Susan Blevins

Emory University
Supervisor: Eric Varner

Temples of the divi imperatores: memory and identity

We know of eleven temples to individual deified emperors and their imperial family members, or divi, in Rome: the first to Divine Julius was dedicated in 29 BCE, and the latest, to Divine Marcus Aurelius, was built after 181 CE. How did architecture and ritual associated with cults of divi shape the Roman collective memory of individual emperors and the conception of the imperial office? What practices ensured and perpetuated imperial aeternitas? This study of the mnemohistory of deified emperors reveals that the temples to divi, and associated ritual, functioned individually and cumulatively as the primary loci for the construction of each divus as aeternus or timeless (or even outside of time). The memory of deified emperors became a touchstone of imperial Roman society that provided continuity despite recurrent dynastic ruptures in the transfer of imperial power. Moreover, this phenomenon lay at the very heart of Roman identity formation which sought a kind of divine legitimation through their deified rulers. I explore the tension between cultural revision and cultural continuity inherent in collective memory and suggest that the established dichotomy may require elaboration to accommodate imperial deification.

Publications & conference papers, 2012

Publications & conference papers, 2010-2011

Lauren Donovan Ginsberg

Brown University
Supervisor: John Bodel

Literary and Ideological Memory in the Octavia

Scholars often note that the Octavia as a whole presents a post-Neronian audience with a specific memory of the dynastic purges of 62 CE and the historical figures involved in these events. Understudied, however, is the way in which the play's own characters constantly construct memories of the past-often in conflict with the memories of other characters-as well as try to control how they would in turn be remembered by posterity. My dissertation on the large scale examines the way in which memory is constructed, problematized, and even erased within this text. I am guided in this research by two fundamental questions. First, I explore what role the concept of memory plays in the Octavia and how it becomes a significant structural and thematic motif. My second interrelated question focuses on how the poet uses intertextual reminiscences of Julio-Claudian literature in order to shape not only literary memory, but also political, cultural, and ultimately ideological memory within his historical drama. The decision to put the Julio-Claudians back on stage was an act of staging memory that required the poet to construct a 'realistic' or believable memory of life under the previous regime. My dissertation aims at demonstrating that through this intertextuality the poet of the Octavia constructed a particular memory of Rome's first imperial family-a memory that had lasting influence on the way in which that family would be remembered.

Publications & conference papers, 2012

Publications & conference papers, 2010-2011

Lucy Jones

University of London
Supervisors: Henrik Mouritsen,
                      Dominic Rathbone

Nostra Memoria: Social Memory in Republican Rome

In this thesis, I employ the discipline of social memory to re-evaluate the decline and fall narratives of Roman society in the first century BCE within their social context. In so doing, I attempt to identify what, if any, were the ethics of social memory and how these in turn affected the historical consciousness of the Republic.

Within the discipline of Classics, the relationship between social memory and history is an area of renewed and growing interest. To the best of my knowledge, a detailed analysis of the relationship between the perceived decline and fall of Roman society and the study of social memory is exiguous, although the discipline is moving increasingly towards an understanding of the Krisenbewußtsein of Roman historical consciousness. The notion of Krisenbewußtsein in republican Rome is integral to the argument of my thesis, in that I take it to have been a response, not to 'actual' historical crises of the first century BCE, but to deep-seated social anxieties about the past and an ingrained sense of nostalgia. These concerns, although present in many societies, were reinforced in Rome by familial and societal veneration of the maiores. This framework conditioned the social memory of the past as well as the historical consciousness of the present and affected the narratives that were told both contemporaneously and subsequently about the history of Rome.

I test this theory by analysing in detail various aspects of the written evidence from the Republic, often using interdisciplinary approaches from, for example, anthropology and sociopsychology, to elucidate my discussions.

