Ida Östenberg | University of Gothenburg (original) (raw)
Books by Ida Östenberg
The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in th... more The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in the ancient city of Rome, exploring the interaction between people and monuments. Representing a novel approach to the Roman cityscape and culture, and reflecting the shift away from the traditional study of single monuments into broader analyses of context and space, the volume reveals both how movement adds to our understanding of ancient society, and how the movement of people and goods shaped urban development. Covering a wide range of people, places, sources, and times, the volume includes a survey of Republican, imperial, and late antique movement, triumphal processions of conquering generals, seditious, violent movement of riots and rebellion, religious processions and rituals and the everyday movements of individual strolls or household errands. By way of its longue durée, dense location and the variety of available sources, the city of ancient Rome offers a unique possibility to study movements as expressions of power, ritual, writing, communication, mentalities, trade, and – also as a result of a massed populace – violent outbreaks and attempts to keep order. The emerging picture is of a bustling, lively society, where cityscape and movements are closely interactive and entwined.
Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as sp... more Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as spectacle and performance. Ida Ostenberg analyses how Rome presented and perceived the defeated on parade. Spoils, captives, and representations are the objects, and the basic questions to be asked concern both contents and context: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? The triumph was a crowded civic celebration, when spectators met with coins from Spain and Asia, Jewish temple treasures, silver plate and furniture from opulent royal feasts, trees from eastern gardens, Punic elephants appearing as in battle, kings, long known by name only, and ferocious barbarians dressed in outlandish costumes. Ostenberg aims to show what stories the Roman triumph told about the defeated and what ideas it transmitted about Rome itself.
Papers by Ida Östenberg
The Materiality of Text – Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity, 2019
This volume contains revised versions of selected papers delivered during a series of research ta... more This volume contains revised versions of selected papers delivered during a series of research talks on the materiality of texts at Durham University in the academic year 2011/12, hosted by the Department of Classics & Ancient History, and a conference held in Durham in September 2012. As editors, we are very grateful to all our contributors for their patience, understanding, and support. We are particularly grateful to the Department and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Durham for their financial support of both the research talks and the conference. We are also very grateful to the British Epigraphy Society and the Society for Promotion of Hellenic Studies for their financial support, particularly in the provision of student bursaries. We thank the staff at University College Durham and the Calman Centre for their hospitality and unwavering support prior to and throughout the conference, and Dr. Barney Chesterton and Eris Williams Reed, then both PhD students in the Department, for their help in all organizational matters and for their general good cheer. At the University of Virginia, we are grateful to Matt Pincus, a graduate student in the Classics Department for his help with proofreading, and especially to our University of Virginia colleague Jane Crawford for her generous help with several papers written by non-native speakers of English. Kevin Scahill and Adam Gross, our editorial assistants, have provided invaluable help throughout the complex process of the preparation of this manuscript for printing. Our particular thanks go to Professor John Bodel for his encouragement to submit the volume to the Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy series, to Professor Adele Scafuro as the series' co-editor, and to the anonymous reader(s) for their feedback and advice. Both individual papers and the volume as a whole have greatly profited from all their suggestions and advice. In addition, we are very grateful to the editors at Brill, Mirjam Elbers and Giulia Moriconi, as well as to our production editor, Wilma de Weert. Finally, we are very grateful to the museums and institutions around the world that have kindly granted permissions to publish images of their material: they are thanked individually in individual papers. The abbreviations follow the guidelines of OCD and SEG, supplemented by those of the GdE; less often encountered abbreviations are explained either in the list of abbreviations following individual papers, or on the first mention of the relevant corpus. For further assistance, please consult the Index locorum.
Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society, 2018
"And he [M. de Charlus] gave a little laugh that was all his own — a laugh that came to him proba... more "And he [M. de Charlus] gave a little laugh that was all his own — a laugh that came to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had been sounding now, without change, for not a few centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could relish its precious quality like that of certain old musical instruments that have now grown rare. There are times when, to paint a complete portrait of someone, we should have to add a phonetic imitation to our verbal description, and our portrait of the figure that M. de Charlus presented is liable to remain incomplete in the absence of that little laugh, so delicate, so light."
