A nowadays popular term to describe space as it is ‘lived’ in the context of ceremonies related to a city’s or nation’s past, is Pierre Nora’s ‘lieu de mémoire’. It should be realized, however, that Nora coined this expression as part of a larger theoretical discussion in which he placed – in the footsteps of the influential sociologist Maurice Halbwachs – his- tory and memory in fundamental opposition to one another:
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. (Nora, 1989:8)8
Nora considers the emergence of entities experienced as lieux de mémoire in conjunction with the rise of history as a scientific discipline, and with a more complicated, mediated manner in which collective cultural memory is experienced within modern societies. As the ultimate cause behind this development he postulates ‘the acceleration’ of history, a process that he identifies with the growth of nation states and the fusion of the world into one global society.9 As a result, local identity is put under pressure and therefore the need
increased of ‘lieux de mémoire’, instituted places of (collective) remembrance, represen- ted by monuments, rituals, festivals or any other spatial or temporal entity that may sym- bolize, express, or organize memory in a coherent and recognizable way for those who witness, receive or take part in them.
According to Nora the emergence of the lieu de mémoire coincided with the disappear- ance of the milieu de mémoire, ‘environment of memory’, where memory is not objectiv- ized and crystallized, but, a place that
is communal, belongs to public life, functions through a network of associa- tions with diverse places, spaces, and groups, relies upon metonymic construc- tions, and, like human memory, condenses, abridges, alters, displaces, and projects fragments of the past, making them alive in the present for particular groups (Nelson, 2003: 74).
Thus a milieu de mémoire is not a site whose ‘past-ness’ is remembered as past, but a spa- tial realm where memory offers itself in a continuous unmediated and unfashioned dia- logue with the present. Nora associates milieux de mémoire with pastoral and peasant cul- tures that renew their memory continually through oral rather than written means. Nora’s strict distinction between memory and history has been challenged by specialists in the field of memory studies, who take as their point of departure the assumption that our understanding – and therefore any attempts at reconstruction – of the past is always affected by the present and therefore continually shifting. Important in this area is the Ger- man Egyptologist Jan Assmann, whose concept ‘cultural memory’ nowadays dominates debates about the relationship between space, remembrance and society:
The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowl- edge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity. (Assmann 1995: 132)10
Unlike Nora and his school, memory studies generally assume a continuation through his- tory of the ways in which humans seek to organise and objectivise their memory within societies. Depending upon place and time, this process may happen spontaneously, driven by the need of a group to express or identify itself in a particular manner, but it may also be, or become, part of an ideological agenda set in motion by those in power, with the intention of exerting control or steering a society into a certain direction.
Unless one rejects the dichotomy of history versus memory that is implied in the term lieu de mémoire and employs the term ‘theory-free’, it makes more sense to follow Assmann’s emphasis on continuation and define the Ceramicus as a ‘site of cultural memory’.11 As
such, it played a major role in the transfer and advertisement of concepts related to Athe- nian ideology. These were mirrored, first, in concrete images of the Athenian (mythical) past that were (re)presented, (a) in the temporal sense, by the content of the orations, (b) in the spatial sense, by the temples, grave-monuments, inscriptions, sculptures and paint- ings that constituted the site’s ceremonial backdrop, and (c) in the spatio-temporal sense, by the processions that crossed the site on the way to Eleusis and the Acropolis or the ceremonial burial of the war dead at the dêmosion sêma. Second, the petrified shapes of the monuments on and around the Ceramicus emphasized what was probably the single
most important item of Athenian political propaganda, the idea of continuity of habitation and rule of the Athenians citizens over their own soil from which they had sprung forth themselves. This ‘myth’ of Athenian autochthony recurs as a topic in extant funeral orations12, and also accounts for their typical structure in which mythological topics seam-
lessly switch to historical ones.13 Thus in a subtle and seemingly inadvertent manner, the
Epitaphioi suggest an uninterrupted tradition of Athenian core values such as liberty, self- lessness and martial excellence, each associated with Athens’ democratic constitution.14
Although the anachronism in the use of the term lieu de mémoire itself may be problem- atic, Nora’s idea of ‘acceleration’ of history certainly turns out to be useful – though rid of connotations with a dichotomy of history versus memory – in explaining the inclination of the Athenians of this period to ‘petrify’ and thereby spatially anchor their past through monuments.15 ‘Acceleration’ need not be time-bound to the 19th century and the growth
of the nation state: it can also apply to antiquity. Owing to a unique set of circumstances – some of them related to the physical, geological and climatological layout of Attica and therefore part of the longue durée, and others, like the fall of the tyrants and the advent of the Persians typical évènements – post-Kleisthenic Athens became an increasingly rest- less society that seemed continually ‘on the move’, engaged in campaigns abroad whilst often besieged at home. It survived assaults of Persians and Greeks, built itself an empire in the Aegean, fought a war of attrition against Sparta, rebuilt its city after its traumatic defeat to the Peloponnesians (404 BCE) and the subsequent rogue regime of the Thirty (404-403 BCE), and gradually regained its prominent position among the Greeks in the course of the fourth century until it capitulated to Macedonian power after the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. All this came with a price. In the fifth century alone the Attic countryside had to be evacuated twice, and apart from casualties due to plagues, droughts and other natural disasters, the city lost scores of hoplites and marines in expeditions over- seas, the most striking of which were the defeats against the Thracians (at Drabeskos, ca. 465 BCE), the Egyptians (460/59 BCE, cf. ML 33) and the Sicilians (413 BCE). The popularity of Athenian beliefs in autochthony and uninterrupted habitation may result from an unconscious desire to balance the flux, restlessness and instability. It coincided with a desire to remember and create sites of cultural memory that expressed the perma- nence, both of the city’s physical layout and, metonymically, of its mentality throughout the ages. Let us now turn to the Epitaphioi and look into the ways in which they function within this larger ceremonial context.