The Persian War as Civil War in Plataea’s Temple of Athena Areia

Abstract

Summary Differences in the Persian-War tradition have often been noted, but there remains a general assumption that those differences were limited to self-interested quibbling within a commonly accepted narrative of the war. In this paper I argue that divergences in the Persian-War tradition went much deeper. In the decades immediately after the war’s end, the various city-states were producing commemorations of the Persian War that in some instances could hardly be said to recall the same event. I focus on a single case in point: the commemorative narrative publicized by the Plataeans in their temple to Athena Areia. Whereas the Athenians (and others) represented the war as a glorious struggle against an alien invader, the Plataeans, despite their close alliance with Athens, chose to cast it as a disturbing civil war between Greeks. These conflicting stories about the Persian War emerged because of substantial differences in all three of the factors that tend to influence memory production: the real experiences of a given past event, the preexisting social memories onto which those experiences must be grafted, and of course the evolving present needs in whose service the past is always recalled and occasionally reshaped. Most Greek states had much less in common than Athens and Plataea, and similarly deep fissures can be seen elsewhere. Ultimately, this study suggests that the Persian-War tradition was, from the beginning, far more fractured and chaotic than is currently assumed.