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GAGNÉ,
RENAUD "The Pride of Halicarnassus": A Ritual
Map
"The Pride of Halicarnassus", the recently
published verse inscription from ancient Salmacis, offers
a rare insight into the expression of Hellenistic civic
identity. The poem is roughly divided in two
complementary parts, a centripetal list of foundations
and a centrifugal catalogue of authors. Focusing on the
list of foundations, I plan to discuss how the epigram
uses the semantics of ritual to map civic identity in
time and space. I propose to go through the text episode
by episode. I will show that the successive moments of
colonization mentioned in the poem each allude at once to
both a ritual event of the local cultic calendar and to a
mythical event of kin origin; I will suggest that,
alongside the linear time of mythical events, the epigram
has also inscribed the circular time of the ritual
calendar in its evocation of the city. Most ritual
occasions were of course anchored in tales of the
primordial past, in aitia, and any account of foundation was thus bound to conjure
memories and associations of cult. But in this remarkably
sophisticated post-Callimachean tale of foundation the
process goes further: as past events are consistently and
explicitly tied with present ritual, the structure of the
mythical tales appears to be organized in function of the
map of local cult. As the two times are made into one,
the author of the poem is able to open a road through the
ritual system of Halicarnassus, to draw a selective
picture of the polis by negotiating a constant and subtle
play of reflections between past event and present cult.
This same association of event and cult was also used to
inscribe the civic space of Halicarnassus. The location
of ritual involves a constellation of places, and I will
thus end my paper by illustrating how the epigram's
representation of the city modeled and organized this
religious space.
Abstracts
Index
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