Greek Memories: Theories and Practices ed. by Luca Castagnoli and Paola Ceccarelli (review)

This volume is a much needed and very welcome addition to the growing interest in memory studies that emerged as a new academic field of history, anthropology, and literary theory some decades ago. Being a complex phenomenon (rooted in the present, dealing with the past, and meant for the future), memory is directly linked to the formation of individual and cultural identity.¹ Sixteen papers examine the interaction and development of different “disciplinary” approaches to memory in ancient Greek literature within a wide chronological and generic span from Homer to Plotinus.

The book is structured chronologically, containing four sections (Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Imperial memories) that represent a synchronic and diachronic contextualisation of different approaches to memory across disciplinary and generic frontiers.

Lilah Grace Canevaro explores the role of women as vessels of collective memory in the Iliad and in the South Slavic epic (the Kosovo cycle). She argues that women memorialise their men through words and objects and as objects, weaving being a means of memorialisation. Peter Agócs lays out the implications of the much-discussed late Archaic metaphor of the “wax tablets of the mind.” The idea of memory as an image inscribed in mental space receives its developed form in the late 5^th century bce (Simonides 510 PMG).

Paola Ceccarelli discusses Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Suppliants and argues that tragic performances in Athens had the potential to play simultaneously on multiple “memorial” registers, on the levels of both (i) the shared cultural and collective memory of spectators, and (ii) the specific remembrance of previous performances (cultural memories of the mythical past or recent events which might be [re]shaped). Silvia Milanezi also deals with the phenomenon of written memory in dramatic competitions (the parabasis in Aristophanes’ Knights and the Euripides scene in the Acharnians) and with the importance of the history of the Dionysiac contests and “Dionysiac” record. She highlights three aspects of memory in comedy: the Muses as comic characters and their role in the dramatic competitions; the poetics of comedic memory in connection with the training of memory and its results; and, finally, the relationship between comic memory and the memorialising practices of the city.

The rhetorical manipulations of individual and collective memory are considered by Mirko Canevaro, who argues that in the Athenian law-courts as well as in the Assembly there was actually no ambivalence concerning memory. Orators were well aware that their audience considered themselves to be a cultural elite that commanded a powerful force of shared memory and knowledge. Catherine Darbo-Peschanski contextualises models of memory and their relationship to time in the development of Greek historiography (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius are discussed). Memory is declared to be a fundamental key for our understanding of how works gathered under the common heading of ancient historiography differ from one another, and how they diverge from our modern conception of historiography.

Plato’s theory of memory and recollection, with its binary model of memory and forgetfulness, occupies a central place in the volume (chapters 7 to 9). Andrea Capra examines Socrates’ reshaping of Sappho’s poem 16 (Voigt) in the Phaedrus, Sappho becoming a “master of oblivion.” Ynon Wygoda discusses Socrates’ presentation as forgetful in the Platonic corpus, a capable faculty of memory being a prerequisite for inquiry (Phaedo, Meno, Phaedrus). Richard A. H. King considers Plato’s Philebus as a key text on memory and recollection, close to Aristotle’s treatment of memory and imagery. The latter is discussed in the next chapter by Luca Castagnoli, who questions the domain and the status of the objects of memory and the role of mental images in the function of memory; Castagnoli argues that Aristotle’s claim represents an original departure from one important thread of the Greek cultural tradition.

Claude Calame applies Assmann’s theory of cultural memory to Theocritus’ work (Idyll 18), revealing that the ancient myths remain an integral part of...