Current Issue
The current issue of Ókor examines the various forms and meanings of violence in the ancient world. Approaching the topic from multiple periods and genres, the studies demonstrate that violence becomes visible not only on the battlefield, but is also embedded in everyday social relations, status differences, and the fabric of urban coexistence. Narratives of Roman origin traditions present violence as a foundational pattern of communal self-definition, while accounts of maintaining political order reveal the heightened tensions between elite and populace. In Greek tragedy, the problems of bodily destruction are intertwined with the presence of the divine, whereas in the poetry of Ovid, the experience of trauma and transformation emerges at the boundaries of language and the body. Within the self-reflexive layers of Roman literature, violence becomes a tool of narrative and generic reinterpretation: poetic treatments of civil war both evoke and call into question the rhetoric of historical violence. The aim of this issue is to place these diverse approaches side by side in order to show that violence in ancient cultures constitutes a fundamental, formative, and identity-shaping experience. In addition to the thematic studies, the issue is complemented by contributions in the Textus, Books, and Dualis sections.
