The Archaeology of Nostalgia: How the Greeks Re-created their Mythical Past

This volume 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. It offers insights into the making of myth and the exceptional imagination of a people building the first modern civilization out of the relics of the past. The ancient Greeks drew upon their phyical environment not just to illustrate the past but also in many ways to invent: massive fossil bones were the remains of giants; strange rocks were petrified heroines; Bronze Age walls and tombs were the work of titans; and artefacts from the past became Achille's spear, Helen's necklace and Hercules' cup. The Greeks could point to where Poseidon struck the Acropolis with his trident, to Athena's olive tree, to Odysseus' cave in Ithaca. They worked out what Oeidipus' Sphinx looked like, and found Memnon crying to his mother Dawn in an Egyptian statue. It all enhanced their sense of Greekness and history, and it attracted the Roman tourist too: Julius Caesar was warned to tread carefully in the long grass at Troy lest he step on Hector's ghost.