Affiliation: University of New Brunswick
Matthew A. Sears is a historian of ancient Greece and Rome, specializing in military monuments and commemoration, war and society, and ancient historiography. He publishes widely on Greek and Roman politics, society, and culture, and has bylines in The Washington Post, The Globe & Mail, Maclean’s, and Time Magazine. He holds a PhD in Classics from Cornell University
This presentation investigates the disputed location of the Battle of Cynoscephalae, fought between the Romans and the Macedonians in 197 BCE, to suggest that the battle took place on a type of middle ground between flat plains and rugged heights. This middle ground, consisting of rolling hills and parallel ridges of modest height and steepness, proved to be the ideal terrain on which the flexible manipular legion could defeat the dense Macedonian phalanx. While the ancient literary sources suggest that the battle developed out of a chance encounter between the two forces, this article argues that the Roman commander, Titus Flamininus, deliberately chose the spot because of its topographical characteristics.
This presentation makes the case for the importance of discussing and, where possible, visiting modern war cemeteries and war memorials as an aid to the effective teaching of ancient war and society. In addition to the fact that many modern commemorative practices, such as the casualty lists of the Imperial/Commonwealth War Graves Commission, are directly modeled on ancient precedents, and the idea that drawing parallels between antiquity and today can help us understand both periods, an encounter with the war dead who more closely resemble “us” can lead to a richer appreciation of the experiences of ancient peoples. Ancient history can too often be taught with a level of detachment and abstraction due to the great temporal distance. Instead, teachers and students should encounter the ancient war dead as real individuals, remembered and mourned by real individuals in real societies – an encounter made more likely in the context of modern examples that might be more familiar. As a case study, this paper will compare modern Remembrance/Armistice Day ceremonies, which many of us have experienced and about which we know a great deal, to Early Iron Age burials in Greece from periods without written evidence and for which we only have material remains.
“This presentation explores the reinterpretation and repurposing of Greek “warrior” burials in the Early-Iron-Age and Archaic periods. Several stories in the ancient sources, such as Herodotus’ account of two local heroes appearing as gigantic hoplites to ward off the Persians from Delphi (Hdt. 8.36-39), reveal the Greek belief that heroes could provide tangible military support, though scholarship tends to emphasize the cultural and political benefits such figures brought to their communities. Furthermore, despite the volume of work done on burial and hero cult, the spatial orientation of these sites in the landscape has received little attention. In the Late Geometric and subsequent periods, several burials seem to have been conceived as sources of physical protection and were intentionally positioned to be most effective at this task. Archaeological evidence suggests that these dead were placed to be bulwarks of their respective communities.
The 8th-century polyandrion, or mass grave, on Paros almost certainly contains the remains of Parian soldiers who died in some military action – perhaps in the storied Lelantine War since these burials are, remarkably, oriented towards the Lelantine Plain some 200 km away. On Euboea, a series of elite burials, several with weapons and with remains in expensive bronze urns, inspired a hero cult in the early Archaic period precisely because they were pointed at Eretria’s rival, Chalcis, even though the original burials likely predated the Lelantine War between these cities. While those buried on Paros were soldiers, those who received cultic veneration at Eretria were likely not but were later reinterpreted as such. These sites represent important stages in the development of hero cult and the conception of heroes as warriors providing military support after death.”
The Tomb of the Lacedaemonians in the Kerameikos, one of the most important cemeteries of ancient Athens, seems out of place. Why were Spartan soldiers buried in the city of their rivals, next to those against whom they fought and died? The Athenians and Spartans probably had different ways of thinking about this conspicuous tomb, and each were able to bend the tomb’s meaning to suit their own agendas. From a Spartan perspective, the Tomb of the Lacedaemonians in Athens represents one of several burials in hostile territory, which served as a way for the Spartans to advertise their superiority and lay claim to the lands of others.
