Memories of Winners and Losers: historical Remarks on why Societies Remember and Commemorate Wars.

Why do societies remember, and even commemorate, wars? Why do they insist on remembering instead of forgetting an event which is highly traumatic? In fact, our insistence on remembering wars goes against one of the basic tendencies outlined by polemology, according to which forgetting the suffering of war is structural and periodical. The question becomes even more puzzling when we think that the losers as well as the winners remember war, and not just in commemoration rituals for the dead, where the relevance of commemoration seems self-evident, since it ensures that the fallen are remembered and mourned (although, in fact, much more is actually going on), but in almost every figure of memory. This paper tries to solve this problem by investigating some historical case-studies. Issues such as post-war trauma, collective memories, theories of nationalism, ways of expressing a sense of belonging, military reputation, future expectations and the sacred dimension of wars are addressed. The last part of the paper investigates some challenges facing scholars engaged with ancient sources, such as lack of evidence, remediation, intermediality, the risks of dealing with allegedly gendered narratives.