States of Memory by David C. Yates

Author:David C. Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

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Meaning

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I considered whether the differences observed in our surviving Persian-War commemorations extended to the master narratives that framed them, by surveying the spatial and temporal boundaries the Greeks imposed on that conflict. In this chapter, I pursue the same question, but now through an examination of the overall meaning the Greeks assigned to the war.1 The process by which the past is organized to convey meaning has been studied extensively by Hayden White, who coined the term emplotment to describe it. In short, he argues that the past is not meaningful in itself, but is only made so by ignoring some facts, emphasizing others, and arranging all (within suitable spatial and temporal frames) to tell a story about the past that has significance for a present audience.2 White is thinking largely about modern historiography and draws his conclusions in very broad strokes,3 but his concept of emplotment still proves quite valuable for understanding how the raw facts of the Persian War could be assembled to tell very different kinds of stories.4 As we shall see in the following, this war could be variously presented as a glorious victory over a foreign invader or a disturbing civil war, a story of divine salvation or deep loss, the achievement of restrained masculinity or the gift of untrammeled female sexuality. These are not matters of mere detail, but go to the heart of what the Persian War represented and continued to represent to those who actually and then metaphorically remembered it.5

At the most basic level, this chapter complements the last and shows that the Greeks had no greater consensus about what the war meant than they did about when it took place, where, and for how long. But we can press the evidence here further. We established in previous chapters that the Greeks were predisposed to commemorate the war as members of their respective polities, but it remains to consider why these memorial communities chose to recall and frame those events as they did and not in some other, equally distinct way. In the present chapter, I narrow our focus to three case studies that compare contrary plot elements in Athens and another allied state (Plataea, Megara, or Corinth), in order to demonstrate how the idiosyncratic needs and assumptions of these city-states influenced memory production.6 I organize these local pressures into three broad categories: the present interests of a community, its actual experience of the past, and the preexisting social memory onto which new experiences had to be grafted.7 Although all the commemorations examined here respond to a complex mix of influences, one category has been highlighted in each case for the sake of exposition: present interests in the case of Plataea, real experience with Megara, and finally, preexisting social memory with Corinth.

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