Abstract
Scattered across the Greco-Roman world were numerous locales at which katabases had become manifest within reality: sites identified by the ancients as nekuomanetia, charonia and plutonia. This chapter presents a reading of these places as spatial expressions of katabasis and examines the concrete engagements with memory contained therein.
Since katabases are often presented in literary settings as journeys to fictitious or metaphorical realms, these real/spatial constructions require a unique mode of analysis. Thus, we begin by framing these landscapes as natural deathscapes in order to centre their katabatic associations on real-world topography: while such a reading follows the precedent of Dimakis (2015), we explore a new direction by emphasizing the relationship between space and memory. Further, given the context of antiquity, we nuance our consideration of remembering and ‘the past’ appropriately (e.g. removing sharp divisions between myth and history) by turning to the notion of cultural memory – updating Halbwachs’s foundational concept of collective memory in accordance with more recent advances by J. Assmann and Alcock. This paradigm presents these interactions between space, memory and katabasis as a function of communal self-identity.
We examine two case studies in particular detail – the sites of Heraclea Pontica and Tainaron – analysing the ways in which local communities were invited to envisage historio-mythic katabases as tangible and present in the topography of these sites: at Heraclea Pontica, we consider the link between the nekuomanteon and the foundation of the nearby polis (by the same name) through the creation of a unique myth of place; at Tainaron, we examine the symbolic nature of space as indicative of both eschatological reflection and recollections of the past. Thus, the katabatic and memorious material inherent within these landscapes provides a unique perspective on the notion of a ‘descent into the past’.