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
The quote from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, illustrates the limitations in the human sense of sight. Only by adding sound to our visual perception of a person — or a place, an event, or indeed a city — can a full portrait be obtained. The laugh of M. de Charlus also has social implications; it is a mark of his aristocratic lineage, a culturally embedded sound adding to his social standing, to be admired or scorned by listeners and readers alike.
The question of how “to paint a complete portrait” is central to the study of the senses in antiquity, a topic which has recently and quite rapidly become en vogue in the classical fields:
• How do we, in the words of Proust, “add a phonetic imitation to our verbal descriptions” of life in the Roman city?
• How do we move beyond depictions of maps, plans and 3D-models fully to grasp how the city of the empire was perceived, not only through sight but also through sound and by way of smell and touch?
• How did the Romans themselves express their urban sensory experiences in their written testimonies?
• What can a deepened understanding of the sensual perceptions of the city in Roman times — the visual, audial, olfactory, tactile and synaesthetic — tell not only about a single individual’s experience, but of Roman culture as such?
• Was there a specific Roman way of perceiving the urban environment, and in what ways were such sensory experiences dependent on the subject and in what ways on the object — the cityscape itself, with its buildings, streets and open areas?
• What rôle did the social and historical context play? and
• How do we approach these questions in a scientific mode that takes our research beyond intuition?
Ridley Scotts Gladiator från 2000 var den första episka storfilm med antikt tema som producerats ... more Ridley Scotts Gladiator från 2000 var den första episka storfilm med antikt tema som producerats på 35 år. Filmen blev en succé: den slog publikrekord, möttes av positiva recensioner och vann fem Oscars. Film- och TV-industrin såg ny potential i avdankade antika teman och levererade i rask följd ett antal storproduktioner som utspelas i Hellas och Rom. Men också utanför biosalongerna gjorde filmen avtryck, emellanåt benämnd "Gladiatoreffekten". En ny generation studenter strömmade till universitetens antikenkurser, och inte minst viktigt, studiet av antiken på film tog fart. Ett stort antal böcker har sedan år 2000 utkommit som behandlar både specifika filmer och antikfilmen som genre. Vetenskapliga tidskrifter riktas åt studiet av antiken på film, och varje konferens med självaktning inkluderar numera en eller flera paneler som behandlar antiken på film och TV. Till en början rörde den vetenskapliga debatten i stor utsträckning frågor om filmens historicitet. Många upprörda röster kritiserade antikfilmens sätt att handskas med fakta, och den akademiska konsult som anlitats till Gladiator lät stryka sitt namn från eftertexten i protest. Senare studier har i stort lämnat frågan om historicitet och istället ägnat sig åt tolkning av antikfilmen som samtidsfenomen. Vilka temata berörs? Varför är de viktiga just nu? Vad säger de om vår syn på antiken och på vår egen tid? Jag tänker i denna text diskutera olika aspekter av "Gladiatoreffekten" inom film och akademi. En fundering rör också det framtida studiet. De senaste åren har sett en rad film- och TV-produktioner som närmast sågats av både filmkritiker och antikvetare (t.ex. Pompeii, 300: Rise of an Empire). Diskussionen om historicitet har blossat upp på nytt. Sedan Gladiator utkom 2000 har de vetenskapliga diskussionerna närts av och förts med särskilt fokus på filmer och TV-serier av god kvalitet (såsom Gladiator, Troja, Rome). Vad innebär den nya storproduktioner av "Bfilmer" för studiet av antiken på film?
