From the point of view of the early twenty-first century, any book on the history of ancient Greece is, or at least pretends to be, a book about the past. However, the present book is not only a book about the past from the point of view of the modern or post-modern reader. Rather, it is mostly a book about the past from the point of view of the Greeks themselves. More precisely, it is a book about the ways in which, at different points in time, Greeks living in Messenia in the southwestern Peloponnese, and Greeks elsewhere who identified themselves as Messenians, construed, interpreted and transmitted, by ways of stories, rituals, and other symbolic practices, representations of their shared past, of what made of them a specific and recognizable group inside the greater community of the Greeks – and also, about how other Greeks reacted to those ideas and contributed, for various reasons, to their shaping. Even though, in order to investigate these issues, it is necessary also to devote some attention to what is from our point of view the history of the Messenians, this will be done in a succinct way and with the purpose of creating a framework in which to investigate how ideas about the past and symbolic practices that articulated such ideas developed over time.