Every winter in the classical period, on a specifically chosen day, Athenians gathered together to mourn the men who had died in war. According to Thucydides, the bones of the dead killed in that year lay in state for two days before being carried in ten coffins organized by tribe to the dêmosion sêma where they were buried and then a speech was made in honour of the dead men by a man chosen by the city.Footnote 1 As his description makes clear, this ceremony was a public event attended not only by citizens and foreigners, but also by the female relatives of the dead men. Other sources report that the polemarchos put on the agôn for those who died in the war and these contests included musical, athletic and hippic competitions.Footnote 2 The war-dead also received sacrifices.Footnote 3 The occasion combined burial with cult and games usually afforded to the divine, although how exactly this combination worked in practice is not clear because Thucydides, our single best source for the Epitaphia, focusses on the burial and the oration given by Pericles in the winter at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote 4
Through its inclusion in Thucydides' history, Pericles’ speech is probably the best known of all the funeral orations, but it is not the only example of such a speech. From the fifth century, we have a few fragments of Gorgias' funeral oration and of the speech which Pericles delivered at the burial of the dead from Samos in 439.Footnote 5 For the fourth century, three such epitaphioi are preserved in the works of Lysias, Demosthenes and Hyperides, while Plato presents us with a parody of such a speech in his dialogue Menexenus.Footnote 6 Interpretation of this material is not easy and only Hyperides' speech is certainly known to have been delivered at the funeral of the war-dead, in this case, early in 322 after the first phase of the Lamian War.Footnote 7 Demosthenes' oration for the dead from Chaeronea in 338 and Lysias' epitaphios of about 391 for the dead in the Corinthian War have both had their authenticity questioned, very probably wrongly.Footnote 8 Pericles' speech is usually understood as being more Thucydides' work than Pericles', but, according to Thucydides' own articulation of his practice, the speech must be appropriate for its context.Footnote 9 In contrast, Gorgias' speech seems to have been a rhetorical exercise and was very probably never actually delivered at the funeral of the war-dead. The oration in the Menexenus is generally identified as a parody, but, like all parodies, it must contain a good deal of truth in order to perform its function of sending up the patriotism which the epitaphioi celebrate.Footnote 10 Despite these problems, these texts form a clearly identifiable group and they share a series of topics and themes.Footnote 11 They follow a fairly set pattern: an introduction (prooimion) followed by a long segment of praise (epainos) and then an address to the survivors (paramythia); at the end, the orator either tells his listeners to mourn the dead or, having mourned the dead, to depart.Footnote 12 The praise section not only glorifies the dead being buried, but also the city and its institutions and it juxtaposes the deeds of the most recent war-dead with those of their ancestors.
For students of Classical Athens, these funeral orations are well known because of Nicole Loraux's important work in which she showed that these speeches were both worthy of study and could help us to understand what it meant to be Athenian in the period between say the middle of the fifth century and 322 b.c.; intended for an audience of citizens, the orations served as an important expression of the city's ideology.Footnote 13 Loraux repeatedly stresses the nature of the epitaphios as ‘official speech’ and its role ‘as an expression of official ideology’, an emphasis which has been picked up by scholars such as Rosalind Thomas and Jonas Grethlein.Footnote 14 Although Loraux devoted a chapter to ‘the Athenian history of Athens’, the memory politics of these orations did not enter into her discussion, almost certainly because memory had not yet become an investigative approach for scholars when she wrote the original text in the first half of the 1970s.Footnote 15 Such is the influence of her book that subsequent scholars have also not considered the memory politics of these orations: issues of remembrance are noticeably absent from recent commentaries on the speeches of Lysias and Hyperides, while Grethlein in a book on the Greeks and their past simply notes the memorial nature of the epitaphioi and Thomas focusses on them as direct propagators of ‘the official [oral] traditions of Athens’.Footnote 16 We need to ask, therefore, what these orations' relationship to memory is and how exactly they worked to create it. The actual texts repeatedly flag up the importance of memory and memory-making. Furthermore, examining these speeches through their politics of remembrance shows that they are not limited to celebrating the good death of citizens and to promulgating the ideology of the city, as the scholarly discourse currently suggests, nor are they focussed only on adult male Athenians. As I argue, the processes of remembering are integral to the dynamics of these orations, the purpose of which is to create memory. The ritual context generates remembrances which would not otherwise exist both for the survivors, the children, parents and brothers of the dead, and for the Athenians as a corporate group; it also ensures that these memories are ‘national’ ones shared by the whole city. Remembering together serves to unify the Athenians and it eliminates the possibility of (retrospective) contestation over the political decisions which led to the deaths of the men being buried. For the orators, remembering was also integral to the construction of their speeches and they could not have been written without it. The work of remembrance done in the epitaphioi intersected with other strategies of memorialization elsewhere in the city and their juxtaposition brings out the complexities of remembering in Classical Athens; indeed, the orations formed a critical part of this larger context and cannot be understood without it. The speeches further show in exemplary fashion how one individual's memory may become collective remembrance.
THE DYNAMICS OF MEMORY
The processes of remembrance in the funeral orations involve the creation of both individual and collective memories and so both remembering and forgetting. As the extensive scholarship on memory shows, remembrance is complex and works on different levels; our interpretative frameworks, therefore, must accommodate this complexity. Scholars regularly juxtapose individual and collective or social memory, despite the fact that ‘there is no individual memory without social experience’.Footnote 17 Since to remember is, in Jeffrey Olick's concise definition, ‘to mediate temporal distance, to relate past and present’, the remembrances of an individual are produced when that person recalls earlier events.Footnote 18 Collective or social memory is created when individuals share their memories together so that they create and maintain awareness and knowledge of their past as a group.Footnote 19 Collective remembering is, therefore, the (multiple) mnemonic practices of the group and cannot be separated from other kinds of culture.Footnote 20 Elucidating the interconnected relationships between the remembering of the individual and of the group is central to understanding the social dimensions of memory.Footnote 21 As a social activity, remembering plays an important role in the functioning of groups because it ‘identifies the group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future’.Footnote 22 Since memory is a process rather than an actual entity, it is malleable and subject to (re)interpretation and (re)use.Footnote 23 This fluidity may further lead to forgetting and the two processes can function as the inverse of each other.Footnote 24 They also require both individuals and groups to decide whether to remember or to forget.
