The seventh chapter explores the developing aesthetic value now attached to Rome’s ruins, tracing for instance the way in which they move up scale from illustrations in books or in the background staffage of Renaissance painting to become the foregrounded subject matter in the paintings of the Baroque era and especially the eighteenth century. Engraved views, vedute and photographs provided tourists with inexpensive and portable souvenirs. The ruins have by now acquired full aesthetic validation as the principal subject matter of paintings by Claude or in the engravings of Piranesi. Thanks to the aesthetic appreciation of the ruins, images of them become common features of interior decoration.

The emergence of a ruin-aesthetic comes after Petrarch, and is initially owed to architects like Brunelleschi and to painters like Raphael. Architects wanted to build in the Roman manner, all’antica, and painters introduced Roman ruins into the background of their pictures. Such was the commitment to the study and imitation of the Roman style that the need to conserve the ruins was recognised and advocated. Hitherto it had never occurred to anyone anywhere to urge that a ruined structure should be preserved for its historical value. But a further value was now attached to the ruins of Rome, namely the aesthetic: the ruins were looked upon as attractive in themselves. The ruins also became the object of study and analysis by a new breed of scholar, the antiquarian and topographer, such as Flavio Biondo, who also wanted to ensure their preservation for future ages to admire. This is a new feature of ruin-mindedness: whatever is deemed beautiful must be preserved for later generations to study and admire and imitate. Since those later generations will include foreign visitors, tourism comes to be recognised as a sound economic reason for conserving the handsome material remains of ancient Rome.

Conservation is a fundamental feature of true ruin-mindedness, but the early attempts to preserve the ruins of Rome were unsuccessful until the tourism of the eighteenth century made it clear that there was an economic benefit to the preservation and attractive presentation of the city’s ruins. Once this was appreciated, care for the preservation of the ruins from further damage and decay became an issue. Towards the end of that century, soil and rubble were removed from the bases of a number of the more significant ruins, and steps were taken to isolate them so as to protect them from harm, an innovative measure. Rome took the lead in guarding the heritage of its built environment. But since no one had ever tried to protect a building out of doors before, novel means of preservation and even of conservation and rebuilding were devised to ensure that the ruins looked their best for visitors and for posterity. Further projects of excavation were undertaken by the French and the Kingdom of Italy in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century the ruins were furbished up for propaganda purposes by the Fascist regime.

Uwe Walter explains how memoria in Rome was rooted in institutions vital to the res publica. Many of these were embedded in an oral context with highly suggestive settings – public speech, the theatre, festival performances, among others. Hence, they had only a limited capacity to store memories and preserve them over time. In similar fashion, buildings and monuments were subject to decay, and with their splendour their memorial force vanished. Historiography was of a different quality. Fabius Pictor attempted to create a unified memory of the res publica, distilled and synthesized from multiple individual and collective repositories of memory across a variety of media – and charged with the authority of the senatorial voice. Two concluding case studies illustrate how Walter envisions the relation between narrative synthesis and the production of meaning: one, the case of L. Marcius Septimus, lower commander during the Punic Wars; and the other the highly politicized episode of ten high-ranking prisoners released after the battle of Cannae by Hannibal on their word of honour that they would raise a ransom in Rome in exchange for their comrades. Each tradition integrated different elements of memory to generate a qualitatively new knowledge of past events.

The second chapter accounts for the steady ruination of Rome despite attempts at maintenance of the built environment in late antiquity. Fire, earthquake and flood were the chief agents of destruction. Repairs were always needed but became increasingly rare thanks to depopulation and diminishing public revenue. The shift of secular power to Constantinople and the gradual decay of paganism in the face of buoyant Christianity did the public buildings of Rome, especially the temples and places of entertainment, no favours. Stone from such structures began to be recycled for repairs or for the adornment of new buildings, such as churches. Depopulation emptied large sectors of the city within the Aurelian walls, and the abandoned sites were turned into farms and vineyards.

True ruin-mindedness begins with the poet Petrarch, the subject along with his successors of the fourth chapter. He was the first person we know of who visited Rome with the intention of seeing the ruins. Thanks to his unrivalled knowledge of Latin literature, he viewed the ruins as ‘sites of memory’, complementary to and made comprehensible by the texts of Roman poets and historians. For Petrarch and his successors, the ruins became an essential part of the historical and cultural heritage of the ancient Romans, a material complement to the history of Livy and the poetry of Virgil. Such complementarity was crucial to endowing the ruins with some context and meaning; they were not just piles of broken rubble but a valuable part of the Roman cultural achievement as a whole. Petrarch’s enthusiasm was infectious and it can be claimed that he initiated two new disciplines, urban topography and antiquarianism, the subjects of the next two chapters, 5 and 6. From this point on, progression will be largely chronological, as the sentiment of ruin-mindedness is developed and enlarged.

