UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT

The Palladion and National Identity

by

Morgan Elizabeth Hunter

Doctor of Philosophy in Classics

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Mark Griffith, Chair

This dissertation takes its start from the observation that people of Sixth and Fifth Century Athens, the Hellenistic Troad and Pergamon, and Republican Rome with its Latin Colonies all made use of stories and symbols taken from the Trojan War in the process of creating an acceptable national identity for their states. The Homeric Cycle of epics and their derived tragedies at Athens, the Iliad’s Mount Ida and Temple of Athena Ilias in Pergamon’s Ilion, the legends of Aeneas at Rome all became central to the way people in Athens, the Troad, and Roman Italy came to see their community. These elements of an imagined Trojan past became part of the complex of activities and formal behaviors that being a member of a socio-political community entails, and especially the symbolic associations of these activities to that community, what Abraham Lincoln called the “mystic chords of memory.”

My particular focus is on three very odd stories about women that I show lie at the beginning of this process in each case: the story that a tall woman, dressed like Athena and riding in a chariot with Peisistratos, tricked the Athenians into making him tyrant; the story that for a thousand years a small city in Greece annually sent two aristocratic maidens to Troy to be tortured and work as slaves for the rest of their lives; and the story that the Roman Senate ordered two sacred Vestal Virgins to be ritually executed after Hannibal won the battle of Cannae.

I identify a specific sacred component from the heroic past that lay at the heart of all three stories: the Palladion, the cult statue of Athena from ancient Troy itself. I demonstrate, by a close examination of all available evidence from literature, art, and archaeology, that this cult statue was a significant symbolic element in the identity of each community. It provided a tangible, visible link to the Homeric world, and thus was a central component in the creation of three separate national identities.

In the course of the dissertation, I also compare these ancient processes of identity creation with more modern examples, taken from Elizabethan England, Imperial France, and Stuart Britain. In each case there are remarkable parallels with the ancient cases I have examined, showing that this process of national identity creation is deeply rooted in human social and political behaviors.