In order for groups to remember, they must talk about and share their narrativesFootnote 25 and they must do so in an orderly fashion. The necessary orderliness is created by ritual, both secular and sacred, and the ritual makes it possible for groups to remember together.Footnote 26 Performing rituals serves to re-enact the past, even if the process does not exactly replicate the original event.Footnote 27 When a group remembers as part of a ritual, a memory is created both of the act of remembering and the event being remembered.Footnote 28 Without the rituals, these memories would not otherwise be available to the participants. In this way, the group is presented to itself and its shared values are disseminated.Footnote 29 Since the whole group participates in this process, a ‘national’ memory is created and it is manifested both in rituals and in commemorative monuments.Footnote 30 This collective remembrance also serves to unify the group and to bind its members together.Footnote 31 These dynamics are extremely powerful and, although they have been most discussed in the context of the modern world, they are also very much applicable to Classical Athens (and the rest of the Greek and Roman world), as we are going to see.Footnote 32
MEMORY AND THE EPITAPHIOI
The surviving funeral orations show that the epitaphioi particularly focussed on the intersection of the past and the present through the narratives which they created. The deeds mentioned were chosen out of a larger potential corpus to construct a particular image of Athens as the democratic city victorious in war against external enemies. This process involved selection, remembering some things, while others were left out and so forgotten. Memory is, consequently, also at stake in these speeches and we need to ask how these dynamics worked. The speakers themselves recognized the important role which remembrance played and they are clear that their orations' function was to create memories of the war-dead among the living. These issues are particularly explicit in the opening sections of the speech in Menexenus and of Lysias 2, but they also appear in the other epitaphioi. Since the orations focus on memorialization, in the next two sections, we shall ask how memories were created both for the survivors, sub-groups of the city, and for the Athenians as a collective whole.
For us, the speeches' memorial function is brought out by the repeated use of the word μνήμη and its cognates in all our preserved orations except for the fragments of Gorgias, but more is involved than simple frequency.Footnote 33 In the early sections of both Menexenus and Lysias' speech, the authors focus specifically on the intersection between the orations and the processes of remembrance. Plato begins his version by noting that the dead have been properly escorted and so they have been honoured by deeds. In terms of words, however, they are yet to be honoured in speech as the law orders. He goes on to say that, ‘when deeds have been well done, it is through a well-spoken speech that memory (μνήμη) and honour (κόσμος) come to the doers from the hearers’.Footnote 34 In this context, accordingly, the oration's function is explicitly to create memories of the deeds of the dead among the living survivors. Its memorializing role is further reinforced by the frame of the dialogue: Socrates is remembering for the eponymous Menexenus the epitaphios of Aspasia who partially composed it from sections which she had previously written for the funeral oration of Pericles.Footnote 35 These various levels and stages of remembering complement and reinforce the memory-making in the actual oration.
Lysias begins with the impossibility of his speech being equal to the deeds of the dead and he stresses that his epitaphios is in competition with the speeches of earlier orators.Footnote 36 He continues, ‘for the excellence (ἀρετή) of the dead has provided such an abundance both for those able to compose poetry and for those wishing to make speeches that many good things have been said about them by earlier speakers, but much has also been omitted by them and there is also sufficient left for their successors to say’.Footnote 37 Here, Lysias flags up the importance of selection in the process of constructing an epitaphios and also the possibility of omissions. That there is sufficient left for successors suggests that he is not envisioning these omitted deeds as having been forgotten. Nevertheless, when events are not included, there always remains the possibility of forgetting and so the potential for the speaker to forget, as well as to remember, is implicitly signalled at the very beginning of this oration.
Lysias continues to focus on the function of these speeches and their connection with memory: ‘first, then, I shall go through our ancestors’ dangers in ancient times, of which I have a memory (μνήμην) from oral tradition (φήμης); for it is right for all mankind (ἀνθρώποις) also to remember (μεμνῆσθαι) them, hymning (ὑμνοῦντας) them in song, speaking of them in the memories (μνήμαις) of good men, honouring (τιμῶντας) them at such appropriate moments as this, and educating the living in the deeds of the dead.'Footnote 38 Lysias now stresses his own memories of the ancient Athenians, but they are not sufficient. Instead, everyone is to remember them and they are to do so in very specific ways: by song, by speech, by honours and by teaching. In this context, the participle τιμῶντας refers not to honours generally, but specifically to ritual activities, a standard usage in connection with figures of cult.Footnote 39 Similarly, ὑμνοῦντας should also allude to ritual practices, as it certainly does at the end of the oration.Footnote 40 Together with the speeches, these participles point to a specific occasion: the burial of the war-dead and its attendant annual cult.Footnote 41 Collectively, these events will create memories of the dead in the living. Memorialization, consequently, is an extremely important part of these rituals and this early section of the speech is programmatic. This remembering serves to link the past and the present by preserving the events of the past in the minds of those now alive. At the same time, the deeds will be carried into the future as the speeches and rituals educate the living, that is, those Athenians too young to remember these events of the past; we shall come back to this education in the next section.
The issues raised by Lysias and Plato are not limited to these two texts. Early in Demosthenes' speech, after discussing the noble origins of the Athenians' ancestors, the orator says that he hesitates to say everything about andreia and other aretê. He will, however, try to speak in a summary fashion about ‘those things which it is useful for those who know them to remember (ἀναμνησθῆναι) and best for those who are inexperienced to hear’; the events themselves specifically inspire emulation.Footnote 42 Again, we see the issue of creating memories for those Athenians who are otherwise too young to have them, but Demosthenes brings out as well the ways in which the rituals also serve to reinforce existing memories of his audience. A little later, Demosthenes flags up explicitly that he is choosing which of the ancestors' deeds to remember.Footnote 43 So selective is he that the recent past is reduced to the double defeat on land and sea of the expedition from Asia, that is to Marathon and Salamis.Footnote 44 Nor is Demosthenes alone in restricting his material. Thucydides also limits his subject matter and focusses on what he thinks it will be useful (σύμφορον) for his audience to hear.Footnote 45 Hyperides points out early in his speech that it is not easy for one man to go through and to remember (μνη[μο]νεῦσαι) such great deeds.Footnote 46 A little bit later he specifically asks ‘now, where should I begin to speak or what should I remember (μνησθῶ)?’.Footnote 47 In answer to his question, he mentions the dead men's ancestry and education, two possibilities which we find in other orations, before deciding to narrate their deeds in the war and the benefits which their actions brought.Footnote 48 Similarly, Demosthenes specifically mentions the difficulty in choosing which deeds of the men being buried to mention.Footnote 49 The issue of selection is also brought up by Plato who chooses not to talk at length about the ancestral exploits in the deep or mythical past because their excellence (ἀρετή) has been sufficiently remembered by the poets, ‘but, of those deeds for which no poet has yet received worthy glory for worthy deeds and which are still unremembered (ἐν ἀμνηστίᾳ), I ought to remember (ἐπιμνησθῆναι) them, both praising them and courting them for others to make into odes and other poetry in a way worthy of the men who did them’;Footnote 50 with this statement, he turns to the more recent historical events. That such issues are raised in a parody suggests their ubiquity in the actual funeral orations in the early fourth century.
