2024 Theses Doctoral

Cultures of Bondage: Bodily Constraint in Ancient Greece

Lovisetto, Giovanni

My study explores the pervasive theme of physical binding in ancient Greece, utilizing visual, literary, and archaeological evidence to uncover its broader cultural and ideological implications. Traditionally, scholarship has scrutinized these sources to reconstruct historical practices such as incarceration, enslavement, and torture. Addressing the performative aspects inherent in the sources under investigation, I complicate this perspective by pairing iconographic analyses and close readings with an interdisciplinary approach informed by theories of affect, embodiment, and neuroaesthetics.

This methodology facilitates the interpretation of spaces like the prison, the courtroom, the theater, and the symposium as interconnected cultural landscapes characterized by practices of torture and imprisonment, cursing rituals, bound figures on vases and statues, and theatrical performances featuring actors chained on stage.

Within this framework, I argue that the image of the bound body transcends mere representation of societal practices: it actively shapes and crafts social hierarchies and identities. Specifically, male elite control over female and enslaved individuals emerges both as a dominant motif and a symptom of societal anxieties. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that in ancient Greece physical bondage was a real- life issue as much as it was a matter of representation, a cultural assemblage of chains, shackles, and wheels.