Spatial memory in the early Athenian inscribed public honours

ABSTRACT Athenian honorific decrees were resolved by the Assembly and/or the Council, inscribed on stelai, and eventually erected in different locations of the city across time. This article focuses on a specific category of decrees, that is, those conferring public honours for the city's benefactors to be announced in the theatre. The article’s core question is: what purpose did the erection of a stele in a specific civic space serve, particularly when public praise had already been delivered elsewhere, i.e. in the Theatre of Dionysus? Through the consideration of the contents and spaces of the four earliest preserved Athenian inscribed public honours, the present analysis will unveil an ideological map of Athens whose connected spots were socially useful to the Athenian civic discourse and cognitively important to the readers’ memory.