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.

The power of place to stir memory was well-known in antiquity, and is exemplified by a speech Cicero places in the mouth of Piso in de Finibus (On Ends). Piso reflects on the Athenian cityscape, and remarks on the capacity of places and the memory associated with them to stir emotion even more strongly than hearing or reading.1 Accordingly, the role of monuments and buildings in Republican memory has been the focus of a good deal of recent scholarship.2 Nor was the mnemonic potential of buildings lost on the princeps himself: as recent work by Eric Orlin and others has shown, architecture played an important role in the Augustan regime, shaping memories of recent events, and stimulating remembrance of a more distant past.3 Examples include the temple of Apollo on the Palatine and the new constructions on the Capitoline (treated elsewhere in this volume), as well as the Forum Augustum, with its statues of Republican notables (the summi viri) evoking a particular model of Roman history.

The early history of Rome has long been subjected to various forms of criticism. I am told that public-school boys in the United Kingdom used to read whole books of Livy’s history, which they (in turn) were told was the work of his imagination, and this view has become a communicative memory still propagated by many historians. This unstable construct began to shake under the weight of Ogilvie’s voluminous commentary (and its continuation by Oakley).1 A serious modern reconsideration began with Tim Cornell’s monograph The Beginnings of Rome in which he argued for the internal consistency of the traditions on early Rome.2 Cornell made the case that the main body of narrative is likely to go back a long way and shows a structure that could not simply be invented by historians of the late Republic and early Principate. Given that Roman historiography started only in the second half of the third century BC, there is a gap of several centuries between this and the regal period (traditionally dated 753–509 BC).3 Accordingly, if there was any earlier material, it must have been transmitted by means other than formal historiography, and oral tradition seems like the obvious candidate.

This is a tale of two Catos, the real-life man and the legend. The difference can be helpfully illuminated through two stories. Our first opens on 5 December 63 BC in Rome at the Temple of Concord where an important meeting of the Senate has been debating the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators.1 Should they face exile or death? Decimus Junius Silanus, the consul-elect for the following year, proposes execution and many others in the Senate agree. But Gaius Julius Caesar, the praetor-elect and new pontifex maximus, steps forth and makes a stirring speech against the death penalty, arguing instead for exile. The Senate is momentarily persuaded, but then something remarkable happens: Marcus Porcius Cato, only thirty-two years old and the tribune-elect, stands up and delivers a passionate, uncompromising speech against Caesar’s motion, articulating the need for decisive action to deter future treason. His speech sways his fellow senators back to a vote for execution of the conspirators. Everyone present takes note, for a new senatorial star is on the rise.