Negotiating Memory from the Romans to the Twenty-First Century

Damnatio Memoriae

Øivind Fuglerud, Kjersti Larsen, Marina Prusac-Lindhagen, Øivind Fuglerud, Kjersti Larsen, Marina Prusac-Lindhagen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367549565
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000190496
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Manipulation of the past and forced erasure of memories have been global phenomena throughout history, spanning a varied repertoire from the destruction or alteration of architecture, sites, and images, to the banning or imposing of old and new practices. The present volume addresses these questions comparatively across time and geography, and combines a material approach to the study of memory with cross-disciplinary empirical explorations of historical and contemporary cases. This approach positions the volume as a reference-point within several fields of humanities and social sciences. The collection brings together scholars from different fields within humanities and social science to engage with memorialization and damnatio memoriae across disciplines, using examples from their own research. The broad chronological and comparative scope makes the volume relevant for researchers and students of several historical periods and geographic regions.

Part I

Forgetting and Remembrance

1 The Other Side of damnatio memoriae

Erasing Memory to Assert Loyalty and Identity in the Roman Empire

Dario Calomino

Anyone wishing to understand the meaning of the expression ‘damnatio memoriae’ from the ways it is used in common parlance would find it hard to avoid the conclusion that it coincides with ‘annihilation’: wiping out the memory of an individual or an event from history. Multiple interpretations of this term are in use that do not all necessarily reflect its etymology and the historical significance attached to this concept in the academic literature, which is that of condemning the memory of disgraced rulers of the past after their downfall and death. In the contemporary political debate, damnatio memoriae has been loosely used as synonymous with ‘harsh denigration’ of a predecessor in the leadership of a country¹ or also to describe the rejection and the systematic annulation of all his/her policy and legislation by a new administration.² Yet, all these different connotations derive from the same broader and univocally negative acceptance of the term denoting the aim to erase the memory of past events, which has also generally prevailed in the interpretation of this practice with regard to the ancient world (among the vast literature on this topic, the most recent and comprehensive works are: Hedrick 2000; Varner 2004; Flower 2006; Benoist and Daguet-Gagey 2007; Benoist and Daguet-Gagey 2008; Krüpe 2011; Calomino 2016). However, damnatio memoriae was not only used to erase memory but also as a means to convey political and ideological messages, especially under the Roman Empire. In this paper, I aim to discuss some examples of how and in which circumstances this happened.

Although there is no ancient equivalent to the modern term damnatio memoriae,³ the fourth-century Church father St Jerome has left us a memorable description of this long-standing tradition:

When a tyrant is cut down, his portraits and statues are deposed too; and when either only the face has been changed or the head removed, the likeliness of he who has conquered is superimposed; so that only the body remains and another head is exchanged for those that have been decapitated.

(Jerome, On Habacuc II, 3, 14–16, 984–8)

This practice is first attested in Pharaonic Egypt and in the ancient Middle East societies (see Varner 2004, 12–20, also for Roman Republican examples), but it is under the Roman Empire that it was followed in the most methodical and spectacular ways. Some of the most gruesome pages in ancient historiography are the accounts of the execution of Roman emperors and of members of their entourage and of the execration of their bodies as a result of the condemnation of their memory. Archaeological evidence has confirmed that this procedure was implemented with consistency and on a large scale, also revealing that, other than being just swapped, portraits of a disgraced emperor could be re-carved and turned into those of his successor (on this practice see: Galinsky 2000; Varner 2004, 10–12 and 25 and 2008). Besides the removal or replacement of portraits of the condemned, damnatio memoriae also involved the erasure and sometimes the replacement of their names from official documents and various media, such as public inscriptions and coins (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Brass sestertius of Commodus; Rome, c. AD 190. [M COM] has been erased from the obverse legend, probably to remove the imperial name.

The originality of Jerome’s passage rests in the fact that, unlike other writers, he does not refer to any particular examples of rulers of the past who suffered from the condemnation of their memory but gives a general definition of this procedure just as a modern historian would do. In doing so, he emphasizes the practicality of damnatio memoriae, which is regarded as a political routine whereby the condemnation of an emperor is seen almost like a customary ritual before the elevation of his substitute. This principle encapsulates the fundamental political meaning of damnatio memoriae and its connection with the mechanisms of the transmission of power. Jerome’s view largely reflects the fact that the way in which memory sanctions were used within the Roman political system changed substantially from the early to the later Empire. While in the first two centuries AD, damnatio memoriae was inflicted only in exceptional circumstances and essentially to punish the behaviour of unpopular emperors (like Nero, Domitian, and Commodus), also blackening the memory of their reigns as a warning for posterity, in the third- and fourth centuries it was used regularly as a political instrument to denigrate the memory of emperors who had been usurped and eliminated, no matter whether they had been good or bad, in order to justify their overthrow and legitimize their successors (Calomino 2016, 209–11). It is mainly within this historical context that the condemnation of the memory was used also to assert, rather than just to erase, although the ‘other side’ of damnatio memoriae is not as well documented because ancient sources hardly ever explained why memory sanctions were actually imposed and executed while emphasizing instead how they affected the posthumous reputation of the condemned. The rhetoric of the damnation of the conquered largely overshadowed the political motivations of the victors (Bats 2003).

