Nazism. We would see the whole German people as eager supporters of and participants in the Nazi cause, and have no sense of the way their own actions destroyed the people who were carrying them out. Rulers and opinion-shapers may portray things one way, but that isn't necessarily the way things really are.

So, by the same token, can we really rely on ancient chroniclers, most of whom hailed from the ruling classes of their respective societies and who saw it as their job to shape perceptions according to prevailing notions, to give us the full picture of ancient war and how it affected soldiers and civilian populations (both their own and others)? Of course we should take their words into account, not least because there are no real alternatives to turn to due to the paucity of ancient sources, but we should bear in mind that they were not neutral and they simply weren't going to give us the whole picture. So I think it's flawed to say that there was likely no such thing as anything we would call PTSD in the world of antiquity based on the prevailing cultural notions about war in those societies, and what little we have been able to glean from what has been left to us by the shapers of public perception of the time.

I don't mean to say that the author of the original post is wrong about cultural values regarding war changing over time and place. That's true, but I'm of the opinion that all humans across time and around the world are essentially the same creatures and that culture, while an important factor, is far from the only one, and I'm skeptical that its effects are as all-encompassing and thorough as the author of the original post suggests.

Furthermore, I don't believe that culture is a completely natural and organically-developing thing. A large part of it is shaped quite deliberately from above, by rulers and those who work to shape opinions in accordance with the ruling ideas, based on the interests of a ruling class. As such, prevailing ideas, that is to say, officially-endorsed ideas, may not always be in accordance with the real spirit of the times. Other sides of it become harder and harder to see the further back you go into history, because in ancient times most people were illiterate and couldn't publish ideas contrary to the ruling ideas of the time. As such, their voices have been lost to us.

Mass literacy, education and media of our time, especially social media, have done a lot to enable great masses of ordinary people to get their ideas and experiences out into the arena of public discussion in a way that was never possible before. This is a large part of why things appear to be so different now, and why we're able to hear about such a greater part of the human experience than we get from ancient chroniclers. For instance, the way war damages many of the soldiers who wage it, and the civilian populations subjected to it. If it weren't for literacy, media and social media, we and especially our descendants wouldn't get to see much of the undersides of our social systems, and our societies might look, to people centuries from now, to be as uniform and simplistic as ancient societies are often perceived to be. But I don't believe they really were. To be sure, ideas, about war and many other things, have changed immensely, but I think the basic human experience is universal and, while people did think very differently back then, they weren't quite as fundamentally alien to us as we tend to perceive them to be.

Apologies for the length of this post. I hope that, despite my not being an expert, it will be seen as a worthwhile contribution to this discussion.

Currently writing a thesis on Berserk warriors/Icelandic sagas and PTSD — THANK YOU for the references. I was pretty much depending on Shay and van der Kolk. <3

Beautiful post. Such good academic writing and referencing makes my nipples feel a certain way :^)

As another commenter pointed out, the restrained but fitting use of “fucking” was very entertaining too.

My only mild criticism is that you could have taken a broader view of “ancient warriors” in the sections where you actually talked about their cultural context than basically “Greek citizen hoplites”. I know there’s much less written, and less still translated to English, about the perspective of, say, ancient farmer conscripts, but I wonder if war would be more shocking to them.

Not entirely appropriate comment for the post, but I was taught a module by Jason Crowley and it was fantastic. One of the best teachers I've had.

Maybe this is a bad question for this subreddit, but you seem to clearly imply (without outright saying it) that psychiatric conditions are to a great extent socio-historical constructions, in a very strong sense that, for example, the flu or measles wouldn't share.

Is this a correct impression?

Great post! Thank you so much.

Jason Crowley has been my lecturer for the past 3 years, and I’m always happy to see his writing get plugged. Never thought I’d come across his work on Reddit however! If anyone is interested in any more of his work he has a brilliant book entitled, ‘The Psychology of the Athenian Hoplite: The Culture of Combat in Classical Athens’, (2012)

This was an excellent read. Thank you for taking the time to put it together. You mentioned that the nature of warfare has changed, now involving more explosions and massive machinery. I recall being told in a college history class that World War I, being the first global conflict involving this kind of weaponry, resulted in lots of soldiers and veterans suffering from what modern psychologists would diagnose as PTSD. To what degree was this a new social phenomenon, and what role did this play in the development of PTSD as a diagnosis? How did the medical community and society at large handle veterans suffering from these symptoms before and after WWI?

