The Wars of the Roman Republic. Individual memory, cultural memory, and remediation

Abstract

This article presents the processes by which the Romans recognised the social and identity value of a fact, judged it worthy of being passed on in memory to posterity over the long term, and the means implemented to enable this transmission. It presents the features of the memorial culture of the last centuries of the Roman Republic, and particularly the omnipresence of exempla. The fact that exemplarity played a distinguishing role within the nobilitas explains the desire shown by Roman aristocrats to “make memory” by inscribing their individual memory of the res gestae into cultural memory, particularly in the context of the Roman wars. The example of Cato the Elder shows the importance of remediation in this process: it is through the constant transfer of memory from one medium to another that Roman aristocrats can claim to make memory and inscribe their res gestae in Roman cultural memory. The article concludes with the notion of a crisis of memory, showing that the Augustan principate provided an opportunity for a recollection of the cultural memory of the Republic, aimed above all at highlighting the irreducible novelty of the regime established by the first princeps.