The Archaeology of Nostalgia

by John Boardman

s/t: How the Greeks Re-Created Their Mythical Past
Julius Caesar was warned to tread carefully in the long grass at Troy lest he step on Hector's ghost: the mythical geography of Greece mirrored that of the real world. The ancient Greeks re-created a physical view of the mythical past that poets, priests and politicians used as a paradigm for contemporary behavior, and they drew upon the world around them not just to illustrate that past, but also in many ways to invent it. Massive fossil bones were giants; strange rocks were petrified heroines; Bronze Age walls and tombs were the work of giants; and artifacts from the past became Achilles' spear, Helen's necklace, Herakles' cup. The Greeks could point to where Poseidon struck the Acropolis with his trident, to Athena's olive tree, to Odysseus' cave in Ithaca. It all enhanced their sense of Greekness and of history, and it came to attract the Roman tourist too. John Boardman explores how the Greeks created and re-created their past in physical terms in both objects and images: those that are recoverable, those that are mentioned in texts, or those that may be imagined. He also assembles the many relevant extracts from classical writers with paraphrases of their content. Presented alphabetically under authors and with indexes to gods, heroes, places and classes of object, these Testimonia provide an absorbing read in their own right as well as useful source material for students.

The Archaeology of Nostalgia offers new insights into the making of myth and the exceptional imagination of a people creating the first modern civilization out of the relics of their past. Sir John Boardman is known and respected the world over as an outstanding authority and teacher in the field of classical art and archaeology. He was Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford from 1978 until his retirement in 1994. Among his many activities as scholar, archaeologist, art historian, editor and author, Sir John conducted major excavations on Chios (1953-55) and at Tocra in Libya (1964-65). His prodigious output of books includes some thirty titles. A Fellow of The British Academy, he has received numerous honors, including a knighthood in 1989 and honorary doctorates from the Sorbonne and the University of Athens

Genres: Nonfiction, History

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2002

Reviews

[Midori · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject is extremely interesting and original; the book receives a dynamic start, it seems that it takes bits and parts from other books but it is OK, the author gives credits to their authors. In the process, the aims are becoming blurred and irrelevant chapters are thrown in. At the very end, a comparative exercise is performed but it is just too superfluous to convince. The author is not an expert either in Near Eastern or in Chinese cultures and so the books ends in an unhappy anticlimax.

[Yuki · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading this book, I recognised What we recognised as pre-Greek history was identified by the Greeks as the part of their myth or stories of heroes. It was natural that they identify fossils of bones larger than human as the remains of giants that their Zeus defeated. Their physical world had been shared by mythical existence in ancient Greek.