Keywords
social memory
epinician poetry
Sappho & Alcaeus.
How to Cite
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Abstract
Literary texts may enable a much later reader to observe how collective memory interrelates with personal
remembrance. This goes without saying for Jane Austen or George Eliot. What is new, however, is that passages
from epinician poetry by Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides may inform on the same process, i.e. the
invention of a society’s collective remembrance, or social memory. The argument is inspired by Maurice
Halbwachs, according to whom a society’s cultural complexity is revealed by literature. Halbwachs read
Balzac and Dickens, he often cited Stendhal and even Proust, but the practice of which he speaks obtained also
in those groups in antiquity where Sappho and Alcaeus performed.
References
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