The Rhetoric of Damnatio Memoriae

The erasure of inscriptions or papyri mostly accounts for the destructive agency of this process, which sometimes also resulted from serial and perhaps irrational acts of emulation. Epigraphic sources also hardly document the motivations that induced the Senate and the successor of a deposed emperor to condemn his memory. Official documents featuring a decree of condemnation are very rare and scarcely informative or they might affect the memory of a member of the imperial administration rather than that of an emperor. This is the case, for instance, with the well-known senatorial decree abolishing the memory of Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso, governor of Syria under the emperor Tiberius (AD 17–19), who was accused of causing the death of General Germanicus, one of Augustus’ nephews, and eventually chose to commit suicide rather than facing a public execution. The full text of the decree, dated 10 December AD 20, has survived in a number of copies found in Spain (Eck et al., eds 1996; Flower 1998; Potter and Damon 1999). It includes an account of misconduct allegations against Piso, followed by a thorough a list of sanctions passed on his memory. Rather than to disclose the records of the trial, though, the senatorial text seems to have been designed mainly to present a harsh moral judgement about Piso’s vices as an excuse to praise the virtues of the imperial family (Cooley 1998).

Among the ‘most manifest crimes’ (manufestissima scelera) for which Piso was being posthumously condemned, great emphasis is placed on the contrast between Piso’s ‘savagery’ (feritate morum) and Germanicus’ ‘remarkable restraint and forbearance’ (singularem moderationem patientiamque), and to Piso’s ‘unexampled cruelty’ (crudelitate unica) that ‘had corrupted the military discipline established by the deified Augustus and maintained’ by Tiberius (disciplinam…corrupisset) (lines: 18, 26–7, 50–5. Cf.: Eck et al. 1996, 38–51; Potter and Damon 1999, 16–23). If we exclude such examples of moral condemnation, the actual charges pressed on a disgraced individual always fell within the broad category of acts of treachery against the State. In such a scenario, the accused was usually deemed a public enemy (hostis),⁴ a recurring formula that could be used to define both offences against the emperor by one of his subjects and by the emperor himself against the Senate and the people of Rome.

The punishment of crimes committed by members of the imperial court or high-rank officers against the emperor required little explanation. Betraying the emperor (or, as in this case, a member of his family) equalled betraying Rome itself, no matter how weak the evidence was to support such allegations. In such circumstances, damnatio memoriae was often a means through which the emperor got rid of members of his entourage who could be a potential threat to his leadership because they were no longer endorsing his policy or were becoming too politically powerful and influential, or again who had simply displeased him and lost his favour: this was the case with episodes involving Prefects of the Pretorian Guard, the most powerful men in the imperial administration, such as Sejanus (AD 14–31; see Champlin 2012) and Plautianus (AD 197–205; see Birley 1988, 154–63, and 221). Conversely, the overthrow and elimination of an emperor was an exceptionally severe action that required equally extraordinary motivations.

Treachery is again the only crime that justified the elimination of an emperor and the condemnation of his memory, while the actual motivations are hardly ever documented. The surviving sources are mostly uninformative, especially when they draw upon literary stereotypes instead of accounting for the formal charges against the condemned. One example is the edict passed by the prefect of Egypt Lucius Baebius Iuncinus in AD 212 to promulgate across the province the damnatio memoriae of Geta by order of his co-emperor and brother Caracalla, who had previously commissioned his assassination. The fragmentary text preserved in a papyrus deliberately omits the name Geta because his memory was to be abolished from all public records, so he can only be identified from the appellative ἀσεβεστάτος, ‘most sacrilegious’ (which is echoed by the use of ἀνοσιώτατα, ‘most impious’, in Cassius Dio LXXVIII, 2, 4, referring to Caracalla’s actions against Geta). This shows again a moralistic perspective aiming to denigrate the condemned in apparent contrast with the virtues of the current emperor, his brother, who is regarded instead as εὐσεβεστατο[ς], ‘most pious’ (P. BGU XI, 2056).⁵

Literary accounts are potentially more informative, but it is hard to extrapolate fragments of factual evidence from what often appears to be a combination of gossips and literary topoi. The passage of the Historia Ecclesiastica of St Jerome cited above, so candidly describing the practice of heads-swapping in Antiquity, is probably the only one to explain that damnatio memoriae was other than just a process of erasure and destruction. Yet, Jerome also repeats one of the most common ideological stereotypes underpinning this whole tradition, the perennial fight against tyranny.

‘Tyrant’ is the keyword on which the rhetoric of propaganda relied as a justification for the assassination of a ruler or a political leader, since the killing of Hipparchus in the sixth century BC Athens to that of Julius Caesar at the end of the Roman Republic.⁶ In imperial Rome, the act of tyrannicide and its own symbolism became intrinsically connected with the process of condemnation of political memory, which seemed to be almost like an inescapable punishment for any overthrown despotic emperors.⁷ The posthumous memory of Caesar himself, who did escape this fate, would have probably been harshly struck too if Brutus and Cassius had taken control of the Republic instead of Mark Antony and Octavian. The ultimate example of this tradition is the inscription on the triumphal arch of Constantine celebrating the liberation of the State from Maxentius after his death and damnatio memoriae: the defeated is never named but regarded as ‘the Tyrant and all his faction’ (tam de tyranno quam de omni eius factione…rem publicam ultus est) (CIL VI, 1139 = ILS 694).

The ideological connection between tyranny and damnatio memoriae is so strong that it has endured across the centuries and has been revived in the interpretation of modern examples of condemnation of memory as a result of harsh civil conflicts: the ancient tyrant is now a dictator, and whenever his power is contested and overthrown, then there is damnatio memoriae too. The episodes of mutilation and removal of statues and images of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, following...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Negotiation of Memory
• Part I Forgetting and Remembrance
• Part II Cultural Repression and Contestation
• Part III Destruction and Continuity
• Index