The myth-historical geography of the Athenian leadership of the Delian League. Mnemo-spatial dialogues in Athens and Delphi.

Drawing on some of the mnemospatial approaches illustrated in the introductory chapter to the volume, this paper focuses on the Athenian commemoration of the battle of Marathon as founding myth of Athens’ growing hegemony over the Greek world in the ‘70s and ‘60s of the 5th century. Relying in particular on Halbwachs’ spatial frameworks of memory, Assmann’s mnemotopes, as well as Lefebvre’s discursive notion of space, and Zerubavel’s mindscapes, up to the recent multidisciplinary theorizations on and around memoryscapes, it argues that Athens shapes a sort of myth-historical map of its presence in the northern Aegean, and exploits it on a legitimizing purpose of its own leadership of the Delian League. Thanks not only to spatial relations, but also to intermedial and intervisuals dialogues among different forms of memory, especially poetry for public performance and public monumentality in both Athens and Delphi, it creates a comprehensive discursive space, that anchors itself however in the geographical realia of the Aegean Sea, and thus serves as a legitimizing basis for its arché.