Roman Greece and the ‘mnemonic turn’. Some critical remarks

Since E.L. Bowie’s seminal article on the Greeks and their past in the Second Sophistic, the study of Greece in the Roman Empire has been experiencing what has been described in other areas of social sciences and the humanities as a ‘mnemonic turn’. The purpose of this article is to rethink the role and scope of these approaches by revisiting some of their assumptions and by posing a series of related questions: was the Roman conquest a catalyst for the emergence of phenomena of mobilization of the past in Greek societies? If such phenomena articulated conscious local responses to the imperial situation, how uniform were these responses across the Greek mainland? Were Greeks unique in this respect compared to other provincial societies across the empire? Did every use and representation of the past always have an ideological significance that can be read from the available textual and material evidence? Can we classify and describe all these phenomena by using the ‘language of memory’? By examining these issues, we wish to highlight the complex nature of the evidence and the need to take into account its potential and its limitations when making inferences about remembering as a social and cultural strategy