Preface
P R E F A C E· · · The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between Sanctions against memory in Roman culture have been the subject of numerous studies, especially of individual cases or of specific monuments. My study aims to present an overview of the evolution of memory sanctions on the basis of selected examples. In keeping with ancient practice, I have avoided coining a term to describe memory sanctions in Rome. The Latin phrase damnatio memoriae is often used for this purpose, and it is undoubtedly useful in its own way, if only as a kind of familiar shorthand to refer to a whole phenomenon. As Friedrich Vittinghoff showed in 1936, however, damnatio memoriae is not an ancient term and would not have been used by the Romans themselves to identify their sanctions. Indeed, they did not even have a single equivalent description, since they tended to impose each sanction separately, rather than as a standard package of penalties. By using the expression damnatio memoriae, we have tended to suggest a more formal and static way of behaving than was actually the case in ancient Rome, particularly in the period under discussion here. For example, Dietmar Kienast, in his very useful chronology of Roman imperial history, labels disgraced emperors very much as if they were all treated in the same way and subject to the same standardized penalties. This view represents what many modern historians think about the basic structure of imperial commemoration and political disgrace, even seventy years after Vittinghoff’s dissertation was published. There is a danger that we may create and then contemplate not Rome’s but our own notions of what disgrace and oblivion should be. Meanwhile, the following thoughts of Jan Assmann express some of the complexities involved in looking at memory sanctions across time and in different cultures. After speaking of the “structural amnesia” that can sometimes be found in oral societies, he goes on to discuss cultures that use writing. xx Preface Its counterpart in literate societies is the willful destruction of commemorative symbols (documents and monuments), including the burning of books, the destruction of inscriptions (damnatio memoriae), and the rewriting of history as described, for example, by Orwell in 1984. There is (as far as I can see) no comprehensive term to denote these acts of intentional and violent cultural oblivion. They seem to correspond, on the individual level, to repression, whereas structural amnesia corresponds rather to forgetting. “Cultural repression” might therefore serve as a term for the various forms of annihilating cultural memory. Despite this recognition of a phenomenon termed “cultural repression” by Assmann, who has identified it as being shared by many, if not most, communities that practice formal commemoration in some way, the discussion that follows does not aim to identify an overarching “category of forgetting” or to create a terminology that would describe such a category. Rather it examines elite memory in Rome as it was constructed, and then deconstructed or reconstructed again, under a variety of circumstances. In addition, the rich memory culture of the plebs in the city of Rome is not treated as a separate topic here, although it certainly had a history of its own that was not entirely dependent on elite monuments and commemorative rituals. The text of this book was written between September 2001 and early 2005, with the result that no works published after 2004 have been included in the bibliography. It offers a survey of memory sanctions in Roman culture arranged roughly chronologically from the earliest evidence to the first years of the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius in the late 130s a.d. This study does not aim to be comprehensive and makes little use of any analysis using statistics, particularly of erased inscriptions or recarved portraits. Rather, my conclusions are based on the examination of traditional memory patterns in Roman culture and of individual examples, whether of disgraced persons or of monuments and texts relating to those persons. Hence the emphasis is on the richness of nuances, in the eye of individual beholders and at the moments when decisions about commemoration were being made, often in settings that were essentially local and parochial. As a result the investigation is more focused on the individual than on the typical. Indeed, at the detailed level, each case reveals its own particular character and impact. The Greek material, especially from the Hellenistic period, provides the essential background to evolving Roman...
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