Q&A with Debbie Felton on Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History

Jack the Ripper. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Locusta of Gaul. If that last name doesn’t seem to fit with the others, it’s likely because our modern society largely believes that serial killers are a recent phenomenon. Not so, argues Debbie Felton—in fact, there’s ample evidence to show that serial killers stalked the ancient world just as they do the modern one.

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Felton brings this evidence to light in Monsters and Monarchs, and in doing so, forces us to rethink the assumption that serial killers arise from problems unique to modern society. Exploring a trove of stories from classical antiquity, she uncovers mythological monsters and human criminals that fit many serial killer profiles: the highway killers confronted by the Greek hero Theseus, such as Procrustes, who tortured and mutilated their victims; the Sphinx, or “strangler,” from the story of Oedipus; child-killing demons and witches, which could explain abnormal infant deaths; and historical figures such as Locusta of Gaul, the most notorious poisoner in the early Roman Empire. Redefining our understanding of serial killers and their origins, Monsters and Monarchs changes how we view both ancient Greek and Roman society and the modern-day killers whose stories still captivate the public today.

To celebrate the publication of Monsters and Monarchs, we asked Professor Felton some questions about her book.

The introduction to Monsters and Monarchs mentions several serial and mutilation murder examples from far earlier than the usual Jack the Ripper references. Is there a particular case that sparked your ideas, or do you have a “favorite” (inasmuch as one can have a favorite serial murder)?

Well, I definitely wouldn’t say I have a “favorite.” In fact, the material was pretty disturbing, even though accounts from antiquity don’t have the same immediacy or sense of reality as modern accounts. And there were several different cases that got me thinking about serial killers in the ancient world. The main one that sparked my idea for the book comes from the second century CE and is discussed in chapter 9. This story, by the Greek writer Pausanias, describes a drunken sailor who attacks a local girl and is then stoned to death by the townspeople, but who comes back as a ghost or reanimated corpse of some kind and starts killing the townspeople in revenge. It’s a very weird story and lends itself well to a lot of different interpretations. But some of the minor details brought to my mind aspects of serial killing, such as the characterization of the killer. The other cases that struck me as very serial killer–like were those involving the Greek hero Theseus—like Procrustes, for example, who invited tired travelers to stay overnight in his roadside home, but then murdered them in various ways to get them to fit his guest bed. He basically had a murder kit that included a saw (for cutting off limbs that were too long) and a hammer (for smashing limbs to extend them if they were too short). Procrustes’s attempt to make Theseus fit the bed doesn’t go quite the way he expected. So these cases were all from myth and legend. One of the more realistic cases, from the fourth century CE, describes a highwayman who doesn’t just rob his victims—he tortures them and cuts them into bits. 

In the first chapter, you tackle the difficulty of “trying to make arguments about what motivated people in antiquity” by affirming that “the human mind, human behavior, and human emotions have remained very much the same across time” (13). What were some of the challenges in approaching your work with this mindset? How did it enrich the work?

The main challenge, not surprisingly, was that despite the stated similarities in our minds and reactions, when we talk about ancient Greece and Rome we’re still dealing with substantially different cultures from long ago, when people dealt with death in a far more immediate manner than most of us do now. Aside from the frequent military engagements (both at home and abroad) that most adult men would have experienced at some point in their lives, deaths from illness and old age would usually occur at home, not in an impersonal environment (like a modern hospital). And revenge killing was common in early Greek culture; laws punishing certain types of homicide developed slowly over time. What surprised me was that the reaction to what could be classified (in modern terms) as serial mutilation murder was essentially the same as now: horror that one human being would do this to another, and frustration that the killer couldn’t possibly be punished sufficiently in proportion to the crimes. And these considerations enriched the work in the sense that they made me pay closer attention to Greek and Latin descriptions of the killings as well as of people’s emotional reactions.

