The Invention of Athens

Book excerpt: "In The Invention of Athens, her first book, Nicole Loraux launched her exploration of Greek - and more particularly Athenian - self-representations: in this case, through the funeral oration. Coordinating past, present, and future generations, the funeral oration emerges in Loraux's account as the state institution and genre through which official memory is performed, cultivated, and transmitted. In her anatomy of the institution and genre of the epitaphics, Loraux illuminates the politics, myths, and gendered discourses and institutions of Antiquity. Loraux shows us again and again how the field of representation, particularly as it emerges in a democratic terrain, is the field of contest. Loraux's work was always concerned with the politics of memory - What shall be remembered? And how? And by whom? And for whom? - the way in which the city represents itself, how it constitutes itself, how it remembers and members itself are among Loraux's central preoccupations, and she makes them ours."--BOOK JACKET.