A map of nostalgia: cities once flourishing in <i>Greek Anthology</i> book 9

Abstract

A recurring motif throughout the Greek Anthology is the longing of the lost splendor of great states that once flourished –and that where in ruins at the time of the epigrammatic creation. The aim of this article is to create a corpus about extinct cities, with a translation from the original Greek. It also intends to systematize the historic or legendary causes of the fall of the poleis with their most persistent features, as perpetuated by the consensus of the collective imagination, and to establish how the emotional potential of those places has inspired the poets. Literature is a testimony which is presented as fiction, although it is located in a context and designs a universe with an implicit intention to understand the ‘otherness’.