When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases.

In Cicero’s Lucullus of 45 BC, we find a moment often ignored by scholars, in which the proponent of anti-skepticism and Antiochus’ Stoic dogmatism in the dialogue, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, draws a lengthy analogy from oratorical practice to critique one of Cicero’s arguments as the proponent of Academic skepticism. Fortunately for us, the analogy opens a rare window onto the oratorical appropriation of certain politicians as exemplary populares.1 And so Lucullus argues.

Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the spatial dimension and conditionality of memory – its connectedness and links to space and place – have been well known.1 Halbwachs asserts that collective memory is only possible if it is ‘localized’.2 Hence, the trope of a city or town as a landscape of memory has become fixed in memory studies and has even given rise to the term ‘urban memory’.3 Urban memory can refer to anthropomorphic phenomena (as when the city is said to have a memory of its own). More commonly, however, it points to the city’s status as a physical place and an ensemble of objects and practices which enables recollections of the past and embodies it through traces of successive building and rebuilding.4 The inhabitants of a city thus draw upon its image to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural, and social entity. In that sense, the urban landscape of Republican and Imperial Rome has thoroughly been investigated and reconstructed as a landscape of memory.

In 36 BC, after the battle of Naulochus, Octavian decided to dedicate a temple to Apollo in memory of his victory over Sextus Pompeius and to have it built on the Palatine, on the spot where lightning had struck, which was taken to be a sign.1 The temple, however, would not be erected until 28 BC, after the battle of Actium, and would both commemorate Naulochus and Actium. Apollo was effectively linked to the battle of Actium: after his victory, Octavian restored the temple of Apollo at the entrance of the Ambracian Gulf; he also consecrated a sanctuary to Apollo on the site of his camp at Actium.

Unlike Cicero the orator, philosopher, and celebrated opponent of tyrants, Cicero the poet died a relatively speedy death and left an uncontested legacy. Cicero’s poetic activity earned little mention after his death, and, except for a more holistic assessment from Plutarch, was typically discussed only to be mocked or wished away.1 Regardless of its literary value, I suggest that Cicero understood his poetry as a means to influence and codify memory, and that discussions of his poetry led him to intuit concepts relevant to modern memory studies. To demonstrate this, I turn to Cicero’s De Legibus, a fragmentary dialogue from the late 50s BCE.2 Although the work’s central concerns are legal and political philosophy, it opens with a discussion of a scene from Cicero’s Marius, alongside consideration of Cicero’s potential to write history. Because of this, scholarly treatments that eschew philosophical and legal approaches often examine questions of genre and historical writing.3

This chapter argues that the military and political history and prosopography of the early fifth century cannot be reconciled with the existence of the Notitia system. Specifically, the military challenges the east Roman empire faced during this period, most notably Alaric’s depredations in the Balkans, Gaïnas’ revolt in Asia Minor, and attempts to prop up the struggling western empire, all point to a systemic under-militarization in the east that forced Constantinople to rely heavily on barbarian manpower, often with calamitous results. By the 420s, we find evidence for a gradual remilitarization taking place in the east, which set the stage for the major reforms of the 440s.

This chapter surveys the organization of the east Roman military from the failure of Julian’s Persian expedition to the death of Theodosius I in 395. It demonstrates that there is no evidence to support the emergence of the Notitia system during this period and, in fact, positive evidence indicating that the Roman military continued to operate in its fourth-century configuration, with a central reserve army, the comitatus, commanded by a magister equitum and magister peditum, while smaller regional commands were managed by local limitanei or, in exceptional cases, a comes rei militaris. The sole exception was the magister militum per Orientem, the chief general on the eastern frontier, whose office went from an ad hoc appointment to a formally constituted command during this period.

This chapter traces the gradual unwinding of the Notitia system in response to the shifting strategic needs of the east Roman empire. Anastasius began the process by deploying the praesental armies to the east, first against the Isaurians and then against the Persians, but it was Justinian who fully dismantled them. Beginning with his creation of a new military command for Armenia and continuing through the establishment of a standing field army for North Africa and Italy, Justinain cannibalized the praesental armies and dispersed the striking power of the armies of Oriens, Thrace, and Illyricum. The consequences of Justinian’s decisions were keenly felt by his successors who struggled to defend the empire against escalating threats in the Balkans and the east. By the time Herakleios came to the throne, the Romans could barely muster three field armies, those for Thrace, Armenia, and Oriens, and it was these depleted armies that Herakleios used to defeat Persia and lay the basis for the thematic armies of Byzantium.

This chapter explores the mediation of experience in Middle Republican Rome. Mediation ‘facilitates the externalization of memories we produce in our minds … [and] through the internalization of mediated memories … we participate in collective memory’.1 In what follows, I will suggest that the First Punic War was the first event in Roman history to be mediated in certain ways that held the real potential to transmute lived experience and personal recollection, supplementing them, or even replacing them, with a different set of narratives that emerged from innovations in Roman artistic production. In Rome in the late third and early second centuries BC, especially in the years after Rome’s first war with Carthage, we encounter the first time that memories of conflict were tied to Latin poetry and public narrative art. Accordingly, this chapter will track the impact that these new memorial media made on Rome’s cultures of memory.2

In the early first century AD, the democratic institutions of Athens dedicated an honorary statue to the Roman senator Lucius Cassius Longinus.1 In the process, they re-used a monument consisting of a bronze statue and a marble base from the Classical period.2 Elsewhere, I have investigated why Athenians rededicated such old statues to Roman senators in this period. I have shown that old statues, that is statues from the Classical (and Hellenistic) period, were particularly suitable honours for Roman benefactors because of their shape and the cultural memory attached to them. I have detailed the manner in which they were employed as a political strategy both to engage powerful Romans and to manoeuvre them into a position of patronage and support for the city.

his chapter will discuss some of the ways that recent scholarship on cultural memory has contributed to thinking about the role of exempla in Roman culture, and particularly to the development of the idea of the ‘site of exemplarity’.1 It will also suggest how insights found in this scholarship might sharpen our appreciation of some of the challenges that face modern scholars who are studying cultural memory in antiquity, especially when it comes to the Roman republic from which so little written testimony survives. These themes will be focused through the discussion of the somewhat obscure case of Vibellius Taurea, a bold native of the city of Capua who clashed with the Romans during the Second Punic War.