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

The Introduction offers a broad survey of the body and the corpse in literature and world culture. The chapter opens with a detailed discussion of the violence of the so-called Islamic State, who use corpse abuse as a form of videographic terrorism and recruiting tool. Focus on the ‘spectacle’ of ISIS’ corpse mistreatment strategies functions as an entrée into a survey of the spectacle of power politics more broadly, from the Neo-Assyrian Empire to Rome to the French Revolution. The chapter also explores the semantic capaciousness of the body in western thought – its materiality, metaphoricity, sacrality – with examination of theorizing from Plato to Adriana Cavarero.