In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline.

Sulla’s dictatorship transformed Rome politically, socially, and physically.1 The changes which he imposed created winners as well as losers; but collectively the experience of his rule was traumatic, combining unprecedented violence directed at individuals with continuing uncertainty around fundamental citizen rights.2 The trauma persisted, in the transformation in the operation of the res publica, the Roman state, which was regularly repeated through the annual political cycle; in the reshaping of the fabric of the city, including Sulla’s self-memorialisation and the elimination of memorials to his chief rival Marius; and in the ongoing marginalisation of the descendants of his victims, not simply deprived of their property which had been transferred to new owners but also deprived of their citizen rights.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

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 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.

While researching the significance of the various ways in which Latin speakers interpreted the phenomenon of grammatical gender, I spent a substantial amount of time examining ancient Roman scholars, in particular the Latin grammarians.1 Even a cursory reading of the accounts that these scholars have compiled about the masculine, feminine, and neuter soon reveals how they credit different poets with varying degrees of authority in the use and treatment of grammatical gender, even when that treatment may seem inconsequential to modern eyes. As one might expect, the grammarians regularly consider Vergil’s linguistic finesse indisputable, whereas they deem other poets, Lucan for example, to possess ‘lesser authority’ (minor … auctoritas).2 Evaluative remarks such as these prompted me to wonder what characteristics were thought to constitute the ‘poetic authority’ that informed scholars from antiquity in the evaluation and ranking of poets and whether these criteria affected the ways in which poetry was read and evaluated by ancient readers other than grammarians and other scholars.

Roman comedies transcend the isolated pockets of time in which they are set. Their characters have histories, and their plots are influenced by past events. The audience peers into these with voyeuristic curiosity, as does Periphanes, the senex (‘old man’) of Plautus’ Epidicus: ‘It would be good if people had mirrors … they could then think about how they lived their lives long ago in their youth’ (Plaut. Ep. 382–7). The suspense of comedy lies, however, in the vagueness of these very histories; if the figures of the Epidicus had truly possessed ‘mirrors’, Periphanes would have instantly recognised the slave-musician Telestis as his daughter and there would be no narrative to speak of. The complex relationship which comedy holds with its pasts is therefore advantageous to the audience, who derive no little laughter from watching comic characters grapple with their histories.