Commemorating War Dead in Ancient Greece: Heroic Paradigms and Discursive Strategies

Commemorating War Dead and Inventing Battle Heroes. Heroic Paradigms and Discursive Strategies in Ancient Athens and Phocis, by Dr. Elena Franchi and Dr. Giorgia Proietti, argues that commemoration of the war dead must be considered in the light of the fluidity and malleability which are intrinsic to the social practices of memory. It uses two historical examples, each different in space and time. One example focuses on the commemoration of the war dead in Classical Athens, and disputes the common assumption that they were honoured with a strictu sensu heroic cult and argues instead that they were the recipients of a canonical cult of the dead, though extended in a civic dimension. It does, however, recognize that they were at the core of a complex web of discursive strategies, which, through time, actually represented them as ‘founding heroes’. Using the second example, this chapter advances a new interpretation of the base of a Phocian monument dedicated at Delphi in the 4th or 3rd century BCE, and argues that this monument shows both the Classical and Hellenistic-Roman attitude to reshaping the collective memory of an archaic event and the permeability between different means of commemoration.