Memory studies — one of the most vibrant research fields of the present day — brings together such diverse disciplines as art and archaeology, history, religion, literature, sociology, media studies, and neuroscience. In scholarship on ancient Rome, studies of social and cultural memory complement traditional approaches, opening up new horizons as we contemplate the ancient world. The fifteen essays presented here explore memory in the Roman Empire, addressing a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena from a range of approaches. Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence and memory pervades all aspects of Roman culture, from literature and art to religion and politics. This volume is the first to address the cultural artifacts of Rome through the lens of memory studies. An essential guide to the material culture of Rome, this book brings important new concepts to the fore for both scholars of the ancient world and those of social and cultural memory throughout human history.

Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity presents perspectives from an international and interdisciplinary range of contributors on the literature, history, archaeology, and religion of a major world civilization, based on an informed engagement with important concepts and issues in memory studies.

An illumination of memory-the defining aspect of Roman civilization

Explores how cultural memory theory intersects with the literature, politics, history, and archaeology of Republican and Augustan Rome.

Elite Romans periodically chose to limit or destroy the memory of a leading citizen who was deemed an unworthy member of the community. Sanctions against memory could lead to the removal or mutilation of portraits and public inscriptions. Harriet Flower provides the first chronological overview of the development of this Roman practice--an instruction to forget--from archaic times into the second century A.D. Flower explores Roman memory sanctions against the background of Greek and Hellenistic cultural influence and in the context of the wider Mediterranean world. Combining literary texts, inscriptions, coins, and material evidence, this richly illustrated study contributes to a deeper understanding of Roman political culture.

Future Thinking in Roman Culture is the first volume dedicated to the exploration of prospective memory and future thinking in the Roman world, integrating cutting edge research in cognitive sciences and theory with approaches to historiography, epigraphy, and material culture. This volume opens a new avenue of investigation for Roman memory studies in presenting multiple case studies of memory and commemoration as future-thinking phenomena. It breaks new ground by bringing classical studies into direct dialogue with recent research on cognitive processes of future thinking. The thematically linked but methodologically diverse contributions, all by leading scholars who have published significant work in memory studies of antiquity, both cultural and cognitive, make the volume well-suited for classical studies scholars and students seeking to explore cognitive science and philosophy of mind in ancient contexts, with special appeal to those sharing the growing interest in investigating Roman conceptions of futurity and time. The chapters all deliberately coalesce around the central theme of prospection and future thinking and their impact on our understanding of Roman ritual and religion, politics, and individual motivation and intention. This volume will be an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of classics, art history, archaeology, history, and religious studies, as well as scholars and students of memory studies, historical and cultural cognitive studies, psychology, and philosophy.

The pompa circensis, the procession which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was both a prominent political pageant and a hallowed religious ritual. Traversing a landscape of memory, the procession wove together spaces and institutions, monuments and performers, gods and humans into an image of the city, whose contours shifted as Rome changed. In the late Republic, the parade produced an image of Rome as the senate and the people with their gods - a deeply traditional symbol of the city which was transformed during the empire when an imperial image was built on top of the republican one. In late antiquity, the procession fashioned a multiplicity of Romes: imperial, traditional, and Christian. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the webs of symbolic meanings in the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.

In this dissertation, I examine the Roman cultural memory of the conquest of Latium and Rome's earliest expansion through case studies of three Latin cities--Tusculum, Tibur, and Praeneste. Each of these cities underwent the transition from independent civic entity to community of Roman citizens on a different timeline than the majority of Latium: though most Latin cities came under Roman control after being defeated in the Roman-Latin Wars around 338 BCE, Tusculum had already been incorporated as the first municipium cum suffragio after 381 BCE, while Tibur and Praeneste seem to have remained independent allied cities until 90 BCE. I reconstruct the Roman cultural memory of these cities and how it changed over time, incorporating a variety of textual and material sources including literary references, inscriptions, iconography alluding to each city, and monuments or significant sites. I demonstrate that the memory of Tusculum, Tibur, and Praeneste as formerly independent, non-Roman communities persisted through the Late Republic and into the Empire, even as they became completely politically integrated with Rome. The cultural memory of these cities was shaped by continuing interactions between the Romans and the inhabitants of each conquered city, perhaps newly incorporated as Roman citizens themselves, and inconsistencies in depictions of the cities, I argue, provide evidence of the ongoing processes by which the conquered citizens of Latium and the conquerors of Latium were negotiating their history of conflict by reinterpreting and reframing their shared memory of the past. By identifying recurring themes and motifs across many types of evidence, as well as areas of dissonance and mutually incompatible characterizations, I argue that developments in the cultural memory of pre-Roman Latium should be connected to the multiple social groups within the Roman community that would have preserved different memories of Tusculum, Tibur, and Praeneste.

A thematic overview of the cultural history of memory in antiquity.