Monuments hold a special significance for the shaping and the perpetuation of historical memory. The past is discussed in terms of the conceptual, idealized past of public monuments; the local past of ancient sites from the early days of the community; the genealogical past of homes and tombs; and the unifying past of historiography. Noting that the historical memory of the Romans will only transpire if these different forms of memory are synthesized, each one with due recognition to the institutions and situations in which memory were deployed, Tonio Hölscher argues for a certain hierarchy: prioritization of material expressions of the past leads him to regard Roman historiography as an offshoot of historical memory with limited social impact; monuments, on the other hand, powerful and with vast visibility in the centre of the city, wield inescapable impact upon Roman society. The essay concludes with Hölscher expressing his opinion on the place and design of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the planning of which had become the focus of a major public debate in Germany at the time.

Such was the aesthetic appeal of a Roman ruin that English grand tourists began to decorate their parkland back home, now landscaped in a sort of ‘faux-naturalism’, with sham ruins. The eighteenth-century fashion for the English garden swept over continental Europe, and many gardens, surprisingly even in Rome itself, have sham Roman ruins after the English fashion. The fashion for sham ‘Roman’ ruins continued into the twentieth century and was extended to the United States and Japan.

In a new essay, Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp reflects on almost a century’s worth of research on the Roman Republic in Germany and its reception in the Anglosphere. The history of scholarship on the Republic is traced, from Gelzer and Münzer to Syme to Brunt to Millar, with special attention given to the influence of Christian Meier. Key themes of more recent work include political culture, the contio, memory studies, the early Republic, and imperialism.

The study of Roman history has always been multilingual, and some of the most important work on the Roman Republic is in German. Today, however, fewer and fewer anglophone students and scholars read German. The result is that major work published in German can go unread and uncited. This new essay by Amy Russell surveys the problem and potential solutions, as well as exploring some of the difficulties of translation from German to English and a glossary of untranslatable terms. It is important that we balance the benefits of multilingual publishing with the need to make Roman history accessible to all. Translation and collaboration are among the methods recommended. Translation from German brings specific problems, as some concepts can be expressed more easily in one language or the other; Russell takes a case study of the term Öffentlichkeit and its similarities to and differences from English phrases such as ‘public space’. Those differences have significantly affected how scholars writing in German and English have conceptualized the public and the political in the Roman Republic. A glossary elucidates a range of other hard-to-translate concepts.

The chief interest of the antiquarian in Rome’s ruins was topographical, identifying them if possible with structures known and described in Latin literature. Attempts to picture the layout of the ancient city generated numerous maps and disquisitions, which gradually morphed into guidebooks for tourists, many of which focussed on only the ancient remains to the exclusion of the modern city. The development of tourism is one of the capital outcomes of the fascination with the ruins of Rome. There does not seem to have been any other city or site in the world that was visited for the sake of its ruins. Topographical studies were, however, hampered by their reliance on more (or in one case, less) ancient texts in which buildings and their locations were mentioned, not always reliably. It became clear in due course that the only way forward lay in archaeological excavation.

Early states converge on a similar, number-based, “algorithmic” theoretical science. In Greek mathematics we see a new science, based not on the anonymous teacher but on the named author, seeking fame. Such authors look for new, surprising results, and therefore couch them in the language of proof. The resulting body of knowledge of many surprising proofs has no precedent in previous societies. The generation of Archimedes adds considerable subtlety and brings this to the cusp of modern science. The new Greek departure intertwines with other traditions, especially in the Near East, giving rise to a number-based but also proof-based astronomy (that of Ptolemy) and to the Arabic algebra. In the Renaissance, efforts to creatively engage with this Greek legacy gave rise to the scientific revolution. The science we know is objectively valid, but also historically contingent; one of the contingencies making it possible was the new departure of Greek mathematics.

Literary canons are neither the embodiment of transcendent values nor the artificial construct of gatekeepers. They are produced by deep social and poetic forces. The Greek emphasis on performativity meant that the new Athenian democracy became hyper-performative with its drama and speeches and outspoken figures such as Socrates. This riveted attention in the Greek world and, as Athenian political power disappeared, Athens’ soft power could not be replaced (since new sites of power were not as publicly performative). This created a Greek model of culture as a sphere autonomous from the state, predicated on the internal friction of the democratic city. This made possible a science based on debate. Replicated by later cultural traditions, it provided the model for Roman otium, for scientific debates from the Islamic world onward and for the rise of modern European civil society.

Petrarch initiated ruin-tourism, and that flowered in the period of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Arguably, the ruins of Rome were the first to generate the production of a considerable variety of souvenirs, portable objects manufactured expressly for visitors to take away. Now a souvenir is only desirable if the object it represents is deemed attractive: the ruin-aesthetic was so well established by the time of the Grand Tour that ruins moved from the background of paintings into the foreground; they became the subject. In the engravings of Piranesi the ruins of Rome reached their peak of aesthetic appeal. The aesthetic validation of ruins is to the fore, since the English decorated the interiors of their houses with scenes of ruination. They also brought home architectural models of ruins in cork or marble for display; their porcelain and fans were decorated with ruin motifs.