Speaker: Greta Hawes, Australian National University and the Center for Hellenic Studies

Pausanias’ Periegesis offers us a unique opportunity to examine the local contexts of ancient Greek myth. More compellingly, this text requires us to reconsider what we understand ‘local’ myth to be. In this paper I offer a detailed analysis of Pausanias’ account of Boiotian Thebes which highlights the effects of the material destruction and depopulation of the city on its local storytelling traditions. Following the lead of Dan Berman, I show how the particular ‘supportive infrastructures’ of Imperial Thebes – its physical environment, storytelling communities, ritual activities, and textualized traditions – influenced the nature of the stories told there. At Thebes, the stories told echo closely the much older tragic tradition; this is clearly a legacy of the notable strength of Thebes’ place in panhellenic paideia, and the relative weakness of its local storytelling community. This method of analysis is particularly fruitful when making comparisons between other cities described by Pausanias, such as Mycenae, Messene/Ithome, and Argos, whose diverse histories meant that their traditions of storytelling were subject to their own particular configurations of supportive infrastructures.

Greta Hawes is Lecturer (equivalent of Assistant Professor) in Classics and Ancient History at the Australian National University. She is author of Rationalizing myth in antiquity (OUP, 2014) and editor of Myths on the map: the storied landscapes of ancient Greece (OUP, 2017). She is currently a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, where she is working on a project which explores the myriad relationships between Greek myth and landscape through the lens of Pausanias’ Periegesis.