Conference papers, 2010-2011

Simon Lentzsch

Universität zu Köln
Supervisor: Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp

Traumatische Erinnerungen und ihre Verarbeitung in der römischen Kultur

Die Geschichte der römischen Republik ist zu großen Teilen eine Geschichte des militärischen Erfolgs. Ohne Zweifel stellte die Erinnerung an die zahlreichen Siege in Kriegen und Schlachten einen bedeutenden Bestandteil  der römischen Erinnerungskultur  dar. Diese Triumphe bildeten einen wichtigen Teil von Markierungen der eigenen Erfolgsgeschichte, welche wiederum mitunter auch als Vollzug eines göttlichen Weltplanes angesehen wurde. Jeder einzelne Erfolg war dabei auch ein Beweis dafür, dass die Götter Rom anderen Völkern vorzogen und dass das Bündnis mit ihnen, die pax deorum, intakt war. Für die Römer hatte die Vergangenheit also ein besonders hohes Gewicht. Sie wirkte fundierend und identitätsstiftend und bildete zugleich einen Auftrag an die Lebenden, an der Vollendung der eigenen Größe in der jeweiligen Gegenwart zu arbeiten. Nun waren die zahlreichen Kriege der römischen Republik allerdings nicht frei von Niederlagen. Ob in den Kriegen gegen Städte und Stämme in Italien, gegen Karthago oder gegen Gallier und Germanen: in all diesen Konflikten musste Rom teils desaströse Niederlagen erleiden, die nicht so recht in das Bild des sieghaften Roms zu passen scheinen. Was hätte also näher gelegen, als diese Niederlagen in der eigenen Erinnerung zu marginalisieren? Bereits ein erster Blick in die literarische Überlieferung zeigt aber, dass das Gegenteil der Fall ist. Dieser Befund wirft Fragen auf. Wie fügten sich diese Niederlagen in das Bild, welches sich die Römer von ihrer eigenen Vergangenheit machten ein? Konnten sich aus einzelnen Niederlagen dauerhafte Traumata herausbilden? Waren mit Niederlagen bestimmte ‚Botschaften‘ und Vorstellungen verknüpft, wenn ja welche? Gab es bestimmte Strategien der Erklärung und Verarbeitung? Schließlich dürfte vor allem die Nobilität ein Interesse daran gehabt haben, die Deutungshoheit über Niederlagen zu erlangen bzw. zu erhalten, denn immerhin leitete sie zu einem nicht geringen Anteil aus den militärischen Erfolgen Roms heraus ihren Führungsanspruch innerhalb der Gesellschaft ab. Lassen sich also Spuren davon erkennen, wie man innerhalb der politischen und militärischen Führung mit Niederlagen umging, um nicht zuletzt die Gefahr einer Untergrabung des eigenen Führungsanspruches zu unterbinden? Dieser Komplex von Fragen soll den Ausgangspunkt für die geplante Studie bilden.

Conference papers, 2012-2013


Lynley McAlpine

University of Michigan
Supervisor: Elaine Gazda

Marble, Memory, and Meaning in the Four Pompeian Styles of Wall Painting

My dissertation focuses on the depiction of colored marble and other decorative stone in the four Pompeian styles of wall painting. Marble is especially useful for study because of its popularity in wall painting, its moral and symbolic significance in Roman literary texts, and its rate of survival in the archaeological record. Central among the approaches I employ is a consideration of the role and mechanisms of memory and reception with regard to both material culture and written documents. Due in part to its prominence in scholarship on Roman wall painting, the role of literary evidence in our interpretation of marble in wall painting should be examined from the perspective of memory studies. Adopting an approach that adds the material environment’s part in remembering to these interpretive frameworks is potentially enlightening. Not only can we use the archaeological record to check some of the claims made by ancient authors, such as Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, and Lucan, about the use of marble in the Republican and Augustan periods, we can consider the processes involved in the creation of Roman documents that describe the Roman past. Memory studies also allow us to think about how the information people remembered about paintings and about the ideals of the people who created them affected the way later generations viewed them. When focusing on marble in particular, changes in a viewer’s reception of paintings that feature imported stone might parallel changes in the meaning of those materials elsewhere, i.e. from rare commodities associated with individual military conquest and extreme wealth to, later on, decorative materials more widely accessible and symbolic of the general prosperity and influence of the Roman empire. Reception in this case would depend on whether earlier meanings were still remembered and acknowledged by later viewers, or whether viewers assumed that contemporary connotations extended into the past. Approaches that take into account memory allow us to move away from the idea of reception as something that is tied to a specific historical moment, and to think of it as a dynamic, always variable process.

