Evoking the dead : Roman books of memory /
"Rome's political change from Republic to Empire challenged rulers and intellectuals, particularly in matters of collective memory. As a cultural device and intellectual fabrication, memory laid the ground for determining just what was worth remembering, and how, through monuments, languag...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Baltimore :
Johns Hopkins University Press,
2026.
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| Series: | Cultural histories of the ancient world
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Rome's political change from Republic to Empire challenged rulers and intellectuals, particularly in matters of collective memory. As a cultural device and intellectual fabrication, memory laid the ground for determining just what was worth remembering, and how, through monuments, language, history, and celebrated heroes. Evoking the Roman Dead investigates how, why, and to what consequence ancient Romans fabricated memories of their own past. The memory of Rome thereby became a fiction to sustain various kinds of status quo, the government, a regime, a family, a canonization of a set of books and the ways of learning with them, even a sense of self as an educated person. But this memory, despite its normative value and ostensible permanence, was selective and mutable. Bloomer focuses on the moment and motives when a society becomes concerned about its collective memory, reshapes its institutions, changes the set of the memorable and the means of access to and diffusion of an authorizing past. This is a fascinating case study in culture making, with the particular strangeness that the new culture is repeatedly understood as a version, errant deviation or proper return, of the old. Examining the process of enshrining memory from the late republic through the early empire, Bloomer traces the period during which literature took over, or tried to, the role of memory-bearer. He argues that memory bearing is a profoundly literary process, dependent on literary forms and predecessors and yet also affecting the interests and modes of future literature. Perhaps the strangeness of the phenomenon needs remarking. Literature as redefined by Cicero and Varro appropriated and refracted the cultural imperative to evoke the dead. The numinous power of the dead was, in their view and that of subsequent authors under the first emperors, essential to the health of the body politic. This power might be lost if the words of the great old Romans were not repeated, and reworked. There is here also the fear that the power has been lost, that the change from republican institutions to imperial autocracy put at risk the continuity and life force essential to Rome"-- Provided by publisher. |
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| Physical Description: | 232 pages ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781421454856 1421454858 |