These speeches, consequently, are focussed on the politics of remembrance and orators are clear that an important part of their function is to create memories for their audiences. This process involves choosing among a variety of topics and examples and the orators stress the difficulty of selection. These choices allow the possibility not only of not mentioning some exploits, but even of forgetting them, an important dilemma for any memory-making. The orators are also aware of the intersection between their speeches and the larger ritual setting. Lysias and Demosthenes most clearly focus on the ways in which their orations in this particular setting create the appropriate memories for their audiences. For us, their awareness emphasizes the important role of memory-making both in the speeches and at the Epitaphia more generally. The orations and their setting are firmly linked and understanding them requires us to focus on both the dynamics of remembrance and their larger ritual context, rather than on the promulgation of ideology and ‘official oral tradition’, as the current scholarship does.
CREATING MEMORY FOR THE SURVIVORS
The clear overall memorializing function of these speeches leads us to their politics of remembrance. The speech and its attendant rituals focus on two particular areas of memory: the deeds of the ancestors of the current Athenians and the exploits of the dead being buried. Appropriately, these events were performed in external war by the Athenians as a corporate group and individual Athenians go largely unnamed.Footnote 51 The actions of past Athenians focus on victories so that the city is presented as always victorious both in the deep or mythical past and in the more recent past. Encapsulated in this way, the memory work of the epitaphioi seems initially to focus on the audience in general but, it is, in fact, not so limited. The strategies also concentrate particularly on groups of the survivors, the children, parents and brothers of the dead men, and how they remember their recently deceased relatives. Through the texts and rituals, the children are educated and given memories of their fathers and their actions, while the parents and brothers are provided with an opportunity to remember the campaign and the end of their relatives' lives.
When Lysias describes the role of the rituals, he specifically includes the education of the living in the ancestral deeds, as we have already seen.Footnote 52 Although Lysias concentrates on the exploits of ancestors (προγόνων), the whole oration is, in fact, educational and presents the city's past to the audience. Listening to the speech educates those present and gives them memories of these exploits which, without the rituals and their attendant memory-making, they would not otherwise have. Similarly, Demosthenes states that he will focus on those things which are best for the inexperienced to hear.Footnote 53 As in Lysias' description, these listeners are the young Athenians who are too young to have any knowledge of the events which Demosthenes is about to describe. After listening to his speech, however, they will be less inexperienced and so more educated; consequently, they will now be able to share in the memories which the more experienced Athenians already have by virtue of their age and so their attendance at burials of the war-dead in earlier years. This education, however, can only be achieved through the dynamics inherent in the functioning of memory; without this memory-making the young will never be properly educated, because it is only in this ritual setting that the deeds of the dead and their ancestors are rehearsed as a narrative of the city's history.Footnote 54
How these processes might work can be seen in Lysias' narrative of the oldest and youngest Athenians' defence of the Megarid under the leadership of the general Myronides in about 458.Footnote 55 While Thucydides describes the forces as the ‘oldest and the youngest’, for Lysias, they are ‘the older men and those who were underage’.Footnote 56 This slight change in terminology stresses the extreme youth of the youngsters: if they were not yet adult, then they should not be expected to fight on behalf of the city; in this way, they become parallel to the oldest children of the dead being buried. The analogy is reinforced by Lysias' further descriptions of the youngest: they imitate the oldest, they are able to follow the orders of the oldest, they are not yet strong [used twice] and, after the fighting is over, they were again being educated;Footnote 57 in much the same way, the children of the dead are also educated by the speech itself. Through it, the children learn about ‘the most beautiful glory’ with which the youngest and oldest returned home.Footnote 58 As presented by Lysias, the expedition is an outstanding success won in a single battle which merits a trophy; in contrast, Thucydides presents the first encounter as a draw followed by the erection of rival trophies which lead to a battle and then the death by stoning of the remaining Corinthians.Footnote 59 As (re)constructed by Lysias, the episode provides the children of the dead with a model for how they should behave: to fight for the city even when underage, to win a splendid victory, and then to return to their education. Subsequently their own exploits, like those of the youngest, will be remembered in funeral orations so that the children of the dead may continue to be educated and may remember the deeds of earlier Athenians. The ritual setting guarantees that these dynamics of memory will continue indefinitely.
The achievements of the dead fathers have a further function in the education of their children. Demosthenes states specifically that the children are to be raised in their fathers' fame, which will never grow old, and later he describes them as the heirs to their fathers' glory.Footnote 60 The actions of the dead, accordingly, are a model for their offspring to imitate as they attempt to live up to these lofty standards. Similarly, the speaker in Menexenus in his own voice begs the children to imitate their fathers; in this speech the fathers, as reported by the speaker, also tell their children to try to surpass their accomplishments.Footnote 61 The fathers indicate clearly that they want to be surpassed by their children, a situation which will especially arise if the children are prepared not to use up and squander the glory of their ancestors.Footnote 62 Strikingly, the fathers in the Menexenus do not worry about whether the children will have knowledge of the relevant deeds; rather, their concern is about how they act on the basis of what they know. In a more general way, Thucydides tells his undifferentiated listeners to emulate the dead.Footnote 63 In both passages, this idea that the dead men are models for their children requires the deeds of the dead to be well known, as they will be through the medium of the funeral orations which rehearse them, initially at the burial of the men and then as part of the narrative of the events of the recent past.Footnote 64 These processes both allow the children to remember their fathers and educate them so that they become good citizens of the city who will fight for her and, if necessary, die on her behalf, as their fathers did.Footnote 65
For the children of the dead, these memorializing strategies have a further important role to play. Lysias considers happy the children of the dead who are too young to know what sort of fathers they lost.Footnote 66 Here he flags up an issue which must have been very real in this society for which war was the norm rather than the exception. These children would need some memories of their fathers which they could acquire, at least in part, through these orations. On the first occasion, the oration described the deeds of the men being buried while, in subsequent years, those exploits would then be incorporated into the historical narrative of the recent past. In this way, children too young to have been present at the burial of their fathers would still have a way of gaining memories which they would otherwise not have. In both the Demosthenic and the Thucydidean orations the speakers claim to report the thoughts of the dead men who were being buried so that their listeners know what inspired these men to their valiant actions.Footnote 67 In Menexenus these dynamics are taken so far that the speaker actually ventriloquizes the words of the now-dead fathers to the children and he claims both that he heard the words himself and that he was ordered to convey them to the children.Footnote 68 In the context of these orations, these strategies serve to provide the children with memories of words which they have not yet heard from their now-dead fathers. They gain, as it were, access to their dying thoughts.