Conference papers, 2012-2013

Conference papers, 2010-2011

Sebastian Modrow

Universität Greifswald
Supervisor: Egon Flaig

Vom punischen zum römischen Karthago. Reflexionen eines Konflikts und ihr Beitrag zur Konstruktion römischer Identität

Gegenstand meiner Doktorarbeit soll die Transformation einer realen Landschaft, der punischen Welt mit ihrem Mittelpunkt Karthago, in einen medialen cue des kollektiven Gedächtnisses der Römer sein. Der gewählte Titel beinhaltet somit einerseits den zeitlichen Rahmen der Betrachtung (von der Zeit der ersten Reflexionen (ca. 2. Punischer Krieg) bis zur Neugründung der Stadt im Jahre 29 v. Chr.), als auch andererseits die zentrale Frage: Wie konnte Karthago für die Römer zu einem solchen Abrufreiz verinnerlichter Sichtweisen werden und was beinhaltete er? Die Frage nach Entwicklung und Inhalt des Karthagerbildes ist jedoch unweigerlich mit der Frage nach seiner Funktion verbunden. Die Rekonstruktion von Vergangenheit dient einem gegenwärtigen Zweck. Zudem muss der Einfluss oder die bewusste Absetzung von bereits vorgefundenen Deutungen berücksichtigt werden sowie die speziellen Formen römischer Memoria. Die Begegnung der Römer mit dem punischen Kulturkreis war zweifellos eine der folgenreichsten in der römischen Geschichte und ihr letztendliches Resultat war die physische Vernichtung der Stadt Karthago im Jahre 146 v. Chr. Die Errichtung des zweiten Karthago unter Kaiser Augustus war die einer römischen Kolonie und keinesfalls die Wiedererrichtung der alten punischen Metropole. Die Neugründung der Stadt als Colonia Julia Concordia Carthago war zweifellos eine ideologische Herausforderung des kulturellen Gedächtnisses der Römer, die ihre Spuren in den historischen Reflexionen ihrer Zeit (hier besonders in Vergils Aeneis) hinterließ. Karthago war im kulturellen Gedächtnisses der Römer zu einer bedeutenden Größe geworden. Seine Wiedererrichtung war somit nicht nur ein städtebaulicher, ökonomisch-politischer Eingriff in die Landschaft Nordafrikas, sondern gleichzeitig einer in die römische Erinnerungslandschaft, eine Herausforderung der römischen Identität.

Publications & conference papers, 2010-2011

Claudia Moser

Brown University
Supervisors: Susan Alcock,
                      John Bodel

Material Witnesses: The Memory of Sacrifice and the Altars of Republican Rome and Latium

The imprint of Republican Roman sacrificial experience on the minds of individual practitioners leaves little trace in surviving texts and images – scant remains of a few types highly standardized representation that cannot, in themselves, provide a reliable reflection of the multifaceted character of ritual performance. By contrast, sacred places are bearers of memory, responding tangibly over the generations to the frequency and transmission of ritual performance. In my dissertation, I argue that we can gain access to this material memory by situating sacrificial practices in their particular temporal, geographic, architectural and topographic contexts, in spaces centered on the actual point of ritual contact between animal and priest, men and gods, matter and spirit, the natural world and the divine – in other words, at sacrificial altars. My investigation of the material imprint of sacrifice focuses diachronically on five representative case studies (Lavinium, S. Omobono, Fosso dell’Incastro at Ardea, The Sacred Area of the Republican Temples at Ostia, and Largo Argentina), comparable in chronology, regional setting,  range of sacrificial remains and, most importantly,  in their characteristic accommodation of a multiplicity of altars within a single sacred area. Yet, for all that these sanctuaries have in common, each of these sites can be seen to leave its own distinctive, locally-bound, and, as I hope to show, determining imprint on the experience of sacrifice. My research maintains that the ordinary act of sacrifice upon an altar should be understood as a topographically monumental event – at once ephemeral, iterative and eternal – a local storing, processing and transmitting over the centuries of the material memory of ritual.

