Rituals, Resources and Identity in the Ancient Graeco-Roman World The BOMOS-Conferences 2002-2005, eds. A. Holm Rasmussen et al. (Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Supplementum) (Rome 2008)
Abstract
All history is an act of remembrance, an attempt by the historian to preserve the memory of the past by putting it on record (as Herodotus says in his opening sentence). There are many other possible rationales for the study of history (intellectual gymnastics; learning lessons for the future), but this one is surely basic, our moral duty to recall the past, and to oppose those who rewrite the past for unsavoury ends.
But one should not set up the historian as the simple guardian of objective truth (in opposition to dubious cultural memories). The last generation’s work on the writing of history has emphasized the extent to which history is a constructed artifact, the product of intellectual, social and political pressures. This post-modern view of history makes a difference to how we think of memory. Both memory and history now look like heavily constructed narratives, both weave their stories of the past, both are products of their own time. This is not to suggest (in extreme postmodern mode) that memory and history are the same thing: it is certainly possible for history to make truth claims. Such truth claims are defensible because of the disciplines and self-reflexivity of history. The narratives of history are differently constructed from those of memory. But there are also similarities between memory and history, and it is interesting to explore the productive relationship between them. One way of doing this is through a historical study of memory, which does not draw a simple line between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ memory claims of the past.
The interest in studying memory in the past is that it places centre stage the self-understandings of particular peoples, and so gets us closer to understanding their world. As has been well said by the art historian Marius Kwint, ‘For a truer understanding of the significance and causality of the past we should reckon more with memory, embracing all its subjective viewpoints, since awareness of the past depends on it.’
Study of memory will place us closer to the mind-sets of particular peoples, it will help to prevent us from creating anachronistic interpretations of the period, and will make it possible for us to see how the choices they make relate to their own understandings of the past. One implication of this point concerns periodisation. Historians of Greece generally start with the Rise of the Polis (in some sense), the emergence of Greece out of the Dark Age that followed the fall of Mycenaean civilization. Even Robin Osborne’s fine book Greece in the Making: 1200-479 BC follows essentially that periodisation, beginning with the collapse of Mycenae and ‘the onset of the Dark Age’. Of course, all histories have to start somewhere, and this particular starting point of course has many merits, but the costs of our modern periodisation are perhaps not always sufficiently clear. As will become clear in what follows, Greeks of the classical and later periods had a very different sense of the past. They did not know of a Dark Age (let alone Geometric and Orientalising periods). Instead, they believed in a continuous link between the present day and the remote past. As Lucia Nixon puts it, the common Greek ‘chronology of desire’ sought ‘to encompass the whole of history in one chronological system’.
Memory and Ancient Greece
Simon Price
Rituals, Resources and Identity in the Ancient Graeco-Roman World The BOMOS-Conferences 2002-2005, eds. A. Holm Rasmussen et al. (Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Supplementum) (Rome 2008)
Abstract
All history is an act of remembrance, an attempt by the historian to preserve the memory of the past by putting it on record (as Herodotus says in his opening sentence). There are many other possible rationales for the study of history (intellectual gymnastics; learning lessons for the future), but this one is surely basic, our moral duty to recall the past, and to oppose those who rewrite the past for unsavoury ends.
But one should not set up the historian as the simple guardian of objective truth (in opposition to dubious cultural memories). The last generation’s work on the writing of history has emphasized the extent to which history is a constructed artifact, the product of intellectual, social and political pressures. This post-modern view of history makes a difference to how we think of memory. Both memory and history now look like heavily constructed narratives, both weave their stories of the past, both are products of their own time. This is not to suggest (in extreme postmodern mode) that memory and history are the same thing: it is certainly possible for history to make truth claims. Such truth claims are defensible because of the disciplines and self-reflexivity of history. The narratives of history are differently constructed from those of memory. But there are also similarities between memory and history, and it is interesting to explore the productive relationship between them. One way of doing this is through a historical study of memory, which does not draw a simple line between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ memory claims of the past.
The interest in studying memory in the past is that it places centre stage the self-understandings of particular peoples, and so gets us closer to understanding their world. As has been well said by the art historian Marius Kwint, ‘For a truer understanding of the significance and causality of the past we should reckon more with memory, embracing all its subjective viewpoints, since awareness of the past depends on it.’
Study of memory will place us closer to the mind-sets of particular peoples, it will help to prevent us from creating anachronistic interpretations of the period, and will make it possible for us to see how the choices they make relate to their own understandings of the past. One implication of this point concerns periodisation. Historians of Greece generally start with the Rise of the Polis (in some sense), the emergence of Greece out of the Dark Age that followed the fall of Mycenaean civilization. Even Robin Osborne’s fine book Greece in the Making: 1200-479 BC
follows essentially that periodisation, beginning with the collapse of Mycenae and ‘the onset of the Dark Age’. Of course, all histories have to start somewhere, and this particular starting point of course has many merits, but the costs of our modern periodisation are perhaps not always sufficiently clear. As will become clear in what follows, Greeks of the classical and later periods had a very different sense of the past. They did not know of a Dark Age (let alone Geometric and Orientalising periods). Instead, they believed in a continuous link between the present day and the remote past. As Lucia Nixon puts it, the common Greek ‘chronology of desire’ sought ‘to encompass the whole of history in one chronological system’.
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