The children are not the only survivors of the dead to be addressed and the orations regularly speak directly to the parents and brothers of the dead. To the parents, Thucydides presents the glory of the dead as a consolation for their deaths, while Hyperides urges his (undifferentiated) listeners to remember not only the mens' deaths, but also the excellence (ἀρετῆς) which they have left behind.Footnote 69 Demosthenes acknowledges that ‘it is difficult for fathers and mothers to be deprived of their children and to be without closest family members to care for them in their old age; but it is a noble thing (σεμνόν) to see the dead possessing undying honours (τιμάς) and a public monument of their excellence (ἀρετῆς) and to be thought worthy of sacrifices and games in perpetuity’.Footnote 70 Bereavement is again balanced by the achievements of the dead men which are manifested both by a physical monument and by the cult included in the Epitaphia. More explicitly than Thucydides and Hyperides, Demosthenes emphasizes the role of the rituals in creating memories of the dead's excellence which will subsequently console their surviving parents. As for the brothers, from Thucydides' perspective, they cannot hope to achieve an excellence (ἀρετῆς) equal to that of the dead unless, he implies, they also die in war on behalf of the city.Footnote 71 In this way, the dead act as a model not only for their children, but also for their brothers. The glory and the excellence which are so important a part of these dynamics both for the brothers and for the parents will be created and perpetuated through the medium of the funeral orations which will ensure that the achievements of these excellent men are remembered and not forgotten.
The politics of remembrance in these orations additionally allow the creation of further memories which would not otherwise exist. When the speaker narrates the deeds of the now-dead men on campaign, his words create a memory for his listeners of these events. For fathers too old to go on campaign, brothers too young to fight or men active in other theatres and so not present, these narratives provide a memory which they would not otherwise have. These dynamics appear most clearly in Hyperides' oration. He starts his narrative by describing Leosthenes' actions, the troops which he raised and his victory in Boeotia.Footnote 72 He continues with the occupation of Thermopylae, victory over Antipater and the siege of the Macedonians in Lamia; subsequently, he mentions Leosthenes' death and another victory.Footnote 73 Later on, Hyperides also describes the hardships which the soldiers suffered in this campaign: the daily stationing of forces in battle order, the unusually large number of battles, the extreme winter weather and the lack of supplies.Footnote 74 Together, these two passages create a vivid sense of the actual campaign and the hardships which it entailed for the Athenian forces. They provide an immediacy which a simple list of victories could never have given the listeners. In this way, the speech creates especially strong memories for those who were not present as they remember the gallant conduct of the soldiers in the face of these hardships. Such passages are especially likely to have occurred in orations which, like Hyperides' epitaphios, celebrated the dead from successful military operations, campaigns which were particularly worth remembering. When the campaign is unsuccessful, as we see with Demosthenes' speech, the narrative is less specific and the focus is shifted elsewhere – in this instance, to the valour of the dead.Footnote 75 This choice allows the creation of a positive memory of the dead, even though the campaign was unsuccessful and the details of the actual battle are obscured.
When an orator chooses to report the words or thoughts of the dead, the dynamics of remembrance take on a further dimension, as we can see in Demosthenes' speech. When he comes to explain why the dead were inspired to be valiant (εὐρώστους) in the face of the enemy, he says that they were motivated by what they had known or remembered or heard about the famous deed(s) of the eponymous hero of their particular tribe.Footnote 76 In his first example, ‘all the Erechtheidae knew (ᾔδεσαν) that Erechtheus, their eponymous ancestor, gave his own daughters, whom they call Hyakinthides, to a foreseen death and killed them in order to save the land. Therefore, they thought it shameful that he who had been born from the immortals had done everything to free his fatherland, while they themselves seemed to hold their mortal bodies to be more important than their immortal glory’.Footnote 77 For four tribes, the relevant verb is in the negative so the Aegeidae were not ignorant (οὐκ ἠγνόουν), it did not escape the notice (οὐκ ἐλάνθανεν) of the Oeneidae and of the Aeantidae, and the Antiochidae did not forget (οὐκ ἠμνημόνουν).Footnote 78 The negative constructions stress not only that the members of these tribes were remembering, as is explicit for the Acamantidae and the Hippothontidae, but also that they were not forgetting their knowledge of the eponymous ancestors, a dynamic made unambiguous with the Antiochidae. In the context of the epitaphios, these verbal choices stress the overall memory politics of the occasion. Since Demosthenes says that the Leontidae ‘had heard’ (ἠκηκόεσαν) about Leos, it seems likely that the verb παρειλήφεσαν, which is used of the Pandionidae, has the meaning ‘to receive by hearing or report’;Footnote 79 this context in Demosthenes' speech suggests that the Epitaphia was one of the important occasions for hearing about the deeds of the eponymous heroes.
The effect of this section is to present listeners with the final thoughts of the dead, as if they had been present at the moment of their death. In every case, the now-dead men were remembering in some way what they already knew about the eponymous heroes and then, for nine of the ten tribes, Demosthenes says what they thought, understood or assumed on the basis of these examples of behaviour. For the Acamantidae, the fifth tribe, there is a direct question instead of their thoughts: ‘Acamas, accordingly, attempted every danger in order to save his mother; how could they not endure every danger in order to save all their parents at home?’Footnote 80 In this construction, Demosthenes had to ask his audience the same question which he says the men of Acamantis asked themselves. As the example of the Erechtheidae shows, the actions of each eponymous hero are described in a compressed and allusive narrative which assumes previous knowledge on the part of the audience; consequently, listeners must recall what they, too, already know about the eponymous heroes of the city. The overall result is to position the audience so that it must recreate what the men themselves did, while it also provides them with the last thoughts and, in the case of the Acamantidae, words of the dead. For the brothers who were too young to go on campaign, this passage gives them an opportunity to practise the behaviour which they will need when they finally fight on behalf of the city; these dynamics also apply to the children and they form part of their education. In Demosthenes' description, different memories and occasions for remembering are interacting and they will have continued to do so when the audience later recalled this passage of the speech and so (re)created these memories afresh.
For the women in the audience, the mothers and the wives, these memory politics are particularly significant. Through their presence at these rituals, they were included in the collective memory-making of the city, so that they became part of it. In this way, they gained memories of how their sons and husbands died in war and they experienced the campaign from the male perspective, remembrances to which they would not otherwise have had access by virtue of being female. These processes did not stop at the end of the rituals when the women left the collective setting and the dêmosion sêma. Instead, they will have taken these memories with them and, individually, they will have passed their remembrances on to the children and grandchildren of the dead, who were too young to know the men in question. We must imagine this memory-making as happening both on the level of the individual, when remembering is triggered by, for example, objects, and on the level of the family, when memories are repeated and created within the settings of family ritual.Footnote 81 In this way, commemoration of the dead is not limited to the Epitaphia and its speeches, and it interacts with other memories and the occasions for making them, as we shall see below in more detail.
