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.

Despite increasing dilapidation, many of Rome’s ancient buildings survived in a form to impress visitors. During the Middle Ages a number of them – Hildebert of Lavardin, Master Gregorius, Benjamin of Tudela – left a brief record of the favourable impression the ruins made upon them. More widespread, however, were the legendary accounts, as found most extensively in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, of the history and function of a number of the ruins of the pagan past. Such fables can be seen as forerunners of later ruin-mindedness in their attempt to explain the original role in the urban fabric of what was now ruinous and puzzling.

I write this book to convince you of the importance of studying ancient Greek history. I argue that Greek antiquity was exceptional and consequential. It was contingent – it did not have to be the way it was. And it was decisive, helping to shape what followed.

The contio was vital to the political conversation between the senate and people, creating a shared political space. Its success was not so much rooted in the institutional framework but in the contiones’ ability to connect with the audience’s lived experience. In particular, the nobility’s leadership was found acceptable because it was portrayed as beneficial to all; aristocrats were able to substantiate their claims for social eminence with real assets. The capacity to create consensus by means of a set decision-making process faded over time. The second half of the article traces the growing involvement of the contio with domestic issues since the time of the Gracchi, if not earlier. While promises of spoils and profit remained a recurring theme in public speech, they appeared less and less believable. The political crisis of the late Republic was thus also a crisis in the communication between mass and elite. The consensus evaporated because its inherent benefits had fallen flat: the contio became an outlet of discontent and communications counterintuitive to the preservation of the libera res publica.

The notion of the “Greek miracle” is problematic for an obvious reason: it implies that some transcendent set of values was present in a parochial section of humanity. While anti-racist arguments serve to historicize this miracle and show how it is explained without reference to the identity of the Greeks, we should be on our guard concerning the potential racist ways in which discussion of the “Greek miracle” may be appropriated. The chapter surveys such racist appropriations and comments that we need, nevertheless, to come up with concrete accounts of the Greek miracle, precisely so as to refute such racism and also, and less obviously, we should recognize the way in which certain processes, begun with the Greeks, have a progressive political valence, the theme of the remainder of the book.

Through the complex processes of generating mutual expectations and demands, senatorial consensus resulted in a wider consensus held by all. Only on four occasions did the popular assemblies ever vote in a way that went against the senate’s expectations, in 209, 200, 167, and 149 BCE. Discussion of each of these instances demonstrates that the people were not accustomed to, or interested in, following their own preferences: when rogationes were brought before the popular assemblies, they were certain to be agreed. What united the very few cases of rejection was that the people’s response was highly personalized, that is, the initial rogatio pertained to a specific individual; the response aimed at inconveniencing that person; and the senatorial elite was itself divided on the person. Egon Flaig performs a threefold analysis: he measures the strength of preferences in the peoples’ assemblies; he explores the limitations to what is labelled the institutional automatism behind the acceptance of motions; and he teases out the tactical and ritualized manoeuvres of withdrawing precarious proposals. The results are merged into a checklist that gauges the semantic and situational variety of action before the contio.