Cultures of Commemoration

Historians of the First World War have long noted that forms of remembrance and the symbolic language of war memorials were inspired by ancient models, but it was not clear whether these forms carried the same meaning two millennia ago as they do today. This question has now been partly answered by this volume, edited by Polly Low, Graham Oliver and P.J. Rhodes. The eight essays cover almost 2,500 years of history. The authors analyse the ways in which fallen soldiers were remembered and honoured in their respective societies. The introductory chapter identifies the problems of comparing cultures and is followed by three case-studies of commemorative practices in classical Athens (Polly Low), Hellenistic cities (Angelos Chaniotis) and the Roman Empire (Alison Cooley). The articles on fifth-century-BC Athens and on Rome demonstrate that differences can be as important as similarities. The limited availability of sources from the ancient world does not permit the authors to come to a final conclusion. Comparisons over millennia are difficult per se. While we know how Roman and Athenian authorities dealt with the bodies of the fallen and how they honoured the dead, we do not know whether the funeral orations and the honours accorded the fallen comforted the bereaved in the way that these commemorations did after the First World War. One continuity over the centuries is that the body of the soldier, even when dead, no longer belonged to the family, it belonged to the state. The state decided what was to be done with the remains of fallen soldiers. In the ancient world bodies were often cremated and buried on the battlefield (Roman Empire) or the ashes were returned to the homeland (Athens). Alison Cooley shows that the cult of the ancestors in Rome did not mean that dead soldiers were remembered as individuals, but that it was considered important to give them a decent burial. There are a few remarkable exceptions where the names of soldiers were inscribed on ‘war memorials’, as in Adamclissi in present-day Romania, but it was generally not customary to commemorate individual fallen soldiers. In Athens the remembrance of the fallen seems to bear more resemblance to modern forms. A special space in the city was dedicated to the citizens who had died in Athens’s wars. Excavations have found only limited numbers of monuments listing the names of fallen soldiers, but it appears probable that naming soldiers on monuments was a general practice. Many examples may have been destroyed, others may still be found. However, the information about the dead given on these monuments was very limited. The inscriptions include the soldier’s name and tribe but not the name of the soldier’s father. This makes it difficult to connect names with individuals. Angelos Chaniotis emphasises that Hellenistic Greece was only interested in commemorating victories, while Cooley states that the Roman Empire also commemorated defeats in battle, lamenting the ‘reversal in Rome’s fortunes’ (p. 80). Major defeats were integrated in the festive calendar with the aim of winning back the support of the gods. This changed after the end of the republic. The Roman emperors were less keen on keeping the memory of their military disasters alive. The XVII, XVIII and XIX legions, which suffered an overwhelming defeat by German tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, for example, were never re-formed

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