The memory politics of these orations distinctly focus on particular groups: the children of the dead men, their parents, brothers and, less explicitly, their wives. For all of them, the speeches created memories which would not otherwise have existed. Through these rituals, the children too young to remember their fathers will have learned what sort of men they were, while all the children will have been educated in the appropriate ways for them, as the heirs of their fathers' glory, to behave. The parents gain memories of the sons which will console them in their bereavement and the brothers are provided with models of excellence to follow. When the orators remembered the final campaign and sometimes the final thoughts and words of the dead, the survivors learned about a campaign in which they had not taken part and thoughts and words which they did not know; without the speech in this setting, such knowledge would have been denied to them. As the deeds of the dead were recalled at subsequent burials, this memory-making would have been refreshed and reinforced by the very nature of the ritual.
CREATING MEMORY FOR THE ATHENIANS
These memory politics were not limited to the surviving relatives of the war-dead because they also had consequences for the larger collective group, the Athenians as a whole, and how it remembered both its past and the men being buried. Through the dynamics of ritual, the memories of one man, the writer of the speech, became those of all the Athenians. In this way, a single memory of both the battles and the rites themselves was created for the whole city. It served both to unify the Athenians and to remove the possibility of contestation which is frequently an aspect of memory-making.Footnote 82 The burial of the war-dead, consequently, will not have become an occasion for retrospective blame for the campaign(s) which led to the deaths of the men being buried.
How a single memory was created for the whole city is well illustrated by Lysias' long narrative of the battle of Salamis.Footnote 83 Since this section follows immediately on the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae, Lysias begins with the Persians' march on the city, the Athenians' ancestors learning of the disasters and the difficult choices which then faced them.Footnote 84 As the audience will have known, the Athenians did abandon the city and they fought against the barbarians at sea. With the children and wives and mothers on Salamis and the allied fleet assembled, Lysias describes the reactions to the arrival of the barbarian army and fleet through two long direct questions and a description of what they saw and how they must have felt.Footnote 85 The perspective slides here from the Athenian non-combatants watching to the Athenians fighting at sea in the battle and this section is closed off by two more direct questions focusssed on the Athenians' relations with the divine.Footnote 86 At this point, Lysias shifts to the outcome of the battle: the resounding victory under the leadership of Themistocles and the victory prize which the Greeks are said to have awarded to the Athenians without dispute.Footnote 87
Although at the beginning of his narrative, Lysias describes the Athenians specifically as ‘our ancestors’ (ἡμέτεροι πρόγονοι), it is an isolated usage and the rest of the narrative will be carried out with verbs in the third person plural and pronouns. This decision obscures who exactly these Athenians are and it allows a slide between the Athenians in 480 and the Athenian audience of the early fourth century.Footnote 88 Listeners are presented with the difficult choice which faced the city and two proposals, to abandon the fatherland or to side with the barbarians, are offered. This design forces members of the audience to make the choice themselves and so to replicate the actions of their ancestors. In the first pair of rhetorical questions which follow, the subject shifts from the indefinite anyone of the first question to the Athenians watching on the shore and about to fight in the battle.Footnote 89 Lysias asks what these two groups of Athenians were thinking before describing the situation; he then imagines what they were probably thinking, as well as what they definitely knew, saw and heard:
In their present difficulty, they evidently greeted each other frequently and perhaps they lamented their own fate; they knew that their ships were few, they saw that the enemy's were many, they knew that the city had been abandoned, that the countryside was being ravaged and was full of barbarians, that the sanctuaries were burning, and that all of these terrible things were happening nearby. They heard the Greek and the barbarian paeans mixed together, the cheering of both sides, and the noise of ships being destroyed; the sea was full of corpses and many wrecked ships, both friendly and hostile, were sinking together. For a long time, the sea-battle was evenly balanced: at one time, they seemed to be victorious and safe, at another, they seemed to be defeated and destroyed. On account of their present fear, they evidently thought that they saw many things which they did not see and heard many things which they did not hear.Footnote 90
This careful construction places the audience first in the position of the watchers on Salamis and then of the combatants on the ships. As in Demosthenes' narrative of the eponymous heroes, listeners have to know and see and hear, and so to replicate the actions of the participants, dynamics which even include their uncertainty about the outcome of the battle. In the second set of rhetorical questions, the first one verbalizes the thoughts of the combatants: they ask the gods what supplications are necessary, they remind them of their sacrifices, they pity their children, they long for their wives, they mourn for their mothers and fathers and they worry about future evils.Footnote 91 Again, the audience repeats the actions and experiences of the participants, before drawing back with the indefinite subjects – what god, what human – of the second rhetorical question. Through this narrative, listeners are placed in the positions of Athenians in 480 and they are made present, as it were, at the battle. In this way, they gain memories both of the act of remembering and the battle being remembered, which, by the 390s, would no longer have been part of living memory except through the dynamics of remembrance.Footnote 92 Since this remembering happens in the context of the Epitaphia when all the Athenians are present, they all share the same single memory of the battle which the orator created for them.
The politics of collective remembrance are not limited to the battle narratives and the city's past. They also serve to endow all the Athenians with a parallel set of experiences about the ritual itself in which they are participating. In the extant funeral orations, the orators slide between addressing specific groups of people, the children, the parents, the brothers and the wives of the dead, and the audience as a whole which includes these specific sub-groups, but also constitutes the city as corporate entity. Lysias shows particularly clearly how an orator might achieve this shift. When he praises the men being buried, he starts with the living, mentions their pity for the relatives of the dead, men who ‘made their wives widows, left behind their own children as orphans, and made their brothers and mothers and fathers isolated’, and then he turns specifically to the children and the parents.Footnote 93 Sliding between these groups blurs the boundaries between the immediate survivors and their mourning and the other members of the audience who perhaps knew the dead but are not related to them. The effect is to construct everyone in the audience as a relative of the war-dead, irrespective of whether a family member actually died in the fighting of this particular year, and to provide them with the same memory of the men's final campaign. The experience, consequently, is the same for all the Athenians and, in taking part in this ritual collectively, they are brought together as one people. These shared experiences and memories are also particularly appropriate for the democratic city and they bring out the democratic aspect of these rituals and their dynamics. They especially reinforce the focus on the democratic city which Loraux has discussed.Footnote 94 This emphasis is also found on the monuments erected over the graves themselves with their lists of Athenians without demotics or patronymics; instead, the distinction is by tribe, the same tribes by which the bones of the dead were organized and buried.Footnote 95 On these inscriptions, the organizing principle is that of the Cleisthenic tribes, a hallmark of the democratic system, and the individual Athenians are all treated the same way, as is appropriate for citizens who are all politically equal.Footnote 96
