Review of: B. Steinbock, Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse (Ann Arbor, 2013) (original) (raw)

Narrating the Past, Transforming the Present: Unraveling Collective Memory in the Ancient World (CA 2020)

Classical Association Conference (Postponed), 2020

Collective identities are based on narrative constructs that social groups communicate to internal and external audiences. These constructs gradually become ‘traditions’, through performance or ritualisation, and are perpetuated by social mechanisms. This collection of papers examines the development of different forms of communicating stories and perceptions of identity in the Ancient Greek world. Local histories, imbued to the very core of the community, became a distinct genre after the late Classical period and an essential aspect of communal perceptions of the past. Tales of phyletic descent were used as separators between different population groups and made their mark on communities’ pasts. On several occasions, however, narratives of the past were consciously modified as an answer to contemporary social and political needs. Different perceptions of geographical space were a direct outcome of political developments and changing worldviews, thus adding a temporal aspect to geography and allowing communities to subscribe to multiple identities. The panel examines the ways communities, and individuals re-evaluated relations, actual and conceptual space, and their past in Classical Antiquity. Moreover, it explores the issue of agency to establish by whom, how, and to what purpose the past was negotiated continuously in the Greek world.

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.

White (Greek-) Australian Cultural Memorry and the Visionary Appropriation of History

Modern Greek Studies, 2013

In the twentieth century, the organised Greek-Australian communities appropriated the cultural memory, and in particular the political traditions, of modern Greece in terms of two distinct trajectories. One began with the formation of the first Greek Orthodox Community (GOC) organisation in 1897. We can map in relation to it various community-constituting processes in terms of their conformity with Greek migrants' "perpetual foreigner'' positioning. A second pattern of community-constituting conduct emerged from about the 1920s when, having joined the newly formed Communist Party of Australia (CPA), a section of Greek migrants began to draw upon the ideals of socialist internationalism to advance a longstanding challenge to their foreigner positioning. We have argued elsewhere that key elements of the institutional formation of these communities have functioned as mechanisms for the collective intemalisation of the 'inside-outsider' status assigned to the perpetual

In Limine. Religious Speech, Sea Power, and Institutional Change: Athenian Identity Foundation and Cultural Memory in the Ephebic Naumachia at Piraeus

Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 79 (1), 2013, pp. 239-276, 2013

Topic of the present essay is the religious commemoration of a historical event in Hellenistic Athens and the role of cultural memory in its conception and performance, considered as essential components in the identity construction process and civic self-awareness achievement. I intend to propose as a case study the celebration of the events occurred on the eve-night of the famous naval battle of Salamis, after which the Athenians claimed Greeks’ attention for having been the Saviours of Hellas. Probably by the end of the fifth century BC (when Athenian democracy was restored but the hegemony of the polis on central Greece was ending), or perhaps later, in the course of the fourth century (after Athens defeat in the Peloponnesian War or under the Macedonian domination), the Athenian youths were annually involved in the official celebrations of the victory that the fleet of Themistocles had obtained on the Persian invaders, by playing a ritual naumachia, aboard sacred boats, in the small harbour of Mounychia (modern Akti Koumoundourou) at Piraeus. This tradition is testified by epigraphic sources from the Hellenistic until the Roman Imperial Age. Besides highlighting the positive impact of the contest and collective training in forging sense of membership and fostering unity in society, the Athenian ephebic rituals carried out at Piraeus offers us a meaningful example of religious practice linked to a historical celebration of an event being placed in the remote setting of Classical Athens at the time of the institutional change introduced by Themistocles in 483/2 BC, which had long-term consequences on economic performance, creating a new growth path and ensuring economic prosperity and social justice. From this perspective, the sailing contests played by the future citizens of the polis were social factors of the greatest importance in explaining Athens’ relative success over two centuries in achieving internal stability and cohesion, facing the threat of the “clash of civilizations” by means of the cunning of culture, or, in other words, by means of the cultural practice of the ‘recycling’ of symbolic capital after democracy was restored at Athens in 403 BC.