This thesis aims to make combat an object of history. More precisely, it concerns violence, practices and fighting experiences in the Aegean space from the beginning of the 4th to the 1st century B.C. These four centuries ...
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This thesis aims to make combat an object of history. More precisely, it concerns violence, practices and fighting experiences in the Aegean space from the beginning of the 4th to the 1st century B.C. These four centuries have not been treated with the same attention as the previous period. The choice of the Aegean space was dictated by the abundant documentation for Aegean Greece. It offers the opportunity to study warfare at the intersection of various political, institutional and military frameworks. This research is conducted through the joint study of epigraphic, literary and iconographic sources. It seeks to make a « total » history of the fighting practices of this period, taking into account their political, social, cultural, technical and operational frameworks. The study follows three stages and engages in a progressive descent towards the combatants. First, the different contexts of combat are studied, in order to measure the weight of institutions, military organizations or logistical constraints in the ways Greeks fought. The analysis brings to light multiple contexts, each of which gave particular forms to warlike actions. There was no « one » experience of combat. Nevertheless, we can also see what was, for the majority of men, the most common face of war: the « small » war, actually the « ordinary » war. It was distinguished from the « big » war, the domain of the formations or the assaults during the sieges. These various configurations and their evolution during the four centuries are the subject of a more detailed analysis in the second stage of this study, devoted to the dynamics of combat: the movements and temporalities of combat. This stage therefore also proposes an analysis of the fighting emotions, some of which had until now attracted little attention from moderns: such as the fear of hand-to-hand combat. The last stage arrives at the scale of the warriors and proposes to explore the different configurations previously identified « au ras du sol », and the evolution of the experiences over four centuries. Mots clés : histoire, guerre, combat, violence guerrière, organisations militaires, armement, tactique, expérience combattante, émotion combattante, mortalité guerrière, période classique, période hellénistiqueKeywords : history, war, combat, war violence, military organizations, weaponry, tactics, combat experience, warlike emotion, war mortality, classical period, hellenistic period
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