by Kenny Carnes
About the Creator:
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The Call of the Community
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However remote our personal connections to war may be, we are all affected. Soldiers that fail to ritualize an "exit strategy" from the warfront are bound to psychologically bring pieces of that war home. Prior to reentering Athens the warriors of Ancient Greece practiced a "blood bath" ritual which allowed them to release the traumatic effects of their journeys on the battlefield and effectively transition to civilian life.
To participant in the modern day event and an affective reintegration ritual that was also produced and practiced by the veteran warriors of Ancient Greece, please contact us.
The Theatre of Athenian Warriors
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Athenian theater was created and performed by veterans for an audience of veterans because the process of healing from intense combat was meet by fundamentally communalizing it. Graduation from military life took place on the main stage of the city's theater (1). Athenian theater arose from the political need to purify, purge, and clarify civic understanding for its returning soldiers, so they could again fulfill the roles of citizens of a democracy. The soldiers themselves lead the secular ritual. Athenians had a distinctive therapy of reintegration for its returning soldiers that was undertaken as a whole democratic community acting as the city's primary means of reintegrating the returning veteran into the social sphere as free 'citizen.' Tragedy becomes a place of honor in the re-education for those soldier/citizens as they deployed to and returned from continuing cycles at war (2).
(1) Aristotle, Constitution of Athens Section 42. Translated by F.G. Kenyon. In Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton 1992), 2367f.
(2) Martha Nussbaum, op. cit. p. 378 note 1 and Salkever, op. cit.
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