The modern world of true crime is fraught with the tension between perpetrator, victim, and bystander; you take care to note Joseph DeAngelo (the “Golden State Killer”) and Ted Bundy alongside Nero and Agrippina. Does that same tension between observers (modern or ancient) exist in studying ancient murder?

I would have to say that this tension does not exist or occur in antiquity in quite the same way, mainly because it is not possible to indisputably identify even one specific individual serial killer from ancient Greece or Rome. Rather, my research indicates that what we would call serial mutilation murder was recognized as a phenomenon, but without what could be considered any serious or reliable forensic evidence. Ancient “evidence” consisted primarily of witness testimony—which, of course, is often biased and highly unreliable—and confessions, which themselves were often likely to be compelled rather than entirely voluntary. And in the cases of what sound like serial killings, we have neither witnesses nor confessions. So, for example, with Nero, our sources are highly biased historians and biographers who were writing with hindsight and who were keen to depict the emperor in an extremely unflattering light, and his victims and bystanders in a sympathetic one. What’s especially interesting about Nero is how the sources describe him as having the sort of behavioral progression we associate with serial killers—being callous and violent even as a very young man, with his (alleged) crimes escalating over the years from bar fights and rape to torture and murder.

The accounts of ancient serial murder in your book stem from various tellings of myth, such as those found in epic poetry and tragic drama, but also from historical records. How do the transformations, simplification, and dissemination of these accounts affect our contemporary reading of them?

I think the sort of simplification you mention is precisely the reason why there has been very little previous discussion of serial killers in antiquity or even discussion of the possibility of serial killers in antiquity. This project met with quite a lot of skepticism from academic colleagues when I first mentioned it, whereas, when I started researching, it was quickly obvious that the general public on social media were already raising questions about similarities between mythological characters such as Procrustes and modern serial killers—the same questions I had been asking myself! So the questions seemed worth answering. And I think our contemporary reading of these accounts results in a certain amount of surprise, from the recognition that—even without the level of psychological and forensic detail available for modern serial killings—the motivations and methods in antiquity are recognizable. Take Medea, for example. She’s a mythological character, a princess who is also a witch, who first kills out of amorous obsession, chopping her brother into bits and strewing them in the sea so that her father, who is pursuing her and her lover Jason (who has stolen the Golden Fleece), will have to slow down to retrieve the body parts for burial. Later, she arranges the murder of Jason’s rival for the throne. But when the relationship sours—when Jason rejects her for another princess, a Greek rather than a foreigner like Medea—she gets her revenge on him by killing not only his new fiancée but also the two sons Medea had borne him. Although Medea is a character from Greek myth, her story serves as a prototype for what forensic psychologists identify as “spousal revenge,” one of the main reasons parents kill their children. This type of filicide (child killing) sometimes occurs when a spouse discovers their partner is cheating on them, or during especially bitter divorce proceedings, such as when the partner who gets custody threatens to move away with the children.

The arguments in Monsters and Monarchs open the door to many new possibilities and connections between mytho-historical accounts and the reality of our world. You explore, for example, the notion that the Sphinx of Thebes was a real bandit—and then later mention that posing riddles is sometimes a practice of contemporary perpetrators like the Zodiac Killer. What is the value that you see in reading history across periods in this manner—not necessarily answering an extant question, but broadening the application of a definition? 