Publications & conference papers, 2012-2013

Publications & conference papers, 2010-2011


Shreyaa Patel

University of London
Supervisor: Richard Alston
Aspects of Tacitean memory

My research will aim to question the existence of a possible 'ethics of Tacitean memory' and how such ethics could potentially better our understanding of the Tacitean oeuvre and its place within Roman history. Through reading Tacitus' writings as symptomatic of his world-view, I aim to explore whether Tacitus' historical narratives disclose a hostility towards remembering; whether he had an obligation to remember, forget (or invent) certain events or people; whether his memories of certain heroic exempla depoliticise their familiar uses and whether this can be taken as reflective of a shift in the memory of his wider Symbolic community (i.e. a possible Flavian memory?). Such a focus will enable me to examine whether the established technologies of remembering the Republican past were psychological forms of societal surveillance: was the ethic of remembering the Republican past as a repository of true virtus a form of regulating the individual? If so, a change in the memory-work shows not only the dis-acceptance of the established ethics of remembering but it furthermore becomes a counter-argument to the current political system which aimed to foster such technologies of memory. This then suggests the existence of a developing 'counter-memory' - and it perhaps illuminates established conceptions of Tacitus' references to the loss of libertas under Domitian: if the technique of remembering the past was an imposition, designed to maintain the individual within the requirements of a civilised society, can it be argued that the loss of libertas was therefore a psychological impediment on the individual subject, as well as a political hindrance? Either way, it is my view that like libertas, memory too becomes a contested ideal in the Tacitean oeuvre, yet it remains a positive site through which one can explore the remnants of a fluctuating socio-politics - a rupture in the established ethics of Roman memory.


Annual Report, 2012-2013

Maggie Popkin

Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Supervisor: Katherine Welch
Recipient of Fulbright Fellowship (Italy), Oct. 2010-July 2011
-will resume MR Fellowship, August 2011
The Triumphal Route in Republican and Imperial Rome: Architecture, Experience, and Roman Identities

The Roman triumph, an elaborate victory ritual, wound its way through the streets of Rome from the early republican through the imperial periods. The triumph was a quintessentially Roman institution, embodying fundamental aspects of Rome's self-image: military might and "world" dominance. It was intertwined with monuments, urban space, individual and collective memory, and Roman identities, but these levels of meaning have not yet been fully explored. I propose a critical study of the triumph's architectural space that examines the complex relation between Romans' memories and conceptions of the ritual and their interactions with its associated monuments. Focusing on three key periods in Rome's history rich in evidence - the second century B.C.; Trajan's reign; and the Severan era - I argue that the monuments lining the route shaped Romans' experiences and memories of triumphs as well as their formulations of what it meant to "be Roman" in relation to the broader Mediterranean world.

Publications, 2012

Publications, 2010-2011

Emmanuelle Raymond

Université de Lyon
Supervisor: Hugo Bureau
Musa, mihi causas memora... Recherche sur les formes et aspects de la mémoire dans l'Enéide de Virgile

