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Chapter 9 - The memoria of the gentes as the Backbone of Collective Memory in Republican Rome

from Part II - Translations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
Wolfgang Blösel
Edited by
Amy Russell  and
Hans Beck
Translated by
Kathrin Lüddecke
Amy Russell
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Hans Beck
Affiliation:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
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Summary

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.

Keywords

Roman RepublicRoman politicsRoman historiographymemorycultural memoryhistoriographyRoman elite
Type
Chapter
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The Roman Republic and Political Culture
German Scholarship in Translation
 , pp. 272 - 293
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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