Abstract
The ancient Greeks were acutely aware that war took place not only on the battlefield with the armed combat of male heroes, but also in the aftermath when the women and children of the enemy were taken captive, as Thucydides describes in his History of the Peloponnesian War.1 Kathy Gaca’s work (2014) has shown that this “was ancient populace-ravaging warfare: that included the focused martial use of aggravated sexual assault and other bodily and psychological torments against war-captive girls and women,” a practice called “andrapodization” in the prose sources.2
I want to thank the editors, David Konstan and Peter Meineck, for their suggestions, as well as Kathy Gaca for her generous reading of this chapter. I am grateful to Pangea Farm for two writing retreats where I was able to flesh out my arguments in peace and serenity.
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Rabinowitz, N.S. (2014). Women and War in Tragedy. In: Meineck, P., Konstan, D. (eds) Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137398864_9
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