David C. Yates. States of Memory

A couple of years ago, a right-wing British politician could be found musing on Twitter that a sign that political correctness had finally gone mad would be when historians started to claim that the Greco-Persian Wars were not the straightforward triumph of the gloriously united Greeks over the terrifyingly alien Persians that all sensible people—he implied—know them to be. It is probably better for that politician’s blood pressure, though worse for his historical and cultural understanding, if he never catches sight of David C. Yates’s States of Memory: The Polis, Panhellenism, and the Persian War. This excellent book comprehensively articulates the case for seeing that image of the conflict as a historically contingent construction and—more importantly and more originally—as a construction to which, in the Classical period at least, few if any Greek city-states (poleis) actually subscribed. More specifically, Yates make three distinct claims in this book. First, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the dominant mode of remembering the Greco-Persian Wars was one that was centered on the polis, not on the collective efforts of the Greeks—or what Yates labels “transcendent panhellenism.” Second, as a result, there was no single collectively agreed narrative of the conflict. And finally, it was only with the rise—and as a specific result of the actions—of Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon that a “mutually accepted recollection of the war” emerged (3).

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