1 Need to Hurt? Torture and Truth in the Athenian Courts and in Prometheus Bound* Eirene Visvardi (2022) [Original Publication: Eirene Visvardi. “¿Es necesario herir? Tortura y verdad en los tribunales atenienses y en Prometeo encadenado”. Circe, de clásicos y modernos 26/2 (julio-diciembre 2022). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.19137/circe-2022-260204] Abstract: This paper examines the affective, emotional, and ideological questions raised by the practice of evidentiary torture (basanos) as necessity (anangkê). It proposes that competing ideas about its truth-value in Athenian forensic oratory reflect a degree of ambivalence sufficient to indicate that the Athenians (can) recognize the inherent unreliability of the slave’s tormented body and mind to reveal the truth. In Prometheus Bound, the torture of Prometheus is dramatized as brutal coercion by Zeus’ authoritarian state and set against the ‘coercion’ exercised by the bonds of kinship and emotional attachment. As such it engenders unbending anger on both sides and fails to coerce Prometheus to speak. The juxtaposition of the two genres establishes the unreliability of torture for extracting information along with a recognition that the criteria of exclusion for rendering bodies torturable are arbitrary, as are the rights they help maintain in the interest of Athenian exceptionalism. Fully embracing these recognitions would necessitate a new politics of care and fundamental reorganization of the civic community to expand ‘kinship’ and the bonds that compel mutual recognition and political inclusion. The paper closes by turning to the use of torture by the CIA in the context of the American war on terror to elucidate the persistence of discourses of necessity in contemporary politics of righteous anger and brings forth similar misrecognitions in the interest of American exceptionalism. Keywords: basanos; torture; anangkê; Prometheus bound; enhanced interrogation techniques ~ About fifteen years ago, one of the leading experts on government torture and interrogation proposed that we “live in a world in which torture is returning to a role it had in ancient Greece, inducing civic discipline […], conferring identities, [and] shaping a finely graded civic order”. 1 What constitutes civic order and legitimate practices, which body-movements are deemed legitimate, and whose bodies and voices warrant freedom and self-determination are issues that have returned with urgency especially, but not exclusively, in the US, through the Black Lives Matter movement and recent Supreme Court decisions about reproductive and gun rights among others. Regarding torture specifically, the ongoing trials at Guantanamo of alleged terrorists whose testimonies were obtained under CIA led torture in black sites remind us that the demarcation of rights and personhood are contingent upon controversial approaches to law, transparency, and ‘necessary’ measures for * My thanks to Richard Martin and Andy Szegedy-Maszak for their thoughts and suggestions on this paper. 1 Rejali (2007) 59-60.