First, I think it’s important to point out that the notion of the Theban Sphinx as a real-life bandit was already a theory more than two thousand years ago. Even in ancient Greece there were philosophers and mythographers who questioned the reality of mythological stories—who wanted to interpret them more literally, or at least more rationally. So you’ve got a figure such as the little-known Palaephatus, from the fourth century BCE, who wrote a book providing rational explanations for myths. He noted how absurd it was to believe that monstrous hybrid creatures could ever physically exist (their anatomy and physiology simply wouldn’t work!), and suggested that the Sphinx story grew out of a local Theban legend about a female bandit who robbed and killed travelers in the vicinity of the city. Second, I don’t think it’s useful to insist, as Palaephatus did, that virtually every case of a monster killing people can and should be rationalized into a more realistic scenario. A lot of monsters can be taken as metaphors for the unknown, for our own mortality, or, even less abstractly, as dangers present in nature—a swamp emanating poisonous vapors perhaps becomes personified as the Lernaean hydra (a swamp monster), for example, though such metaphors are themselves a type of rationalization. About posing riddles, there are several different aspects to consider: In a case like that of the Sphinx, we have a monstrous killer taunting her victims—a method of psychological torture, since the victims hold out hope that they might answer correctly and be released. But in folktales and possibly even in recorded history riddles have been posed to the potential suitors of princesses, and the suitors’ failure to provide the right answer results in, at best, their humiliation and, at worst, their execution. Contemporary serial killers, both fictional and real, may use riddles to torture their victims (see pages 142–143), but more often they use them to taunt the police, sending them letters in code, as the Zodiac Killer did. So did the BTK Killer, Dennis Rader. Reading fictional and nonfictional accounts across time that present and try to explain these details provides the sort of long view of human behavior that can make us rethink our assumptions about the uniqueness of modern serial killing.

Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity and editor of Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity: Negative Emotion in Natural and Constructed Spaces.

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with C.J. Alvarez on His History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.

Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences

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and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

The US-Mexico border is at the center of an unprecedented national debate, yet very few people from either the United States or Mexico have ever been to the international divide. This book explains the complex history of construction projects on the border that have been underway for over 100 years.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I thought this was an important subject to write about not because it has become especially controversial but because I grew up in the border region. To us border dwellers, the international divide and the various ecosystems through which it passes have always been relevant.

Why is it important to study the built environment on the US-Mexico border?

Government policies—whether we’re talking about the “drug wars” or immigration law—are often enacted through physical construction projects. Fences and walls are the most obvious examples of this, but it’s important to understand other, less-obvious kinds of building, such as border survey markers, roads and highways, surveillance infrastructure, bridges, and massive storage dams.

In what ways did engineering and police projects affect the geography, environment, and communities on both sides of the international divide?

One of the most surprising conclusions I came to through my archival research was that the Rio Grande border has undergone a far higher degree of environmental transformation than the land border. There is almost nothing “natural” about the Rio Grande watershed, and this has produced fascinatingly complex results in border communities. On one hand, some of these river modifications made it easier for immigration police to surveil the international divide, and on the other hand, an untold number of people have been saved from disastrous floods.

What context might be missing from contemporary debates about the ongoing “drug wars” of the border region and border enforcement policy?

Government and business interests in both the United States and Mexico have spent over a century painstakingly building connective tissue between our two countries. First it was the railroads of the 1880s, then, with the invention of automobiles and trucks in the early twentieth century, more complex road networks were introduced: after the 1950s, that meant the interstate highway system, and after the free trade agreements in the 1980s and 1990s, superhighways and port-of-entry expansions. These were all bilateral projects; you can’t build only half a port of entry. The US-Mexico border is designed to be open to commerce, which means you can’t cherry pick those who cross it, weeding out illicit business and the unauthorized movement of people, no matter how many fences you build.

C. J. Alvarez is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with Theresa L. Miller on Multispecies Ethnography

The Indigenous Canela of Brazil inhabit a vibrant multispecies community of nearly 3,000 people and over 300 types of cultivated and wild plants living together in a biome threatened with deforestation and climate change. In the face of these environmental threats, Canela women and men work to maintain riverbank and forest gardens and care for their growing crops, whom they consider to be, literally, children. This nurturing, loving

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relationship between people and plants—which offers a thought-provoking model for supporting multispecies survival and well-being throughout the world—is the focus of Theresa L. Miller's new book Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil.

