From Cultural Memory to Poetic Memory: Ancient Greek Practices of History Beyond the “Great Divide”

Abstract

In a recent comparative confrontation between the Peloponnesian war and the Polynesian war, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins asked for the agents of history: individuals? communities? the social classes? the economic structures? the social structures? Actually, for the American anthropologist, “no history without culture.” But the question is to focus on the different discursive forms which transforms the events of history in historiography, in a (referential and not fictional) story; these different (often poetic) forms of historiography shape a collective and cultural memory. The Greek case is particularly significant under that point of view as far as historiography is always situated between oral tradition and written tradition (Jack Goody), between poetic forms and forms of prose, with an important political, social, religious, and ideological impact.