Memory Incarnate: Material Objects and Private Visions in Classical Athens, from Euripides’ Ion to the Gravesite (original) (raw)
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Arethusa, 2010
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article. Imagine that becoming Athenian were as simple as opening a basket and finding therein the objects needed to secure your citizenship. This is the fantasy dramatized by Euripides’ Ion, where things in a basket—a woven aegis, golden snakes, and an olive wreath—reunite the hero with his long lost mother and his native city. There is something paradoxical, however, in “re-cognizing” what one has never known. Recognition presupposes familiarity, whereas Ion’s story is that of a foundling baby, abandoned at birth, then rescued and raised by Apollo in a foreign city. How is he to know his mother when he finds her? This essay sets out to explore the cultural agency of the tokens that enable this unusual kind of recognition.
Touch and Remembrance in Greek Funerary Art
Greek Funerary Art nathan t. arrington What makes a grave monument effective? How can objects, incapable of thought, help the living to remember the dead? The variety of memorials in ancient Greece betrays that here, as elsewhere, no single, perfect solution existed. Simple slabs of stone, large mounds of earth, sculpted reliefs, and more responded to the financial abilities of families, to sociopolitical conditions, to cultural and artistic contexts, and to the task of memorialization. In the ancient world, the grave and the grave marker were fundamental components of personal and collective remembrance. People put money, time, and thought into tombs, and visited them frequently. But these monuments, humble and extravagant alike, could not bear their entire mnemonic burden: none could record all the qualities, accomplishments, and aspirations of the deceased; none could immobilize all the moments that mourners cherished and manage to prevent memories, over the course of time, from fading away. And people were well aware of the limits of physical memorials. Neglected and forgotten tombs dotted the Attic landscape, and poets compared the immortality of their speech acts to the inevitable decay of works of art. In the sixth century, the richest Athenians favored two sculpted funeral forms (to attempt) to create a lasting monument and to help remember the dead: freestanding stone statues (a kouros or a kore) or stelae ). 2 Frontal and (when standing on their large bases) over-life-size, the freestanding statues acted as "doubles" for the deceased, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has described. 3 The dead received a permanent body whose formal appearance, not by chance, was shared with statues of the immortal gods. The grave reliefs also were usually for individual figures. The Archaic monuments stood out on the landscape, and mourners could identify and interact with the figures, who were named through inscriptions that encouraged passersby to mourn. There was no need for realism on these statues and reliefs, since the funeral setting and the inscription made the identity and function of the solitary figures evident. The memorials were semiotically strong, with a clear signifier (the statue or the figure in the relief ) and a clear signified (the deceased).
"Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture"
Greta Perletti, 2020
This chapter relates the statue-like bodies of some Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to the theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourse. In particular, the chapter shows how memory images, which in antiquity played a pivotal role for the art of memory, were represented as inducing a paralysing, statue-like state in living bodies. Shakespeare’s work partakes in this re-assessment of memory images, as words are more powerful memory triggers and carriers than monuments and statues. Moreover, while Shakespeare’s tragedies stage bodies turning into stone because of the destructive fixedness of the past, his late plays manage to set in motion the images produced by memory and by so doing resist death-like paralysis. Keywords: cultural representation of memory; memory images; lethargy; pathological memory; statue-like bodies
Material objects are now a well-established research topic in Greek tragedy. In the past decade, the most remarkable critical turn has been a shift from a performance-oriented interest to an ontological questioning. While the first generation of scholars investigated how objects participated, sometimes crucially, in the performance of Greek tragedy, the current generation is more interested in the ontology of objects, namely the set of defining properties that characterise their being in ancient plays, and, more widely, how non-human and human beings coexist in the ancient tragic Weltanschauung. This shift raises epistemological questions that have not been explicitly formulated. Moreover, a response to these ontological debates on the ‘life’ of objects has been to absorb and apply new theories: posthumanism and new materialisms are now deployed as new heuristic tools broadening classicists’s range of interpretative strategies. However, through a critical reading of Jane Bennett’s acclaimed 2010 opus, Vibrant Matter, I show how radical new materialist ideas – advocating for the non-human turn – clash with ancient Greek culture. The ancient, tragic materialism indeed grants a relational existence to objects, entangled with human bodies, emotions and cognition.