Le projet consiste à montrer en quoi la notion de mémoire peut s'avérer un enjeu majeur dans la composition de l'œuvre. L'épopée virgilienne attire l'attention du lecteur sur l'omniprésence d'une mémoire représentée et clairement identifiable à travers des objets, des lieux ou des personnages de la fiction. Le poète suscite une réflexion sur cette mémoire intradiégétique qu'il présente comme un facteur de cohésion unissant les hommes et les époques dans un principe de transmissibilité de la Mémoire. Virgile propose aussi une réflexion métapoétique plus profonde sur son art même : le poète déborde le cadre strict de la fiction qu'il utilise pour donner libre cours à l'expression d'une mémoire extradiégétique où la narration laisse place au hic et nunc de l'écrivain et de ses contemporains. Certains passages de l'Enéide, propices à une lecture métapoétique, suggèrent l'idée que Virgile a disséminé dans son œuvre quelques éléments d'un art poétique fondé sur une utilisation de la Mémoire. Il reprend la figure traditionnelle du uates en l'infléchissant en faveur d'une vision du poète garant de la mémoire et définit l'Enéide comme œuvre de mémoire dont la composition même doit largement à cette forme littéraire du souvenir qu'est l'intertextualité. Mais le rapport qu'entretient Virgile à l'épopée gréco-romaine est à l'origine d'un questionnement plus profond qui tend à montrer l'utilisation que le poète latin fait du matériau homérique pour le mettre au service de sa propre création poétique, incarnant ainsi le principe littéraire de l'alter ab illo. Grâce à ces multiples éléments, il est possible de mettre à jour la construction progressive d'une définition de la mémoire épique et plus précisément de la mémoire épique virgilienne qui pose l'affirmation d'un genus Latinum et se trouve au centre des choix d'écriture qui distinguent Virgile face à ses épigones.

Publications, 2012-13

Publications, 2010-2011

Stefano Rebeggiani

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Supervisor: Alessandro Schiesaro
Sic itur ad astra: memoria culturale e attualità politica nella Tebaide di Stazio

Il recente sviluppo degli studi sulla memoria culturale ha fornito un contesto teorico estremamente fecondo per l'interpretazione del rapporto tra la memoria collettiva (nelle sue varie forme di oggettivazione) e le forme del potere politico. Intendo studiare le modalità con cui Stazio incorpora nel suo poema maggiore, la Tebaide, elementi della memoria collettiva romana (oggettivata in una pluralità di testi, luoghi e monumenti), e ne fornisce una particolare elaborazione destinata alla costruzione di un discorso politico. Cercherò di dimostrare come Stazio si inserisca con contenuti originali nel dibattito politico di età flavia, e come il suo poema non rifletta passivamente il discorso ideologico dei suoi tempi, ma contribuisca personalmente ad esso, presentando al principe una riflessione sul potere ed un modello da seguire. É mia intenzione coinvolgere in questa analisi vari ambiti della memoria culturale: la memoria di luoghi e monumenti centrali nell'immaginario romano, così come la memoria di eventi storici e di testi letterari entrati a far parte, nell'epoca di Stazio, di un canone riconosciuto come fondante in senso identitario per lo stato romano.

Publications & conference papers, 2010-2011

Aaron Seider

University of Chicago
Supervisor: Shadi Bartsch
Creating the Past: Memory in Vergil's Aeneid

My research analyzes the role that memory plays in the Aeneid by combining recent critical work on social memory with close reading and a narratological approach. Memory's crucial importance to Vergil's epic is no accident. The Aeneid explores the transition between past and future and, above all, the question of how individuals and groups negotiate that transition. Its characters consistently interact with their memories of Troy's destruction and think about their own commemoration, just as the narrator, too, explores his own relationship with memory as one who both remembers and commemorates Rome's origins. Yet despite the signal importance of memory to the epic, its function in the Aeneid is often misunderstood. Contrary to interpretations that overlook memory's nuance and fluidity in favor of the therapeutic healing that forgetting supposedly offers, my research proposes that Aeneas and the Trojans mark and create meaning through remembering and commemorating the past. Even though these interactions often evoke suffering and loss, they are a key way for Aeneas to move forward in an unknown world. A similar dynamic exists in the narrator's relationship with his audience. He transforms his song into a social memory for his audience to share, certain aspects of which he acknowledges may leave him and his audience bewildered and frustrated. By focusing upon the characters' and narrator's engagement with memory, my research explores memory's function in the epic as well as the Aeneid's role within the larger cultural dialogue about memory and the past in Augustan Rome.

