Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse

170 PHOENIX ultimately self-referential, aiming at increasing prestige for the sophist and for rhetoric. In speaking for Helen Gorgias replaces her voice with his own. Isocrates is the subject of Blondell’s Chapter Eleven. She works from the premise that his approach to rhetoric was more serious than that of his teacher Gorgias, and that he employed it as a tool for education and training for politics. In his encomium Helen provided Isocrates with a useful tool for demonstrating heroic achievement and Panhellenic unity: for this orator the Trojan War illustrated both the Greeks’ collective desire to (re)possess her and the Trojans’ to retain her. Blondell points out the circularity in Isocrates’ argument: Helen’s transcendent value as beautiful was proven by the quantity and quality of those who desired her, but it was her beauty that initially provoked this desire (235, 237). This book is a fine demonstration of the way in which textual accounts of a Greek legendary icon can be probed in depth to reveal nuances of cultural history that could easily be overlooked. While it is no surprise that a study of Helen should uncover ways in which the masculine agenda of patriarchal Greece was confirmed, Blondell has also exposed the often self-serving and illogical measures taken by Greek writers to accomplish this. She does this with a freshness often quickened by humour, for instance referring to Äth as “brain damage” (155) or entitling Chapter Eleven “Helen MacGuffin: Isocrates.” Chapters are introduced by quotations from modern media such as the 2006 film Jesus Camp or lyrics from the American songwriter Meredith Brooks. This raises the question of the target readership for the book. There are almost no footnotes, and yet there is much substance for scholars here. Non-classicists can clearly take away a good deal, although at times the attempt to make Greek vocabulary and syntax accessible seems strained, such as with the discussion of the importance of active and passive verb forms to indicate the degree of Helen’s agency, or the masculine gender of logos acting on the feminine psyche (180). But this is an important experiment that on the whole succeeds, and the book will no doubt become a staple in a variety of diets. University of Western Ontario Bonnie MacLachlan Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past. By Bernd Steinbock. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 411. “History without historians” is the provocative subtitle of a recent collection of essays exploring how the ancient Greeks themselves perceived, constructed, and used their own past.1 Steinbock’s study is yet another contribution in this promising direction, though, contrary to what its title might suggest, it is much more circumscribed in its aims, as it focuses exclusively on the Athenians’ historical perception of their powerful northern neighbor, Thebes. The concept of social memory (discussed in the Introduction) is defined by Steinbock as “shared remembrances of a group experience” (7).2 Unlike historical knowledge, as 1 J. Marincola, L. Llewellyn-Jones, and C. Maciver (eds.), Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History without Historians (Edinburgh 2012). 2 Following S. E. Alcock, Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments and Memories (Cambridge 2002) v. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 171 we understand it, social memory is often distorted, filtering only certain events and not infrequently changing their nature. It is also protean and malleable, insofar as it can accommodate many divergent versions of a given event on the one hand, and is subject to conscious manipulation on the other. It has little room for nuance or historical contextualizing. Finally, it is to be sought not only in remembering but also in active commemoration. Hence, it exists beyond the simple sum of individual memories, being firmly embedded in the communicative framework of the polis, which accommodated many diverse “carriers of social memory” (discussed in Chapter One), from funeral orations , dramatic festivals, rituals, family and local traditions, to various material artifacts. These theoretical premises are put to work in the subsequent chapters, which examine in detail the Athenian memory of four particular events: Thebes’ medism during Xerxes’ invasion (Chapter Two); the mythical

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Beauty · Greeks · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Prestige · Rhetoric · Sociology · Sophist · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy