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One of the most debated topics regarding the Peace of Philocrates (346 BC) is the fate of the Phocians: were they excluded by a specific clause or not? This paper argues that if we take Demosthenes at face value the Athenians debated about more than one clause concerning the Phocians. A closer analysis of the historical, performative and memorial context of the peace negotiations, on the one hand, and of the legal proceedings against parapresbeia, on the other, suggests that the clause !"#$%&"'($%)*+%,()'($ was debated in the assembly, and then deleted, whereas the attempt to furtively reinsert it afterwards by Aeschines and Philocrates was invented by Demosthenes in order to get Aeschines into trouble and promote his own policy. For the same reason, the relevance of other Phocian clauses was emphasized. One of the main aims of the whole ?Phocian discourse? by Demosthenes was to articulate and share with the Athenians a specific version of the past in order to plot, and increase fear of, the future: the ruin of the Phocians, who were deceived (by Philip and by Aeschines) in the past, is equated with the risk the Athenians are running to be deceived (again by Philip and by Aeschines) and fall into disrepair in the future. Several war scenarios are opening up, the battle of Chaeronea is at the gate: a specific memory of the past raises anxiety levels about the future in the Athenian assembly, a fact Demosthenes is well aware of.

War is a characterizing feature in ancient societies under several perspectives: political, institutional, social, economic, juridical, religious, and cultural. Accordingly, as the first part of this paper illustrates, modern studies in ancient polemology have developed along different, though complementary, currents: war is analyzed as both a crucial moment within military-political history and as a socio-economical phenomenon; it is considered in both its religious and widely cultural implications; and, most recently, it is investigated as a moment of ?founding? relevance concerning the social memory and collective identity of a given community. Starting from the seminal Cadres sociaux (1925) by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the investigation of collective memory in both ancient and modern communities has in fact undergone an outstanding theoretical development, which, as the second part of this paper precisely shows, has exponentially increased the directions of research within classics and the humanities in general. In the last two decades so-called ?memory studies? have been increasingly applied to the study of war and conflict. This contribution provides modern bibliography on war, on memory and on war and memory, and tries to pinpoint main themes on the study of war and memory for future research.

Creative misunderstandings and creative misinterpretations are two different kinds of creative mistakes. They are widespread phenomena which can be found both in scholarship and in various cultural encounters. Creative misunderstandings are mutual and occur between different cultures; creative misinterpretations are not mutual and can occur within the same cultural context. Both misunderstandings and misinterpretations can be double. The examination of two different and emblematic cases of double creative mistakes shows that they are the way by which in many situations people are constructing otherness and past. In the first case, Australia?s Indigenous peoples creatively misunderstood some Christian religious concepts (first level mistake), and these creative misunderstandings were creatively misunderstood as simple misunderstandings by the missionaries (second level mistake); in the second case, ancient storytellers and/or ancient historians creatively misinterpreted ancient Greek frontier wars as initiation wars (first level mistake), while modern scholars emphasized this interpretation exaggerating its implications (second level mistake). In both cases the chain of creative mistakes can be understood only through the analysis of the first and of the second level mistake, because the latter depends on the former. Hence, it can be argued that looking for creative mistakes may be an essential component of studying history.