Conference papers, 2010-2011


Kelly Shannon

University of Oxford (Corpus Christi College)
Supervisor: Rhiannon Ash

Religion in Tacitus: Historical Constructions of Memory

My thesis examines how religion in presented in the works of Tacitus, and how it resonates with and adds complexity to the larger themes of the historian's narratives. Tacitus constructs a picture of a Rome with ‘religious amnesia:’ the Romans of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian epochs of which he writes repeatedly fail to maintain the traditional religious practices of their forebears.   The Annals and Histories are populated with characters, both principes and populace, who fail to recognize or respond properly to prodigies and omens, commit impious acts of murder against family members, and even participate in the destruction of some of the city’s most sacred buildings.  But alongside this forgetfulness of traditional religious practice runs the construction of a new memory – that of divus Augustus – leading to the veneration of emperors in terms appropriate to gods during their own lifetimes.  This creates a religious narrative that resonates with and illuminates Tacitean observations on the nature of power in imperial Rome.  The types of religious material Tacitus incorporates include calendars (how do Tacitus’ Romans preserve or change the traditional scheduling of religious festivals?), architecture (what determines the building of or alterations to temples and other religious monuments?), liturgy (do they celebrate festivals in the same ways as their ancestors?), and images (how do they treat cult statues?).  I investigate these religious categories and their function in Tacitus’ writings, and how his characters interact with them: what are the patterns of behaviour, both in terms of ritual practice and in how they think about and interpret the supernatural, and how does Rome’s religious past feature in these patterns? I will consider the differences in Tacitus’ treatment of religious material across his works, and across the principates of different emperors within the Annals.  I will also consider Tacitus’ vision of the way history works to preserve religious memory.  This is done through intertextuality with his historiographical predecessors, where reminiscences of previous examples of religious correctness from Rome's earlier history lurk in the background of an impious imperial Rome that fails to read and imitate them.  This touches on the notion of Tacitean exemplarity: to what extent does our historian expect that his own work will similarly serve as a paradigm for his contemporaries? 

Publications & conference papers, 2010-2011

                 Markus Stachon

Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Supervisor: Reinhold Glei

Dichtermemoria zwischen kommunikativem und kulturellem Gedächtnis:
Untersuchungen zu vergilischen, ovidischen und senecanischen Pseudepigraphen

Zu Lebzeiten bekannte Dichter sind sich häufig ihres Nachruhms bewusst. So nennt etwa Ovid seine Werke den besseren Teil von sich, der ewig weiterleben wird (met. 15, 871–879).
Doch was passiert, wenn das Werk des Dichters nach seinem Tod durch Pseudepigraphen erweitert und dadurch verändert wird? Primäre Pseudepigraphen – also Schriften, die dem angegebenen Dichter bewusst untergeschoben sind – datieren meist in die Zeit wenige Generationen nach dessen Tod. Die Erinnerung an ihn ist in dieser Zeit noch von Zeitgenossen geprägt (kommunikatives Gedächtnis); das Bild von ihm, das die Zeiten überdauern wird (kulturelles Gedächtnis), bildet sich noch heraus.
Sein monumentum aere perennius errichtet sich ein Dichter nämlich nicht allein, sondern zusammen mit ihm die Rezipienten seiner Werke. Erst nach etwa hundert Jahren verfestigt sich das Gedächtnisbild des Dichters, das zum tradierten Lexikonwissen wird: Wie stark wird dieses Bild durch Pseudepigraphen beeinflusst?
Es sollen folgende Werke untersucht werden:
Ps.-Vergil: Catalepton, Culex, Dirae;
Ps.-Ovid: Nux, Consolatio ad Liviam, Halieutica, Ibis, Somnium (am. 3, 5), Heroides 15–21;
Ps.-Seneca: Epigrammata, Octavia.  

Conference papers & Publications, 2012-2013


Last modified March 27, 2013
bnatoli@utexas.edu