Parallel session 6, panel 1: Memory and the gods

(Friday 22nd June, 4-5.30pm)

What is hidden in gods’ memories?

Katarzyna Kostecka (University of Warsaw)

In the Homeric Iliad, we see the gods of Olympus at a very precise point of time – the times of the Trojan war. When we meet them, they are certainly not the most peaceable family. They have their different conflicting interests and numerous cunning ways by which they hope to achieve them. They support different sides of the Trojan war and favour different human warriors. They are not afraid either to express their mind – sometimes quite brutally. Hera conspires sexually against her husband, Athena mocks her step-sister for her complaints, Poseidon uses his brother's inattention to support the Greeks and finally Zeus threatens them all, that he could draw them by a line, so that everything would return to the primordial chaos. Having said that, one needs to note the divine quarrels never get too hot – most of them actually end with laughter and neither Zeus' threats nor any other bold declarations do get realised. But did the relations between the Olympians always look that way and how can we inspect that? The answer is provided by the gods themselves. During the narration, the Olympians often share their memories of the times gone by and these enable us to inspect the evolution of divine relations through time. In fact, taking a closer look at such reminiscences, we quickly can see how much the situation on Olympus was once different. The short scenes are filled with real violence and deadly danger – conflicts are not resolved as easily as in the times of the Trojan war. The image of Hera suspended by anvils, Zeus almost bound and defeated, Poseidon and Apollo working for a human king show a world that seems on the edge of destruction. In this paper I will analyse the two images of Olympus and show how these interact with the general concept of ages as presented in the Iliad. Most importantly, I will reflect on why and how the Olympic relations finally became settled.

Gone and Not Forgotten (or forgotten and not gone?): Remembering the Titans in Hesiodic Myth
Susannah Ashton (Trinity College Dublin)

In the kleos-oriented society of Archaic Greece, those who are gone are not always forgotten. Commemoration guarantees everlasting fame to fallen heroes, and with arete earning eternal honour, memory conquers mortality. Yet for those who claim supremacy amongst the immortal gods, commemoration is attained through more complex means. The violent leadership upheavals of early mythic history cause the foremost recipients of commemoration to be supplanted, imposing an inherent problem: how does one establish the fame of new sovereigns, when the former rulers (by virtue of their immortality) never truly go away? This paper explores one case study of renegotiating divine royal kleos, in which Zeus’ attainment of commemoration transpires through concealing the past, and forgetting those who oversaw it.

Hesiod’s Theogony is a poetic commemoration of Zeus’ imposition of the present world order, achieved through a crucial victory over his Titanic forbearers. The age of the Titans was not an unambiguously negative period in mythic history; their peaceful rule over the Golden Age is clearly asserted in the Works and Days. Yet when imparting his punishment upon Cronos and the offending Titans, Zeus does not risk allowing them to remain part of this new world order and the Titans are concealed under murky Tartarus. Subdued, but not eradicated, the Titans are accordingly commemorated through Hesiod’s divinely ordained song as immortal (former-) rulers, who are paradoxically being remembered as forgotten relics of the past.

In this paper I investigate the Titanomachy episode (Thg. 617-720), considering a darker side to commemoration as it serves the political power of the eternally living rather than the memory of the dead. To achieve this, I address the following questions:

1. How do the concepts of memorialisation and commemoration differ when applied to immortal figures?

2. To what extent do the Titans fit into a wider pattern of concealment and revelation under Zeus’ rule?

3. In what ways does the Muses’ memorialisation of the ‘forgotten’ Titans complement the order synonymous with Zeus?

In exploring these questions, I set out to elucidate rarely discussed aspects of commemoration, which pose intriguing questions of immortal kleos, and the co-dependency that exists between the commemoration of Zeus’ supremacy and the absence of those who he defeated to attain it

Commemorating Thetis in Epinicean Poetry
Sophie Milner (University of Leeds)

No genre of Greek poetry is as concerned with memory and commemoration as the epinicean ode. Pindar and Bacchylides commemorate victories at the games. Their odes preserve the memory of the occasion, the victor, the sponsor, and the location both where this happened and from where they came. This is often achieved through the ancestral myths and the aitia of the participants’ home polis.

Within this genre, Thetis is a secondary goddess. She is female, and does not do typically heroic deeds. Nonetheless she is often referred to in the odes. Hers though is a secondary role: she is a lesser deity (nereid), mother, wife, bride, and nurturer. It will be argued that Thetis is unusual in the Pindaric world in that she is a feminine deity, the memory and commemoration of whom preserves a softer value system, and whose commemoration stands in contrast to other heroes and gods. The role of Thetis is a source of influence behind a male figure be it her father, son or husband.

This approach to Thetis and her commemoration links with recent work by Phillips (2015) on the materiality of Pindar. Thetis has an artistic tradition and shrine centred at the Thetideion around Pharsalus. Again it will be shown that the methods by which Currie (2010) linked the male participants of the odes to hero-worship, can also be applied to the female Thetis. Finally, Thetis is commemorated as a mother and this follows the representation and commemoration of motherhood as offered classically by Ruddick (1989 and 1996). She dovetails into a traditional maternal figure as if she were the original madonna dolens.

Thetis in Pindar will be shown to be part of the collective memory and therefore commemorated for very different reasons than other heroes. It is this difference in memory and commemoration that the paper will discuss.