The Past as a Political Resource: Evoking the Past as a Strategy in Roman Greece (A02)

• Subject Area: Ancient History
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230856760

In ancient and modern narratives alike, Roman Greece is often understood to have been a place of Roman cultural imperialism and Greek powerlessness and passivity. Against these discourses of weakness, this subproject aims to reveal how Greek cities and priesthoods were actively engaged in improving their actual situation by strategic recourse on the non-material resource of their admired past as it was (re)constructed through buildings, rituals and traditions of the profane as well as the sacred realms of public life. This will be shown with the help of comparative studies of so-called memory landscapes in selected cities and sanctuaries, notably Athens, Sparta, Messene, the Roman colonies Corinth, Nicopolis and Patras, and the sanctuaries Delphi, Olympia and Eleusis.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1095: Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes
• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Project Head: Dr. Muriel Moser-Gerber