Roman Greece and the ‘Mnemonic Turn’. Some Critical Remarks. PUBLICATIONS OF THE NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE AT ATHENS VI (original) (raw)

Roman Greece and the 'mnemonic turn': Some critical remarks

Since E.L. Bowie’s seminal article on the Greeks and their past in the Second Sophistic, the study of Greece in the Roman Empire has been experiencing what has been described in other areas of social sciences and the humanities as a ‘mnemonic turn’. The purpose of this article is to rethink the role and scope of these approaches by revisiting some of their assumptions and by posing a series of related questions: was the Roman conquest a catalyst for the emergence of phenomena of mobilization of the past in Greek societies? If such phenomena articulated conscious local responses to the imperial situation, how uniform were these responses across the Greek mainland? Were Greeks unique in this respect compared to other provincial societies across the empire? Did every use and representation of the past always have an ideological significance that can be read from the available textual and material evidence? Can we classify and describe all these phenomena by using the ‘language of memory’? By examining these issues, we wish to highlight the complex nature of the evidence and the need to take into account its potential and its limitations when making inferences about remembering as a social and cultural strategy.

Colonising the Past: Cultural ideology and Civic Memory in the Hellenistic West

C. Buongiovanni and J. Hughes (eds), Remembering Parthenope: The Reception of Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present., 2015

The cities of the Greek Western Mediterranean provide fascinating case-studies of the ways in which cultural memory – especially that of the Greek past - played a complex role in the development of civic and regional identities under Roman rule. The extent to which communities engaged with their Greek past, the forms which any such engagement took, and the extent to which this form of cultural memory shaped contemporary culture, varied widely. In some communities Hellenism remained a prominent part of local cultural identity, but in others, it is much less visible, and in some cases, we can see the development of a fictive Greek past as an element in cultural identity, which was no less powerful for having tenuous historical roots. This paper aims to explore the role played by cultural memory in several communities with a real or imagined Greek past as they developed under Roman rule. In particular, it will examine the significance of variations between different memory communities, and why an on-going, or re-imagined, Hellenism was more important to some communities than to others. It will also consider what forces might have shaped such developments and how the Greek and non-Greek elements of local culture were interwoven in early imperial Naples.

Greek Memories: Theories and Practices. (TOC)

Greek Memories. Theories and Practices, 2019

Greek Memories aims to identify and examine the central concepts underlying the theories and practices of memory in the Greek world, from the archaic period to late antiquity, across all the main literary genres, and to trace some fundamental changes in these theories and practices. It explores the interaction and development of different ‘disciplinary’ approaches to memory in ancient Greece, which will enable a fuller and deeper understanding of the whole phenomenon, and of its specific manifestations. This collection of papers contributes to enriching the current scholarly discussion by re-focusing it on the question of how various theories and practices of memory, recollection, and forgetting play themselves out in specific texts and authors from ancient Greece, within a wide chronological span (from the Homeric poems to Plotinus), and across a broad range of genres and disciplines (epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, philosophy and scientific prose treatises).

Introduction: Collective memory in ancient Greek culture: Concepts, media, and sources

C. Constantakopoulou and M. Fragoulaki, edd., Shaping Memory in Ancient Greece: Poetry, Historiography, and Epigraphy, Histos Supplement 11 (2020), ix-xliv, 2020

Cultural or collective memory defies a stable definition. It can be viewed as an interdisciplinary space where different and at times overlapping terms, media, and methodologies speak to each other, casting new light on the multifaceted phenomenon of collective remembering. Τhe chapters of the present volume explore aspects of the shaping (and reshaping) of collective memory in ancient Greece, viewing it as a holistic cultural phenomenon, mobile, transformative and transformable.