Review of: Georgios Deligiannakis, The Dodecanese and the Eastern Aegean Islands in Late Antiquity, AD 300-700 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Abstract 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. https://www.sidestone.com/books/strategies-of-remembering-in-greece-under-rome-100-bc-100-ad
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.
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).
2017
ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the memory of Nicias was contested in Athenian public discourse after the failure of the Sicilian expedition. Defending the reliability of Pausanias’ testimony (1.29.11-12), it makes the case that the conspicuous absence of Nicias’ name on the public funeral monument of 412 BC prompted Pausanias to report the story he had read in Philistus (FGrHist 556 F 53). Thucydides’ silence concerning this damnatio memoriae of Nicias stems from the historian’s disapproval of the Athenians’ action; his eulogy of Nicias (7.86.5) is a deliberate correction of the exclusion of Nicias’ name from the Athenian casualty list. By the middle of the 4th century, Nicias played again a positive role in Athenian social memory, as Demosthenes’ positive reference to him in one of his assembly speeches shows (D. 3.21). This restoration of Nicias’ reputation is largely due to the Athenians’ memorial practices: the annual public funeral orations downplayed defeats and integrated them into the idealized version of Athenian history which celebrated all the fallen as manifestations of timeless Athenian excellence. Over the decades, the details of particular campaigns and the failings of individual generals faded from common historical consciousness. This process facilitated the rehabilitation of Nicias’ reputation in the eyes of later generations of Athenians. KEYWORDS: Social memory; Sicilian expedition; Nicias; logos epitaphios; Pausanias
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.