Memory and Ancient Greece

Bibliographic Data

ID23404034
AuthorsSimon Price (0000-0001-6963-4800, corresponding author)
Year2012
Pages15-36
Publication date2012-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueHistorical and religious memory in the ancient world (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199572069.003.0002
OpenAlexW2503689625
ISBN9780199572069
LanguageEN
Citations received28
References cited20

The relationship between memory and history is a productive zone in which the self-understanding of past peoples was formed. This chapter studies four contexts in which memories were constructed in ancient Greece: objects and representations, places, ritual behaviour and associated myths, and textual narratives. Underlying all four is a longstanding Greek desire to link the present to the remote past. Objects, monuments, and temple decorations, for example, were of high significance for this task. Place, location, and close physical proximity to signifiers of the past established the necessary links. Thirdly, local versions of myths became a standard way of raising the profile of places small and large. Finally, textual narratives offer themselves as the framework for and articulation of memories of the past, and here genealogies in the widest sense, from Hesiod's Theogony to the Parian Chronicle, are shown to provide telling material.

Aesthetics · Art · Articulation (sociology) · Collective memory · Hesiod · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Poetry · Politics · Balkan and Eastern European Studies · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Philosophy

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