We asked Theresa to explain the significance of her research, which reckons with the rapid environmental and climatic changes facing sensitive ecologies as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

Plant Kin is about Indigenous peoples’ environmental knowledge and their resiliency to climate change. I pose the question: How do Indigenous peoples engage with their environment in meaningful ways, even as the environment is rapidly changing in the Anthropocene? For the Indigenous Canela of the Brazilian Cerrado, they engage with their environment through affectionate, caring relationships with nonhuman kin, especially plant kin. By examining these human-plant relationships through what I call a “sensory ethnobotany” approach, Plant Kin offers a way forward for climate change resilience strategies in the Anthropocene.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I have been interested in working with Indigenous peoples since I was an undergraduate at American University making two documentary films on Aymara youth and feminist activists in Bolivia and Diné environmental activists in New Mexico. My interest in human-environment engagements and Indigenous peoples grew while I was working toward my masters degree at Oxford University and I began working in Brazil. Through a serendipitous connection with Dr. William Crocker from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, I visited the Canela village in July 2011 and was eventually adopted by my Canela family. Ever since, I have been connected to and deeply interested in understanding their life-world. Moreover, the ethnobotanical diversity that Canela gardeners manage is impressive and extremely beautiful. I was, and continue to be, drawn to the multi-sensory beauty of diverse human-plant relationships.

How do you interview a plant?

There are various strategies that scholars have offered on how to “interview” and ethnographically study plants (see Hartigan 2017; Myers 2017; among others). Plant Kin looks at this question ethnographically, through its focus on Indigenous life-worlds that have arguably the most complex and detailed ways of engaging with nonhuman kin (see TallBear 2011, 2016; Todd 2016). From an Indigenous Canela perspective, it becomes clear that people engage with plants through multi-sensory, embodied activities of naming and planting seeds and cuttings; tending, weeding, and singing ritually to growing crops; harvesting crops at the end of their life-cycles; and through specific shamanic communication with plants and their master-spirits. For my research, I participated in and observed these activities in multi-sensory and embodied ways in order to understand how Indigenous human-plant communication occurs. While the Canela do not consider themselves to be “interviewing” plants as such, there are ways that they closely engage and communicate with plants that is akin to scientific observation in the Western tradition, and that goes beyond this realm to consider plants as agentive subjects in the Canela community.

Tell us about the part of the world where your research is focused and why you chose this area.

The Brazilian Cerrado is a biome that covers nearly a quarter of Brazil’s territory and is being deforested more rapidly than the Amazon. The Cerrado has long been considered a “sacrifice zone,” as compared to the Amazon (Sawyer 2009; Oliveira and Hecht 2016), and here industrial cattle-ranching and soy and eucalyptus plantations are allowed to run rampant. This was particularly true of the Cerrado during the soy moratorium of 2006–2016 in the Amazon (Gibbs et al. 2015). The Cerrado is an extremely beautiful and diverse biome, with sweeping landscapes and brilliant red earth. I fell in love with the region and its people while living there and experiencing its seasons and ecological diversity. While the threats to the Cerrado are relatively well-understood within Brazil (and there are organizations that work exclusively on conserving this biome), worldwide much more is known about the Amazon and its threats. Plant Kin is an attempt to shed light on the plight—and also the beauty and resiliency—of the Cerrado and its socio-ecological diversity.

How do you see the Anthropocene in terms of “sensory ethnobotany”?

Sensory ethnobotany is the theoretical approach I put forward in the book to take seriously embodied, multi-sensory engagements among people and plants over time and in diverse contexts. The framework can help us understand the Anthropocene—a distinct epoch marked by human activity that has changed the “socio-economic and biophysical spheres” of the earth (Steffen et al. 2015)—in its focus on the lived realities of human-plant engagements in the past, the present, as well as by allowing for contemplations of what those realities could look like in the future. Sensory ethnobotany allows us to reconsider human-plant engagements as not purely economic or nutritional, but rather communicative, generative, caring, and sometimes grounded in kinship ties, as is the case for the Indigenous Canela. In this regard, sensory ethnobotany is a response to Natasha Myers’s (2017: 3-4) call for a “Planthroposcene” in which humans “make allies” with plants. In this way, sensory ethnobotany furthers the dialogue concerning multispecies engagements and how they can contribute to climate change resilience strategies.