Accordingly, when the Athenians took part in these rituals, they were presented as a united whole of equal citizens who participated harmoniously together. Their unity was further created by the sacrifices included in the rituals because, by their nature, they identify members of the sacrificial community and they unify those who take part and therefore receive a share of the meat.Footnote 97 In so participating, the Athenians all gained the same memories both of the dead being buried and of the city's past with its long series of victories over external enemies. That the Athenians all had the same memories further served to bind them together. In this way, a ‘national’ memory was created and it was refreshed and (re)constructed each year when the war-dead were buried and the rituals held, a process which further served to unify the Athenians. While these politics were aimed at the Athenians, foreigners, non-Athenians, were present on these occasions too.Footnote 98 They would have received a particular image of Athens, the city which was always victorious against external foes and was united within herself. At the same time, these non-Athenians were marked off as not being members of the city so that they were excluded from her. Their status would have been further emphasized when the meat from the sacrifices was distributed to the Athenians, but not to them.Footnote 99 These forms of exclusion, in turn, served as another way of bringing the Athenians together because unity was being created through separation.Footnote 100
This focus on unity had further important consequences for the rituals surrounding the burial of the war-dead. Although the decision to undertake the campaign must have been approved by the dêmos in the assembly, the decision may well not have been unanimous and some Athenians may have been very much against the campaign, as, for example, Nicias was before the Sicilian expedition.Footnote 101 Further acrimony may have been created by the atmosphere of the meetings themselves. Discontent could also have existed because of other circumstances: Brian Bosworth has stressed the potential for such dissatisfaction at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War when the people from the country had had to withdraw into the city and the military actions had not been particularly successful.Footnote 102 Under such circumstances, the oration presented at the burial of the war-dead could have turned into an occasion for expressing this dissatisfaction and contesting the earlier decisions. The ritual's memory politics with their focus on unity and the creation of a single ‘national’ memory for all the Athenians will have prevented such contestation from interrupting the proceedings. That the texts of the speeches focussed on the collective group rather than the individual will have reinforced these dynamics because the non-specific narrative would not have presented opportunities for dissent over the actions of individuals or their exclusion or inclusion.Footnote 103 The intersection between the memories created at this burial and the memories of earlier burials, occasions when perhaps there was less division among the participants, will also have helped to eliminate the potential division and acrimony. In this way, Athenians will have remembered that a lack of rancour was the norm, not the exception, and this normative pressure will further have contributed to the absence of division. The consequences of the memory politics of the Epitaphia, accordingly, are not limited to the ways in which the Athenians remembered individually and collectively, but they also played an important role in maintaining the democratic polis itself.
THE ORATORS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY
So far, we have focussed on the ways in which the epitaphioi created memory both for the survivors of the war-dead and the Athenians as a corporate group, but their politics of remembrance were not limited to these classes. How orators composed their speeches was directly dictated by what they remembered so that, without memories of past events, no funeral oration could have been written. Every speaker faced the problem of too much material and, therefore, he had to choose which examples to use. His selection will have been determined not only by his own personal predilections, but also by the choices of earlier speechwriters and the outcome of the year's military engagements. As we shall see, his oration drew on and responded to these earlier epitaphioi, but it also competed with them, as the memories of the Athenians were repeatedly (re)created and (re)presented by successive men. These dynamics, in turn, directly affected which military actions would and would not be remembered by later speakers.
For the orator, constructing his speech required choices from the available material which included too many possible exploits and examples for one speech.Footnote 104 Lysias particularly shows some of the ways in which this process might work. Early on in his speech, he states that he has a memory (μνήμην) of the ancestral deeds, which he is going to describe later in the speech, from φήμη, as we have already seen.Footnote 105 The word φήμη can simply denote an utterance, but it can also mean a speech or an oral tradition, as it does here.Footnote 106 In this particular context, the oral traditions are presumably the epitaphioi given on previous occasions and these earlier speeches are specifically mentioned in the preceding section. They are also explicitly the source of the material which he will start discussing in the very next section. Although Lysias focusses on the events of the deep past, these dynamics need not be limited to the city's early history. In the Thucydidean speech, Pericles says that he is not going to discuss repelling barbarian or Greek enemies because he does not want to go on at length in the presence of those who know about these events.Footnote 107 This passage seems to allude to the kind of long historical narrative which we have in both Lysias' oration and the Menexenus. The implication is that the hearers know these events either because they took part in them or because they have heard them described in funeral orations in other years; at this point, they will mentally insert the appropriate occasions. Readers of Thucydides' work, in contrast, will know some of these events from the text itself: the city's exploits against the Persians were discussed in the Athenians' speech at the congress at Sparta in Book 1 and events after 479 are the subject of the Pentekontaetia.Footnote 108 If we believe that the funeral oration is largely a literary creation of Thucydides, then the (expected) historical narrative may well have been truncated in order not to repeat material already presented in the previous book. Like Pericles' audience, readers would mentally have to insert suitable events and so their actions would mirror those required of Athenians listening to the oration given by Pericles.
For orators writing subsequent epitaphioi, these long narratives provided a basic outline of events which could then be remembered and reused. The section praising those being buried usually describes their deeds, often in great detail, as Hyperides' speech shows. For later orators, this description would provide material which could then be added on to the end of the historical narrative. The process of construction, accordingly, required remembering not only the events of the past, but also events as described in past speeches.Footnote 109 We must imagine that epitaphioi from different years interacted with each other in the memories of the orators, a process flagged up by Lysias' reference to his competition with previous speakers.Footnote 110 The speeches make it clear, however, that the amount of time for the oration was finite.Footnote 111 The deeds of the dead from the past few years could not simply be added on to the basic narrative of the past because the speech would become too long and, perhaps, too boring. For the orators, selection and the potential for forgetting will always have been in play. Some of the possible deeds, like the events of 403 and the return from Phyle, which we find in both Lysias 2 and the Menexenus, must have been topical and would eventually have been dropped from the series as the fluidity of memory and the processes of forgetting took their toll on orators.Footnote 112
The competition envisaged here between speeches will not have been limited to the memories of the orators. It will also have existed in the minds of the audience and so the presentation of the speech itself was also a competitive affair. Lysias makes this agonistic context explicit when he says: ‘while my speech is about the deeds of the dead, the contest is not with their deeds, but with those who have previously spoken about them’.Footnote 113 Competition must also have existed at the moment of selecting the orator, as we see from Menexenus; in this dialogue, the boulê was choosing between at least two men, who are named in the text.Footnote 114 The selection of Demosthenes to give the oration after Chaeronea also seems to have involved several potential candidates.Footnote 115 Once chosen, the speaker had to present the city with an oration which justified his selection, conformed to the norms of the epitaphioi, but could also compete with his listeners' memories of speeches from previous years.
