Epilogue

Violence – by which I mean an intentional rupture of the physical integrity of a body – is a reminder that a human being is always also a thing. Whatever else late ancient humans may have been, they were always subject to the possibility of physical rupture, perforation, tear, or break, as is the nature of things. War was, and is, a stylized method of maneuvering one group of rupturable things toward the infliction of greater disintegration on another group of rupturable things. “The main purpose and outcome of war,” Elaine Scarry writes, “is injuring.” That the things injured are also people, with their own sensations and experiences, pasts and hoped-for futures, is the point of war; it is how war persuades injured people and other onlookers to accept its outcomes. War confronts persons with their reducibility, their thingness, and asks them to accept conditions imposed by the victors in the light of that bodily thingness. The essays in this volume present us with a variety of ways of thinking about this ugly practice. They describe how different late ancient people made sense of what was happening when bodies were ruptured, or bodies threatened to rupture other bodies, on a large scale. In this Epilogue, I bring some of the ideas in this volume together to consider the problem of ruptured bodies in Late Antiquity as a series of questions about how late ancient people imagined or experienced physical thingness in warfare.