Intentional History

Lin Foxhall, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Nino Luraghi, Luca Giuliani, Ewen Bowie, Massimo Nafissi, Maurizio Giangiulio, Joseph Skinner, Ralf von den Hoff, Kurt Raaflaub, Renate Schlesier, Stephen Lambert, Ian Worthington, Kostas Buraselis, Tania J. Scheer, Nicola Di Cosmo, Jonas Grethlein, Kōstas Vlassopoulos

The contributions assembled in this volume study the social function and functioning of notions and ideas about the past held by groups and individuals, with a special focus on ancient Greece but including comparative contributions on early China and on the function of the classical past in modern European culture. Special attention is devoted to the past as a foundation for collective identities and to the ways in which the goals and needs of specific groups impacted its representation and transmission. Contributions range in time from the archaic age to the Roman Empire, covering aspects such as the representation of the past in visual arts, the function of myth and its representation in literary and visual genres, the relationship of historiography to social memory, and the way that the past features in Greek religion. Monuments, literary texts, inscriptions are investigated in...