The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. By 
HARRIET I. FLOWER. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 
Pp. xxiv + 400. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN 0–8078–3063–1.

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CJ Online: 2008.10.03 [orig. CJ 103.3 (2008): 342–4]

         Most classicists know something about damnatio memoriae. If they 
have been to Rome, they may well have encountered evidence of one of the 
best known instances of the practice. On the arch of Septimius Severus 
overlooking the Forum Romanum, one can see firsthand how Caracalla removed 
the name and titles of his brother Geta, after ordering his murder. Though 
new text was added to fill the gap left in the inscription, a visitor can 
still see the channel carved into the marble to accomplish the erasure. On 
another archway, this one set up by the moneychangers in the nearby Forum 
Boarium, Geta’s face has literally been cut out of the family portrait, 
and the names and images of Caracalla’s wife and father-in-law have 
suffered a similar fate. The alteration of these monuments conjures up an 
image of a fratricidal tyrant who extinguished not only the lives of his 
victims, but their public memory. Still, it does not take long to realize 
that the cultural and political significance of these erasures goes far 
beyond what they reveal about the dysfunctional family dynamics of the 
Severan household. As Harriet Flower demonstrates in this ambitious and 
thought-provoking new book, the idea that punishment could extend to the 
destruction of a person’s posthumous memory had a long and fascinating 
history in the Greco-Roman world.

         F.’s first order of business is to disabuse the reader of the 
misconceptions that can be born of terminology. The preface opens with the 
restatement of a point made by Vittinghoff 70 years ago—namely, that 
damnatio memoriae is not classical Latin, and as such does not reflect a 
clearly defined ancient concept. In place of the false precision of this 
neo-Latinism, F. offers “memory sanctions” as a better rubric under 
which to examine the kind of things Caracalla did to Geta. This change in 
nomenclature is emblematic of F.’s meticulous approach. Rather than 
schematize from a range of divergent examples, she stresses the complexity 
and particularity of each individual case. This shift in focus also 
accounts for the breadth of the discussion, which encompasses the full 
range of circumstances in which memory could be modified or destroyed. The 
material discussed includes not just monuments and inscriptions, but 
religious rituals, dramatic performance and literary texts. The result is a 
richly contextualized history of the development of penalties involving 
memory that is full of original insights on nearly every aspect of Roman 
culture.

         The book is arranged chronologically and is divided into two 
sections, covering the Republic and the first two centuries of the 
Principate, respectively. (Memory sanctions in the Severan era are not 
discussed, but a line had to be drawn somewhere and few readers will feel 
shortchanged by this omission.) F. links the development of Roman memory 
sanctions to changes in the political order, arguing that memory was 
initially the exclusive province of the aristocratic family, and that any 
sanctions under the early Republic would have been a private affair. This 
stands in contrast to the contemporary situation among the Greeks, where 
communal authority was apparently stronger and the right of the polis to 
impose penalties on the memory of individuals was commonly acknowledged. 
With the opening of the Roman political class to competition, the new 
patricio-plebeian nobility found it in their collective interest to allow 
some public regulation of these traditions, but nothing that might rise to 
the level of punitive sanctions. Only in the 2nd century, after the Romans 
had been exposed to the possibilities of such practices through contact 
with the Hellenistic world, did the breakdown of consensus lead to the 
adoption of memory sanctions at Rome. These sanctions were used at first as 
a means of social control, but quickly became a weapon with which to punish 
defeated political rivals. As political chaos increased into the late 
Republic, matters snowballed.

         F.’s reconstruction of the origins of Roman memory sanctions is 
mostly a success, but is itself subject to the limitations of memory. Any 
attempt to trace the development of a complex cultural phenomenon over the 
course of Republican history will necessarily be hamstrung by the scarcity 
and uncertainty of the evidence, particularly for the early period. F. 
argues—convincingly, to my mind—that accounts of the fate of M. Manlius 
Capitolinus and the other traitors of the early Republic were modeled to 
reflect the sanctions imposed on aspirants to tyranny in Greece, 
specifically the razing of their houses. While this attention to the 
effects of Hellenization is clearly on point, it would be nice to know more 
about when and how these changes were introduced. One wonders if earlier 
contacts with the Greeks in Italy and Sicily had any impact on Roman 
thinking about the relationship between memory and politics.

         The situation is entirely different when it comes to the 
Principate. It is significant that the second part of this book is nearly 
twice as long as the first, with four times the number of illustrations. It 
is in this context that F.’s particularistic approach pays its greatest 
dividends, as she masterfully explicates a wide range of archaeological and 
epigraphic material, much of it new or recently discovered. Attention to 
nuance is critical here, since it is often difficult to determine if an 
erasure was the result of a formally decreed set of sanctions (like those 
enumerated in the Senatus consultum de Pisone Patre), or reflects a local 
initiative that may or may not have been in line with official policy. 
Further complicating matters is the fact that no damnatio was ever 
completely effective. Domitian’s systematic erasure from public space 
reveals a deliberate policy of denigration, but he nevertheless continued 
to be commemorated in private contexts after his assassination.

         It perhaps goes without saying that it is impossible to discuss 
memory sanctions without discussing memory itself. This book is therefore 
as much about remembering as it is about forgetting, and deals with honor 
and rehabilitation as the inverses of disgrace and oblivion. By describing 
the complex interplay between these opposed elements, F. provides us with a 
vision of the Roman memory world as an intricate and ever-changing 
bas-relief in which the negative space between the figures is essential to 
the interpretation of the scene as a whole. That in itself is a major 
contribution.

ANDREW B. GALLIA
University of Minnesota


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