Incredibly interesting! Thank you for sharing this

I once heard that Jews performed purification rituals and stayed away fro the community for a certain time after battle. The speaker speculated this would help with ancient PTSD. Is this remotely feasible?

One thing I'd like to add to your post is that, in regards to the military, combat isn't what causes a majority of PTSD. Plenty of soldiers who've deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan were never shot at or never shot at anyone but developed PTSD anyway; this even rings true for infantrymen and not just support roles.

It's the constant threat of danger, constant vigilance, and constantly aware that you can do everything right and get unlucky. Did ancient soldiers ever experience that?

A good resource on the social history of PTSD:

Young, Allan. The harmony of illusions: Inventing post-traumatic stress disorder. Princeton University Press, 1997.

You can hear an interview with the author here

Egad, that is fantastic. Simultaneously scholarly AND approachable.

Thank you for the effort you put into giving this to the rest of us.

This might be the best post I've ever seen on Reddit. A wonderfully nuanced look at the epistemology of psychiatric diagnosis, and especially important considering the uncritical way people on this site tend to talk about mental health. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

I have something to add to the last point about release of catecholamines and glucocorticoids. Release of these molecules in the context of psychological stress is not an absolute response to danger. Rather, it is a responses to perceived danger, and will thus very much be very much dependent on the cultural context of the individual subjected to the stressful situation. This does not preclude the ancient Greeks from experiencing the effects of these molecules in battle, but the graded release of them would presumably be very different between an ancient Greek warrior and a modern soldier. Or between individual modern soldiers today for that matter.

This is a really great post!

Moving away from PTSD for a moment, are there any particular elements about a soldier's experience in combat that you think can be considered fairly universal?

For instance is the physiological effect of adrenaline on a person's body likely to be similar regardless of culture? Are there certain instincts that are believed to be "hard wired", for instance how Crowley assumes that soldiers who have to spread out during a tramatic situation would likely experience additional stress than if they stay bunched together?

I would be very interested in a post like this one about the history of the DSM itself.

I’m curious after reading this if there might also be more evidence for or against the existence of PTSD in Ancient times by looking at the history of corporal punishment in antiquity. While I understand your points about the nature of modern warfare having potentially more affect than that of ancient warfare, I know of several accounts from medieval public executions and one particularly in England which attested to the reaction of some onlookers to seeing a criminal hung drawn and quartered. Some reactions were not much different than what I expect mine or many other modern observers to have been, which is to say clearly traumatized. What would your take on such chronicles be with regards to Pre-modern PTSD?

Great work! Thanks for the high-effort post.

I love this sub! Thanks for the post!

This is amazingly researched and well written. Thank you.

What is the oldest historical case that can be made for someone suffering from PTSD (using DSM criteria)?

Thank you for the thorough response. Now, I must ask:

The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence

Does this discourse on the mutability of psychology apply to sexual assault and rape? How do historians deal with the idea that rapes and sexual assault were potentially dealt with differently (i.e. that women were more resilient) in the past? Are there not ethical concerns in making such an argument?

Some upbringings probably lead to more resilience than others, and depending on the norms of a society, those upbringings might be more concentrated in those societies.

I just have a hard time imagining a queer or gender historian making such a claim, whereas in the military case it seems widely accepted to some degree.

Excuse me, but I've typed a long reply to contribute to this discussion, and I don't seem to be able to post it. It keeps telling me that my comment is over 10000 characters, but I've edited it down to less than 9800 characters and it still won't let me post it. I don't believe I've been banned from this sub, as I never received a message telling me so (and in any case I've only ever made maybe one or two comments here, never violated any rules, never been warned, nothing), so I don't see what the problem is, why it's telling me my comment is over 10000 characters and thus unable to post when I've made certain that it's not. I can keep editing it down until it's accepted, but doing so will weaken the points I made and I'm not thrilled about that.

Edit: Well, the fact that I've been able to post this would seem to suggest I'm not banned, at least. Which is good, because it should mean that eventually I'll be able to post my contribution.

Some researchers, recently, have argued that depression is in fact several different disorders with a variety of different causes despite basically similar symptoms.

Anyone know if there's a word that is used to describe the bolded section?

my google-fu fails me

One good source to consider would be traditional societies that exist in the present. Based on the accounts of violence in (for example) Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday it seems likely that there would have been less trauma over killing but a similar response to exposure to danger. (With the caveat that people in traditional societies probably have both higher thresholds to find events traumatic and greater exposure to more severely adverse events)
I would also suggest that we can get insight to the role that living in a fundamentally traumatic society (as the ancient world would seem to any of us) has on the development of PTSD among combat troops by comparing PTSD among WWII veterans who were raised in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or the Western democracies.