As an orator constructed his oration and remembered earlier epitaphioi, he will also have been constrained by the realities of the campaigns of that particular year. Of the preserved speeches, only that of Hyperides commemorated a really successful military campaign with multiple victories. In contrast, Demosthenes' oration marked a serious military disaster and the first year of the Peloponnesian War was not notable for Athenian military successes.Footnote 116 Similarly, Lysias' version gives the impression that there was not very much to celebrate when the speech was written and the lack of success of the dead soldiers is mentioned.Footnote 117 In these two speeches, unlike in Hyperides' oration, little is said about the actual exploits of the dead and memories of very recent events turn out to be surprisingly malleable. When subsequent speakers came to write their own epitaphioi, their memories of these speeches would not include stirring and detailed passages about the achievements of those particular campaigns which could then be incorporated into the new historical narrative. Consequently, the less successful, not to mention disastrous, campaigns will have fallen into the gaps of remembrance and so been forgotten by both orators and their audiences as only military victories remained in their memories.Footnote 118 In this way, the marked focus on Athens as perpetually victorious in war was not only a result of the needs of the ritual context and the city's image of herself, but also a direct consequence of the memory politics of the occasion and its orations.
For the orators, remembrance was an important rhetorical strategy. During the process of composition, it provided them with episodes in the city's history, the building blocks of their historical narratives. Since earlier epitaphioi were a significant source for this material, remembering them will have determined what events were included and excluded from the speech under composition. In turn, these decisions will have directly affected which episodes entered the historical narrative of subsequent speeches and so the Athenians' memory traditions. Campaigns without significant military victories will not have proved memorable and thus the orators omitted them from their speeches. For the speakers, historical events remained fluid, in some cases extremely so, and the politics and complications of forgetting will always have been in play for them in ways in which they were not for the audience, which only received the orator's finished product. At the time of delivery, how these memories had come into being was obscured and only those Athenians with good memories, or a knowledge of the processes involved, will have focussed closely on the forgetting which was inherent in these orations.
THE EPITAPHIA AND ATHENIAN COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Through multiple strategies, the funeral orations and their associated rituals created memory for the Athenians. Among the survivors, the children were educated and provided with memories of their fathers, while all the survivors remembered the last campaign of the dead. For the corporate group, a single memory of both the city's great victories and the events of the year's campaign created unity and prevented division. Remembering was also an important part of composing a funeral speech. The epitaphioi, consequently, must be interpreted in the context of creating and maintaining memories. Since remembering is a social process, we also cannot remove the orations from their setting at the Epitaphia when the rituals played an important role in creating remembrance for the Athenians. The memory work of the speeches, however, did not take place in isolation; instead, it interacted with and was part of the Athenians' larger sphere of collective memory which played out in different fields and media across the city.Footnote 119 As one voice among many, the orations' remembering sometimes reinforced and sometimes competed with memories created by the city's public victory monuments and the city's rituals, particularly the City Dionysia with its announcement of the war orphans in the theatre. Sponsored by the city, these monuments and rituals created collective public memories for the city. These normative influences then interacted with the politics of remembrance at the Epitaphia when a single man remembered the year's war-dead on behalf of the collected Athenians and, in this way, contributed to collective memory.
When both the speakers and the Athenians remembered, the public victory monuments will have played a significant part in reinforcing the memory work of the Epitaphia. Like the orations, the bronze chariot for the double victory over the Boeotians and the Chalcidians in 506 and the fifth-century memorials for the Persian Wars focussed on the Athenians as a corporate group and they did not single out any individuals for particular mention.Footnote 120 Of the fifth-century monuments, the three herms for the battle of Eion in 476/5 are the earliest such structures. The epigram inscribed on the shaft of the third herm invoked Menestheus, the leader of the Athenians at Troy, and it implicitly compared him with contemporary Athenians whose megalê aretê is specifically mentioned in the epigram of the second herm.Footnote 121 The celebration of such military aretê was one of the most important aspects of the Epitaphia and the comparison between present-day Athenians and the heroes of the Trojan War also finds direct parallels in the speeches.Footnote 122 An even closer parallel for the orations is provided by the Stoa Poikile with its series of paintings showing the battle of Argive Oenoe, the morning after the sack of Troy, the Amazonomachy, and the battle of Marathon.Footnote 123 Again, recent events are equated with the successes of the deep past, and the Trojan War in particular, and both the Amazons and the battle of Marathon appear in the extant epitaphioi.Footnote 124 In the second half of the 420s, shields were put up in the stoa to commemorate successes at Sphacteria, a campaign mentioned in Menexenus, and over the Scioneans.Footnote 125 The surviving Sphacteria shield shows that again the achievements of the Athenians as a group were celebrated.Footnote 126 The idea of adding monuments for later victories is very much the visual equivalent of adding new episodes to the historical narrative of the epitaphioi. There is a similar linking of events from the ancestral past, the Persian Wars period, and the more recent past on the friezes of the Nike Temple on the Acropolis, however we want to identify the battle on the west frieze; the south frieze showed Greeks fighting Persians, most likely at Marathon, while the north frieze has recently been identified as the defeat of Eurystheus in his campaign against the Heracleidae.Footnote 127 In contrast, the Parthenon, which also commemorated the victory over the Persians, connected different parts of the deep past together with the present.Footnote 128
These monuments suggest that the idea of a series of historical events linked together to form a narrative of Athenian military achievements did not appear for the first time in Lysias' funeral oration, but it must have been common already in the second half of the fifth century.Footnote 129 Whether the strategy was used already in the 450s, the period of the Poikile painting programme, is impossible to say without further evidence. For the fourth-century orators, these visual monuments will have reinforced the models of the epitaphioi by picking out certain battles, particularly Marathon and the other engagements of the Persian Wars and, from the deep past, the Amazons and Troy. The memories created by these commemorative structures, however, did not completely match those generated by the orations. Since the orators acknowledged no battles from the Archaic period, they ignored the victory over the Boeotians and the Chalcidians, as they also did the engagements at Eion and Argive Oenoe and the victory over Scione. Similarly, of the episodes of the deep past, only the Amazons, Troy and the defeat of Eurystheus appear in both the orations and the victory monuments.
The memory politics of the battle of Marathon and the return of the Athenians from Phyle are rather more complex and they bring out the interplay between the different types of commemoration. The funeral orations are very clear that only the Athenians fought the Persians at Marathon; Lysias particularly stresses that they did not wait for their allies to be informed or to bring them help, while Demosthenes says specifically that they engaged alone (μόνοι).Footnote 130 In contrast, the painting in the Stoa Poikile certainly showed not only the Athenians, but also the Plataeans, as Pausanias' description makes clear.Footnote 131 Like other memorials, the painting could celebrate the contributions of non-Athenians and show particular individuals, while it also commemorated the achievements of the corporate group. The orations, however, could not because doing so would have fractured the unity which the speeches needed to create. Words had the power to fissure the collective group which the memorials did not. While this important monument to Marathon reminded the orators of the significance of this battle, how exactly it was commemorated did not influence the narratives in their speeches. The (normative) influence of earlier orations and the need in this particular context to focus only on Athenians dominated over their memories of the portrayal of the battle in the Stoa Poikile.
