Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts

by Estelle Strazdins

Overview

Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts uses literature, inscriptions, art, and architecture to explore the relationship of elite Greeks of the Roman imperial period to time. This wide-ranging work challenges conventional thinking about the temporal positioning of imperial Greece and the so-called 'Second Sophistic', which holds that it was obsessed above all with the Classical past. Instead, the volume establishes that imperial Greek temporality was far more complex than scholarship has previously allowed by detailing how contemporary cultural output used the past to position itself within tradition but was crafted to speak to the future. At the same time, the book emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary analysis in any explication of elite culture in Roman Greece, since abundant extant evidence reveals its purveyors were often responsible for the production of both literature and material culture. Strazdins shows how these two modes of cultural production in the hands of elites, such as Herodes Atticus, Arrian, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Polemon, Pausanias, and Philostratus, exhibit a shared rhetoric oriented towards posterity and informed by a heightened awareness of the fragility of cultural and personal memory over large spans of time. The book thus provides a sophisticated analysis of the tensions, anxieties, and opportunities that attend the fashioning of commemorative strategies against the background of the 'Second Sophistic' and the Roman empire, and details the consequences of embroilment with futurity on our understanding of the cultural and political concerns of elite imperial Greeks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192866103
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Series:	Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture & Representation
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Estelle Strazdins, Lecturer in Classics, Australian National University

Estelle Strazdins is Lecturer in Classics at the Australian National University. Her research revolves around Greek literature and material culture of the Roman Imperial period and early European travellers to Ottoman lands. Prior to coming to ANU, she was Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Queensland, a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, a Research Fellow at the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, and completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsList of Figures1. The Future and the 'Second Sophistic'Part I: Glorious Past, Tense Present, Pending Future2. Back to the Future3. Monuments and Rhetorical MaterialityPart II: Textual Monuments and Monumental Texts4. The Epitaphic Habit5. Commemoration EmbodiedPart III: Controlling the Future?6. The King of Athens7. The Politics of Posterity

Editorial Reviews

"The book is lavishly illustrated with crisp black and white photos and plans and equipped with a useful general index and an index locorum." — Christopher P. Dickenson, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"The book achieves its aim of drawing out the tensions, preoccupations and interests (which were certainly not one-sided) of the Greek imperial elite; by doing so it offers a remarkable contribution to the understanding of their political and cultural agenda, and, ultimately, of their historical role under the Roman empire." — Giorgia Proietti, The Classical Review

"This remarkable book ... brings together literary, epigraphic and archaeological material to make the case that the Greeks living under the Empire—or at least the elite who produced the literature and set up the monuments—were profoundly concerned with posterity and went to considerable effort to shape the reception of their cultural legacy by future generations ... [The author's interpretations] combine to create a powerful, cohesive and convincing picture of a Roman period Greek elite that was deeply concerned that they should not be forgotten." — Christopher P. Dickenson, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

From the Publisher