While not specifically about the ancient Greece, I remember reading that post-WW2, Germany had a far lower % of people suffering from "PTSD" (forgot the name they called it back then) compared to the US. I've read it being attributed specifically to the upbringing that lead up to World War 2.

Is there any truth to this?

Thank you for this extremely well-written explanation! I was extremely interested in the 'hysteria' bit and expanding on women's experiences. History (I have my undergrad degree in it) often overlooks the women, and my god did they ever face trauma and battles, as well.

Maybe I misread your source, but isn't calling PTSD a Vietnam War product a ridiculous Americentrism?

Has there been an increase in interest and attention about whether ancient soldiers got PTSD or not due to the recent wars America got involved in in the Middle East?

Thank you for writing this. It was very informative. I've spent more of my time studying the neurological foundations of PTSD, so it was interesting to see the more socially constructed take on it.

Personally, I'm still inclined to believe that, as a neurological phenomenon, it's probably existed as long as the human brain as we know it has existed, and that most of the dispute about it seems to be over semantics rather than substance. And semantics is important in historical studies, but sometimes I feel it gets out of hand. I'm not sure if this is such an instance, but what do I know, I never finished getting my history degree.

Broadly speaking, what I argued in the last paragraph is the kind of thing that Crowley's paper in Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks argues. There are much more severe injunctions against killing in modern American society than Ancient Greek society, which was not Christian and thus didn't have Christianity's ideals of the sacredness of life - instead, in many Ancient Greek societies, war was considered something that was fucking glorious, and societies were fundamentally structured around the likelihood of war in ways that modern America very much is not.

I'm late to the party but I don't see any posts addressing the fact that this is a very Christian reading of history (Christians value life, pagans do not). Plenty of Greek sources indicate that war was scary and awful, while plenty of Christian sources celebrate the virtue of righteous war.

Consider this passage from the Odyssey[1]:

As for you, Achilles, no one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been, nor ever will be, for you were adored by all us Argives as long as you were alive, and now that you are here you are a great prince among the dead. Do not, therefore, take it so much to heart even if you are dead.'

"'Say not a word,' he answered, 'in death's favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead. But give me news about my son; is he gone to the wars and will he be a great soldier, or is this not so? ...

It's absolutely true that Achilles wants his son to be a soldier, but it's also absolutely clear that dying in war sucks. Or here's the Illiad describing war[2]:

Each host now joins, and each a god inspires,

These Mars incites, and those Minerva fires,

Pale flight around, and dreadful terror reign;

And discord raging bathes the purple plain;

Discord! dire sister of the slaughtering power,

Small at her birth, but rising every hour,

While scarce the skies her horrid head can bound,

She stalks on earth, and shakes the world around;

The nations bleed, where'er her steps she turns,

The groan still deepens, and the combat burns.

Compare this with the Catholic Dante writing about various Judeo-Christian warriors in the afterlife [3]:

"In this fifth threshold of the tree, which lives from its top, and always bears fruit, and never loses leaf, are blessed spirits, who below, before they came to heaven, were of great renown, so that every Muse would be rich with them. Therefore gaze upon the arms of the Cross; he, whom I shall name, will there do that which within a cloud its own swift fire does." At the naming of Joshua, even as he did it, I saw a light drawn over the Cross; nor was the word noted by me before the act. And at the name of the lofty Maccabeus[1] I saw another move revolving, and gladness was the whip of the top. Thus for Charlemagne and for Roland my attentive gaze followed two of them, as the eye follows its falcon as be flies. Afterward William, and Renouard,[2] and the duke Godfrey,[3] and Robert Guiscard[4] drew my sight over that Cross. Then, moving, and mingling among the other lights, the soul which had spoken with me showed me how great an artist it was among the singers of heaven.

Violence has indeed become less de rigeur in the modern world, but I'm not sure how much of that can be attributed to Christianity as opposed to material excess, strong central states, etc.

If anyone is curious about ancillary information about the toll that combat has on a person, I would also recommend two books by Dave Grossman; On Combat and On Killing. I wouldn't call them canonical necessarily, but they are both very good analyses on the intellectual and emotional burden that the stress of warfare and the actions of killing other people have on an individual. Both fascinating reads that add a lot to this already great post.

I'm a bit confused here about your analysis here. Certainly there is an interaction between one's environment and their minds, but is it really within the realm of history as a discipline to evaluate or even postulate the degree to which that is true? I mean to say, isn't this a topic better suited for sociology or psychology to address?