Trophies and tombstones: Commemorating the Roman soldier

Abstract

Greece is widely acknowledged, but the subject has often been approached in a rather limited way. Attention has focused on democratic Athens, and interpretations of the available evidence have, in turn, concentrated on its function in creating and reinforcing a specifically Athenian and specifically democratic ideology. This article attempts to broaden that focus. Concentrating on late fifth-century monuments from three anti-democratic, and anti-Athenian, city-states (Megara, Tanagra, and Thespiae), it explores the complex pattern of similarity and difference which is visible in these monuments, and suggests that this pattern must be explained with reference to an equally complex network of social, cultural, and ideological factors. War memorials, by their nature, encourage monologic interpretations, but a closer engagement with a broader range of Greek commemorative material reveals the fluidity that underlies those dominant narratives.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.