The Myth-Historical Geography of the Athenian Leadership of the Delian League: Mnemo-spatial Dialogues in Athens and Delphi

Giorgia Proietti

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Chapter 5 The Myth-Historical Geography of the Athenian Leadership of the Delian League

Mnemo-spatial Dialogues in Athens and Delphi

In: Memory, Space and Mindscapes in Ancient Greece

Author:

Giorgia Proietti

Giorgia Proietti University of Trento

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 75–109

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004750005_006

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Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which Athenians constructed the memory of the battle of Marathon as a foundational event justifying the polis’ growing hegemony over Greece through the 470s and 460s. This shall be achieved by drawing on some of the mnemospatial approaches discussed in the introduction. It is argued that Athens shaped a myth-historical map of its geographical footprint in the Northern Aegean in order to exploit those territorial claims to legitimize its own leadership of the Delian League. To prove the case, the available literary and archaeological evidence shall be approached through several interpretative angles: Halbwachs’ spatial frameworks of memory, Assmann’s mnemotopes, Lefebvre’s discursive notion of space, Zerubavel’s mindscapes, as well as the most recent multidisciplinary theorizations on and around memoryscapes. Both in Athens and Delphi, Athenians created a comprehensive and discursive space. They did so through spatial relations as well as by intermedial and intervisual linkages among different forms of memory. Poetry for public performance and public monumentality played a critical role in the process. This multilayered memoryscape, however, was at the same time firmly anchored in several geographical realia of the Aegean Sea, thus acting as the legitimizing basis for Athenian arché.

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Memory, Space and Mindscapes in Ancient Greece

Series: Mnemosyne, Supplements, Volume: 500

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004750005

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 19 Dec 2025

Subjects
- Classical Studies
  - General
  - Ancient Philosophy
- Religious Studies
  - Religion in Antiquity

Front Matter

Part 1 Methodologies

Part 2 Classical Athens

Part 3 The Peloponnese

Part 4 Central and Northern Greece

Part 5 Asia Minor and the East

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Chapter 5 The Myth-Historical Geography of the Athenian Leadership of the Delian League

Mnemo-spatial Dialogues in Athens and Delphi

Abstract

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Memory, Space and Mindscapes in Ancient Greece

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