This chapter brings together literary responses to the ruins of Rome. Over the centuries after Petrarch, the ruins had acquired historical, cultural and aesthetic validation, all the outcome of the development of a sentiment favourable to ruination; in short, ruin-mindedness. For an emotional validation we must turn to writers, who put into plain words how they felt about the ruins. The feelings are surprisingly various: sometimes elation, sometimes moral disgust. Whatever the reaction, it is usually founded, as was Petrarch’s, on the fact that the ruins of Rome have a historical and cultural context, thanks to the survival of Latin literature. The physical remains of the ancient city are given meaning by the Roman literary heritage, and it is that above all which enables writers to record a varied range of nuanced responses to them that are not likely to be evoked by a ruin without a history. Reactions to the ruins are affected by shifts in sensibility, especially the influence of romanticism, which insisted upon recording impressions of the ruins in moonlight. The ruins of Rome are signs to be interpreted in endless ways. This cannot be said of any other ruins anywhere.

Modes and purposes of the memorial practices of aristocratic families were formative to Roman readings of the past. The memoria of the gentes was imprinted deeply on the Republic’s history culture, but was subject to the challenges from other formats of remembering the past, historiography in particular. The pompa and laudatio funebris both heralded and magnified a family’s esteem through the display of imagines and the recollection of narratives of exemplary virtue. While these achievements were uncontested among the gens itself, in the public arena they might have been a bone of contention. The memoria of the gentes distorted that of the Republic as a whole, influencing the work of the first historians, the compilation of lists of magistrates and office-holders, and the outlook of public space. Historiography also distanced and indeed distinguished itself from the memoria of the elites. Discourses of decadence widened the gap between the two media. Meanwhile citizens outside Rome were more removed from the mechanisms of aristocratic remembering and could only access a history of Rome in written format. Elite memories ceased to wield their magnetic force, but they also lingered on in historiography.

In a new essay, Harriet I. Flower gives her personal overview of key themes in the German scholarship translated in this volume. German and anglophone scholarship have pursued different paths for reasons including differences in how the boundaries of disciplines are constituted, but also because of the strong influence in Germany of work by Christian Meier which remains untranslated. Three lenses are suggested which can help us categorize this volume’s contributions to the study of Roman political culture: procedures and rules, ritual and spectacle, and the context in the city of Rome.

Observing that the history of the Roman Republic has been one of turbulence, conflict, and dynamic change throughout, Martin Jehne investigates the integrative and indeed moderating force of standardized forms of interaction between the upper and the lower classes. He sees the corresponding modes grounded in what Jehne labelled a Jovialitätsgebot, that is, a communicative and behavioural code of benevolence that structured and lent meaning to the mutual relations between unequals. Under this unspoken code, members of the governing classes were expected to encounter ordinary citizens deliberately and pointedly as if they were on terms of equality with one another, even though all parties understood that they were not. In its Roman context, Jovialität allowed both the nobility and the people to cultivate an institutionalized conversation that supplemented the realm of prevailing power structures and social asymmetries. To flesh out the argument, Jehne discusses a prominent incident from 414 BCE, the battle of words between M. Postumius Regillensis and M. Sextius.

The Roman Capitol was a place of memory. Several conceptual traits of a Roman lieu de mémoire are identified: an ever-present signposting to other stories, notions of humble origins, portents of a prosperous future, and great men who tie it all together. The concrete places related to these stories are not only visible but, in fact, vital to the story they tell; without them, the symbiotic interlinking between narrative and numinous place evaporates. Discussion of the Roman triumph demonstrates how space is created by ritual. From this emerged an implicit hierarchy of space that lent additional quality to place. The Republic’s greatest imperatores wished to see their fame immortalized on the Capitol. But the Capitol was also somewhat removed from everyday politics, for instance, in the Comitium or in the Forum. Here, aristocrats had to confront the people, directly and in person. In turn, the encounter was critical to the way in which the people awarded public offices in the voting assemblies on the Campus Martius. Between these various locations there developed a distinctive hierarchy of place that was defined by proximity to the present of politics, prestige, and war.