In contrast, the overthrow of the Thirty and the return of the dêmos from Phyle present a different situation. For both Lysias and Plato, the military activity is refashioned as war and the stasis which actually occurred is forgotten.Footnote 132 Neither author mentions the Thirty and Lysias shifts the focus on to the Spartans, an external enemy. These strategies are directly parallel to the ways in which the Athenians chose to remember these events in the public monumental sphere.Footnote 133 In creating their narratives of this episode, the speakers of the early fourth century have been distinctly influenced by memorials elsewhere in the city, as they were not in the case of Marathon. These structures, however, did not prevent this episode in Athenian history from falling out of the narrative of the funeral orations: it was not described by either Demosthenes or Hyperides, even though Aeschines' contemporary description of the memorial with the decree honouring the Athenians who returned from Phyle shows that he interpreted it unproblematically as a structure commemorating victory against external enemies.Footnote 134 As with the Eion herms, which Aeschines also discusses in this section of this speech, the continuing existence of the monument could not keep it within the memory traditions created by the epitaphioi. For us, these two examples bring out the malleability of memory and the ways in which it can change over time when it is no longer important to remember a particular episode which is allowed to slip into the gaps of forgetfulness. For the orators, their memories of the victory monuments will have compounded the difficulties of choosing which events to remember in their speeches because the structures furnished yet more possibilities to use. The speakers' (potential) independence from the memorial traditions of the monuments is further brought out by their continued focus on the corporate group in the fourth century when the structures started to commemorate individual living generals, a strategy only seen in our extant orations with Hyperides.Footnote 135 Different spheres of commemoration had their own requirements and norms which sometimes intersected and sometimes ignored those of other memorial contexts.
While the victory monuments formed one sphere of memory which overlapped with the funeral speeches, the city's rituals created another set of influences on the orators and their audiences. For Athenians in the fifth and early fourth centuries, the ritual which most obviously intersected with the Epitaphia was the announcement and presentation of the adult war orphans in arms in the theatre at the Dionysia.Footnote 136 Plato refers explicitly not only to the city's financial support of the orphans, but also to the display itself: ‘when the orphans attain adulthood, the city, having equipped them with panoplies, sends them forth to their own homes and she displays and reminds them of their fathers’ way of life by giving them the instruments of their fathers' excellence (ἀρετῆς)'.Footnote 137 In a funeral oration, the reference to the fathers' achievements is extremely appropriate, but this passage also explicitly links the two rituals. That association will have been clear in the text of the announcement because it specified that the ‘fathers died in the war as andres agathoi’, the same phrase which appears repeatedly in the orations.Footnote 138 When they were presented in the theatre, the orphans will have been reminded of exactly what it meant to be a citizen of the city: to fight on her behalf and, if necessary, to die for her, just as their fathers had, the same model which they had also been given at their fathers' burial.Footnote 139 In this case, the memory politics of the two rituals replicate and reinforce each other. The association between the Epitaphia and the treatment of the war orphans was not limited to Plato: Thucydides also refers to the city's support of the orphans which he describes as ‘a helpful crown for the dead and the survivors of such competitions’.Footnote 140
Other rituals of the city will have intersected with the funeral oration because some of them either commemorated battle victories or came to be associated with them. The most well-known occasion is the sacrifice of 500 goats each year to Artemis Agrotera at Agrae in celebration of the victory at Marathon.Footnote 141 In the years immediately after 404/3, 12 Boedromion was the date of a sacrifice of thanksgiving to Athena for her help in overthrowing the Thirty.Footnote 142 The sixteenth of this month included a wine libation celebrating Chabrias' victory at Naxos in 376.Footnote 143 In the case of Marathon, the memories of the sacrifice and the speeches may have reinforced each other, as they certainly did with the sacrifice to Athena in the early fourth century. In our extant orations, however, the victory at Naxos is not mentioned so that, by the 330s and 320s, the speakers seem to have forgotten an event commemorated on another occasion in the city. As with the victory monuments, these rituals will have increased the number of possible engagements which could be remembered in the epitaphioi. Nevertheless, what could be remembered in one ritual was not necessarily appropriate for another and there will never have been an exact correspondence between different occasions for remembrance and the memories created at them. Forgetting, as well as remembering, was always in play.
Juxtaposing the memory work of the funeral orations with the victory monuments and some of the city's rituals brings out the complexity of the Athenians' collective memory. Rather than being monolithic and unchanging, their remembering was fluid and it depended very much on the particular (social) context. What could be commemorated on one occasion, such as the Plataeans' participation at Marathon, was inappropriate in another, in this case the Epitaphia. Particular events might be celebrated by monuments or rituals, but they did not enter the realm of the funeral orations, as we see with the battles of Eion and probably Naxos. Or they might enter the collective memory in different memorial spheres for a short period, before dropping out of one, as we see with the overthrow of the Thirty and the return from Phyle. For Athenians, there will have been an interplay between memories created on different occasions; sometimes they will have reinforced each other, but, in other instances, they will have come into conflict as the malleability of memory and the possibility of forgetting came to the fore. Rather than thinking of a single, unified collective memory for the city, we need to think in terms of overlapping spheres of collective memory which, for a variety of reasons, might map more or less closely on to each other.
These various spheres of memory were also authorized differently by the city. The victory monuments had to be approved by the demos in the assembly before they could be set up in the city. As such, they were certainly public monuments which presented the authorized, and so official, version of the battle and its importance. Similarly, the rituals discussed here were all part of religious occasions sponsored by the polis. As our epigraphical evidence shows, changes and additions to such events were also authorized by decree of the dêmos.Footnote 144 Just as with the memorials, this oversight by the city made the proceedings an officially sanctioned occasion. In contrast, the dynamics of the Epitaphia were more complex: while the rituals were performed on behalf of the city, the speech represented the views of a single man and his oration was not formally approved by the dêmos, as the monuments and rituals were. It was, therefore, not official. Instead, it represented a complex intersection of various different influences: the orator's memory of previous speeches given at the Epitaphia, their normative influences, his awareness of his listeners' expectations, his remembrances of military victories celebrated in other venues and on other occasions in the city, and the need to be innovative within the confines of this particular type of speech. As the work of one man, the resulting oration represented his individual memories selected from a series of overlapping spheres of remembrance. Through the presentation to the whole city, the speech took these individual memories and brought them into the sphere of the city's collective remembrance. In this way, the memory politics of the funeral orations also provide us with a case study of how individual memory intersects with and then becomes collective remembrance. The complexities involved further bring out the overlapping spheres which may exist in collective memory, as they certainly did in Classical Athens. Our theoretical frameworks, in turn, must also accommodate these intricacies and they must not assume that memory, whether we choose to call it collective, ‘communicative’ or ‘cultural’, is unified and static.Footnote 145 Repeatedly commemorated in different media and fields which sometimes reinforced and sometimes contradicted each other, Athens' splendid achievements in war were not forgotten, and collectively these practices ensured that the memories of the war-dead would truly never grow old.