In what ways can your work be read as political?

Although not explicitly stated as such, this book is deeply political in that it is grounded in understanding climate change and strategies to deal with and mitigate its effects, which unfortunately is a contested political and economic issue. As Brazil, the US, and other countries across the globe grapple with authoritarian regimes that are dismantling environmental protections and threatening Indigenous rights and livelihoods, the question becomes: how do we fight climate change in hostile political environments? I believe the answer can be found in taking seriously, working closely with, and letting Indigenous peoples lead climate resilience strategies. This is already occurring in Brazil as Indigenous peoples put themselves on the front lines to demand socio-ecological justice through protest movements, running for political office, and stopping policies that threaten Indigenous lives and the environment. Plant Kin is a call to support Indigenous resilience strategies and to make these strategies central to broader environmental decision-making and policymaking worldwide.

How does gender factor in to your research?

Gender is a key component of my research and informs the sensory ethnobotany approach and analysis of Indigenous human-plant relationships described in Plant Kin. For the Canela, as is common in Indigenous Lowland South American communities, the gender binary categories of male and female are crucial to understanding socio-economic, socio-political, socio-cultural, socio-ecological, and aesthetic aspects of the life-world. The gender binary of male/female informs Canela relationships with one another and with nonhuman kin. Yet there are important instances of both people and plants transgressing these gender binaries through third-gender or gender non-conforming identities, activities, and practices. I examine instances of genderqueer gardening in the book and elsewhere (Miller 2018), and it is an important aspect of human-plant relationships that should be explored further.

What do you hope readers, scholars, and researchers take away from your book?

The main point I hope readers take away from Plant Kin is the strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples and the environments they so carefully manage. I also hope that the multispecies embodied approach to nonhumans and especially plants is taken up at a much broader scale to inform not only scholarly discussion, but also everyday human-plant relationships and policymaking around environmental issues. I hope readers come away with a renewed respect for Indigenous worldviews and ways of being and becoming in the world, and are able to appreciate the ways that engaging with plant (and other nonhuman) kin can make the world a better, more inclusive, and more socio-ecologically just place.

Theresa L. Miller is an anthropologist working on environmental and social justice issues. She has worked at the Field Museum and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and is currently a Researcher at FrameWorks Institute in Washington, DC.

www.utexaspress.com

Beyond the Forest Q&A with Loli Kantor

To mark the start of Hanukkah, we asked photographer Loli Kantor to answer some questions about her new book, Beyond the Forest: Jewish Presence in Eastern Europe, 2004–2012. Kantor is the daughter of Polish Jews who met and married in Munich after the war. Born in France and raised in Israel, she has spent the last thirty years living stateside in Fort Worth, Texas. In the early 2000s, she was compelled to set out in search of her roots. In the book's introduction, Anda Rottenberg sets up the devastating details that spurred Kantor's travels in Eastern Europe over an eight-year period:

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"The face of her mother, who died in childbirth, is something familiar only from photographs. Of her father, she knows his place of birth and his short, professional CV, most likely written for the U.S. State Department and thus omitting the details of his war experiences....she knew little of the historical landscape from which her parents emerged, the territory of Central-Eastern Europe—stretching from the western borders of prewar Poland to the line connecting Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kursk in the east, Tallinn in the north, and Crimea in the south—and aptly described by Timothy Snyder as the 'bloodlands.' From 1933 to 1945 this region witnessed the deaths of 14 million innocent people, including women, children, and the elderly. Up until 1948 it also experienced mass forced displacement of whole populations (Jews, Roma, Poles, Germans, and Rusyns), as well as the “voluntary” exile of those who hoped to save their lives or improve their fate."

