After the Crisis: Remembrance, Re-anchoring and Recovery in Ancient Greece and Rome

Crises resulting from war or other upheavals turn the lives of individuals upside down, and they can leave marks on a community for many years after the event. This volume aims to explore how such crises were remembered in the ancient world, and how communities reconstituted themselves after a crisis. Can crises serve as catalysts for innovation or change, and how does this work? What do crises reveal about the ‘normality’ against which they are defined and framed?

People living in post-crisis societies have no choice but to adapt to the changes caused by crisis. Such adaptation entails the question of how the relationship between the pre-crisis situation and the new status quo is constructed, and by whom. Due to the reduced possibility of using the immediate past, which is tainted by conflict and bad memories, it may involve revisions of historical narratives about communal pasts and identities, through the selection of new ‘anchors’, and sometimes even a discarding of the old ones.

Crises affect all areas of life, and crisis recovery likewise spans different spheres. This volume finds traces of such recovery strategies in texts as well as visual representations; in literary as well as in documentary texts; in official ideology as much as in subaltern responses. The contributors bring together the diverse testimonies for such ways of coping that have survived from antiquity.

Jacqueline Klooster is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her publications include Poetry as Window and Mirror: Positioning the Poet in Hellenistic Poetry (2011), The Ideologies of Lived Space in Literature, Ancient and Modern (with Jo Heirman, 2013), Homer and the Good Ruler: The Reception of Homeric Epic as Princes’ Mirror (with B. van den Berg, 2018).

Inger N.I. Kuin is Assistant Professor of Classics, General Faculty, at the University of Virginia, USA. Her publications include Strategies of Remembering in Greece under Rome (100 BC–100 AD) (with T.M. Dijkstra, M. Moser, and D. Weidgenannt, 2017), as well as several articles on imperial Greek literature and Latin epigraphy.