Remembering and Forgetting in Imperial Greece and Rome

As we have seen from recent debates over whether statues of controversial historical figures should stand or topple, culture is a constant collective decision-making process about what we should remember and what we should forget. The cultures of the Roman empire were no different. In the Greek east, authors and monument-makers of the ‘second sophistic’ looked back to culturally defining memories like the Trojan war, the Persian wars, and the high watermark of classical Athens; in the Roman west, equivalent writers and artists looked back to the myths of early Rome and the problematic benchmark of the Late Republic. At the same time, recent pasts could be rubbed out or overwritten at the drop of a hat: when an unpopular emperor died, their trace could be swept away via official memory sanctions decreeing the decapitation of their statues and the erasure of their inscriptions. In this course, you will learn about how and why Greeks and Romans of the imperial period decided to memorialise certain things and suppress others; you will read texts and study monuments, but also learn how the imperial-era ancients conceived of these very technologies as media of memory with different capabilities and characteristics; and you will go deep not only into ‘the past of the past’, but into how that past pictured its future: the confidence of endurance mixed with the fear of oblivion.