Kantor's photo-essay is a very moving account of her personal journey to reconcile incredible loss with hope, faith, and community. Given recent events in the area, we took the opportunity to ask her about what Jewish communities now under Russian rule  in the Crimea region are coping.

We wish you and yours a Happy Hanukkah. Chag Chanukah sameach!


Q: The plates in the book progress from stark black-and-white images to colorful, people and food–filled scenes, almost winter to spring. How does that evoke what you experienced in your travels and time spent in these communities?

The transition from black-and-white to color, from stark to bright does reflect my disposition at the beginning of the project. I made my first trip in November 2005, purposefully to have this stark, cold, and snowy atmosphere in the works, using black-and-white film. This was partly intentional and was also my state of mind about the place of Jewish presence and absence in Eastern Europe.

Block 11 | Auschwitz, 2005 | Poland

AAUP Listening Tour: Q&A with Peter Berkery

Peter Berkery, Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses, visited the University of Texas Press offices in Austin last week as part of his Mellon-funded tour of the AAUP member presses. Peter answered some questions about what he’s learned from his “Listening Tour,” the value of university presses to their host institutions, and advice for young professionals in scholarly publishing.

Follow the Listening Tour on the AAUP Digital Digest, and check out the University of Washington Press's Q&A with Peter from an earlier Listening Tour visit.

Shiori Kawasaki, 2013

Now that you are on the second leg of your Listening Tour, what is the most surprising or interesting thing that you have learned from the Presses you have visited?


It’s arcane, but the most surprising thing I’ve learned relates to my prior experience at Oxford University Press. People generally assume that size is what most sets OUP apart from other university presses. Of course size really does matter, but I’ve come to understand that the biggest differentiator is that OUP in the US is four thousand miles away from its parent institution. Being on campus, a direct part of the ecosystem, makes all the difference—and this is a factor that comes into play for many of our members.


What do you plan to do with all of the information that you are gathering?

Originally, the Listening Tour was intended to accelerate my learning curve. While I still have a lot to learn, I’m now 12 months in and I think people are expecting me to act on my newfound wisdom! So the information I accumulate will have several purposes. First, I will be reporting back to the Mellon Foundation (who funded this second leg of the Tour). Next, I’ll be reporting back to our Board, who will use my input to inform a pending revision to the AAUP Strategic Plan. Finally, I’ll base the specific program decisions we make to further the plan in part on what I’ve heard on the road.

One topic that comes up often among university presses is how to strengthen the relationship with our universities. How can AAUP help those in the academy better understand the role that university presses play in scholarly dialogue?

This is a great question, but a challenging one. First, the direct answer: AAUP needs to strengthen its relationships with other organizations that represent various elements of the academy—administrators, faculty, librarians, lawyers, finance officers, et cetera. It pains me to say this, but we’re barely on any of their radar screens. That said, a lot of the relationship-building work has to occur at the grassroots level, by individual presses. AAUP can equip university press leaders to do this critical work through training and toolkits, but the lifting has to happen on campus.

We have heard about a newly formed AAUP Early Career Group that is connecting young professionals in scholarly publishing for career networking and idea generating. What words of advice do you have for the ‘next generation’ of scholarly publishers?

The best career advice I’ve ever received—and I’m forever trying to put it into practice more myself—came from a sales manager I worked with at Wolters Kluwer: Listen! The good Lord gave you two ears and one mouth because that’s the ratio He wants you to use them in!

Specific to scholarly publishing, I’d say listen to what’s happening in your ecosystem. It’s easy for us to get lost in the work we do—our elegant designs, our guerilla marketing strategies, the disciplines we acquire in—but more than ever we need to be mindful of how external changes are impacting the scholarly communications process we serve. Pay attention to how technology is changing research, and what that means for our authors and our customers in the future.