Cold Comfort: Empathy and Memory in an Archaic Funerary Monument from Akraiphia
Focusing on a single funerary monument of the late archaic period, this paper shows how such a monument could be used by a bereaved individual to externalize and communalize the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional effects of loss. Through a close examination of the monument's sculpted relief and inscribed epigram, I identify a structural framework underlying both that is built around a disjunction between perception and cognition embedded in the self-identified function of the monument as a mnema or memory-object. Through the analysis of other epigrams and literary passages, this disjunctive framework is shown to be derived, in turn, from broader conceptualizations in archaic Greece about how both mental images, including memories, and works of art allowed continued visual, but not cognitive-affective, access to the deceased. From this perspective, the monument's relief opens up to us the experience of the bereaved individual who is only able to connect with the deceased through a remembered mental image.
A Funeral to Remember. The imagined past of the Athenian funeral oration as a source of resilience.
2014
The aim of this paper is to study the funeral oration given by Demosthenes in 338 BC, to better understand the role of the past as a source of resilience during the Athenian identity crisis after the defeat by Macedon at Chaironeia. The funeral oration or epitaphios has often been offhandedly treated as an uninventive and repetitive genre, employing stock themes to reach a never-changing goal: to praise the war dead by promoting polis identity. In 1981 however, Nicole Loraux published a groundbreaking work on the Athenian funeral oration, L’invention d’Athènes. In this book, she focused on the shared mythical and historical past as an important theme in the genre. This type of ‘memory study’ has become immensely popular in the past two decades, but where the ancient world is concerned it has mostly focused on classical fifth-century Athens. I would however like to shed more light on the function of memories of a shared past at the end of the fourth century BC, in what is now known as the Lycurgan period. Ushered in by the battle of Chaironeia in 338 BC, at which Athens suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Philip II of Macedon, the Lycurgan period was a time of identity crisis for the Athenians. This sense of desperation and loss of identity inspired a series of reforms aimed at reinforcing not only military strength, but also civic pride. New insights into the mechanics of the shaping of civic identity have greatly increased interest in this turbulent episode of Athenian history in the past five years, coinciding with the current ‘boom’ in memory studies. The funeral oration, even though two of the six extant samples are dated to this period, has however not received much attention in this light. Indeed, after Loraux, the only one to devote serious attention to the epitaphios was Rosalind Thomas in her 1989 Oral Tradition & Written Record in Classical Athens. The funeral oration is however still only rarely seen as a useful source from which we can learn more about a specific moment in time. The goal here is to bring the funeral oration by Demosthenes into narrower focus, relating it to its specific historical circumstances and focusing on its evocation of social memory to show its unique and inventive character. Contrasting this epitaphios with that of Hypereides, which was held in 322 BC after Athens had booked several victories over Macedonian armies, will especially highlight its importance as an instrument of resilience in the city’s time of crisis.
'Their memories will never grow old': the politics of remembrance in the Athenian funeral orations
Classical Quarterly, 2013
In this article, I ask what the Athenian funeral orations’ relationship to memory is and how exactly they worked to create it. Looking at these speeches through their politics of remembrance shows that they are not limited to celebrating the good death of citizens and to promulgating the ideology of the city, as the scholarly discourse currently suggests, nor are they focused only on adult male Athenians. As I argue, the processes of remembering are integral to the dynamics of these orations, the purpose of which is to create memory. The ritual context generates remembrances which would not otherwise exist both for the survivors, the children, parents, and brothers of the dead, and for the Athenians as a corporate group; it also ensures that these memories are ‘national’ ones shared by the whole city. The work of remembrance done in the epitaphioi intersected with other strategies of memorialisation elsewhere in the city and their juxtaposition brings out the complexities of remembering in classical Athens; indeed, the orations formed a critical part of this larger context and can not be understood without it. The speeches further show in exemplary fashion how one individual’s memory may become collective remembrance.