The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, ... more The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, but nor were they formal processions. They did, however, often share several traits with the ceremonial pompae; many included a larger number of participants, had an ordered sequence and strived at specific ends, they moved through the city centre, took use of symbols and insignia, and they were certainly watched, noted and discussed. This paper analyses aristocratic escorted movements, here labelled ‘power walks’, as movements set between processions and promenades, the formal and the informal, ceremony and everyday life, social distance and physical presence. Besides the central person of the aristocrat himself, the paper looks at his escort and the spectators, and also at the interplay between the various participants and the Roman cityscape.
Svenska Dagbladet, 26 maj 2015
Svenska Dagbladet, Under strecket, 21 maj 2015
This article examines how the victors in late Republican Rome expressed and celebrated military s... more This article examines how the victors in late Republican Rome expressed and celebrated military success in
civil war. It is argued that the Senate and the victorious generals turned to the traditional triumph as a means to embrace civil war victories within an accepted frame of external conquest. It is further argued that the triumphal procession, in its capacity as a well-established spectacle performed as a role-playing between Roman victors and foreign losers, proved an inadequate means to give voice to Romans conquering other Romans. Novel forms of expressions were hence exploited: the memorial and the calendar. The memorial was alien to the Roman culture and did not succeed in winning acclaim. The calendar proved a more effective means. Both Caesar and Octavian were able to use the fasti anni as a medium to articulate their success in civil war, commemorating even their victories at Pharsalus and Philippi.
Battles and battlefield strategies have long held a prime place of interest among Roman scholars.... more Battles and battlefield strategies have long held a prime place of
interest among Roman scholars. In recent years, attention has
also turned to martial rituals, war memorials and the sense of
oneness as shaped by joint experiences of war. These current
discussions focus almost without exception on Roman victories.
In contrast, this paper aims at exploring aspects of defeat, asking how battlefield failures were received, remembered and
how they contributed to the creation of identities in ancient
Rome. The basic questions are these. How did Rome handle her
own defeats? Which losses were forgotten and which were remembered? How were defeats committed to memory (or consigned to oblivion)—what rituals, monuments and narratives
were employed? This paper will argue that, while contemporary
battle losses must have triggered enormous sorrow and fear,
there are very few traces of former defeats visible in Roman
ceremony and cityscape. Only a very limited set of failures
from the distant past were embraced as specific events by the
communal Roman memory. Most defeats were instead taken up by the writers of the Early Empire as preludes to later victories and were thus absorbed into the larger picture of constant Roman success.
The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in th... more The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in the ancient city of Rome, exploring the interaction between people and monuments. Representing a novel approach to the Roman cityscape and culture, and reflecting the shift away from the traditional study of single monuments into broader analyses of context and space, the volume reveals both how movement adds to our understanding of ancient society, and how the movement of people and goods shaped urban development. Covering a wide range of people, places, sources, and times, the volume includes a survey of Republican, imperial, and late antique movement, triumphal processions of conquering generals, seditious, violent movement of riots and rebellion, religious processions and rituals and the everyday movements of individual strolls or household errands. By way of its longue durée, dense location and the variety of available sources, the city of ancient Rome offers a unique possibility to study movements as expressions of power, ritual, writing, communication, mentalities, trade, and – also as a result of a massed populace – violent outbreaks and attempts to keep order. The emerging picture is of a bustling, lively society, where cityscape and movements are closely interactive and entwined.
Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as sp... more Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as spectacle and performance. Ida Ostenberg analyses how Rome presented and perceived the defeated on parade. Spoils, captives, and representations are the objects, and the basic questions to be asked concern both contents and context: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? The triumph was a crowded civic celebration, when spectators met with coins from Spain and Asia, Jewish temple treasures, silver plate and furniture from opulent royal feasts, trees from eastern gardens, Punic elephants appearing as in battle, kings, long known by name only, and ferocious barbarians dressed in outlandish costumes. Ostenberg aims to show what stories the Roman triumph told about the defeated and what ideas it transmitted about Rome itself.
The Materiality of Text – Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity, 2019
This volume contains revised versions of selected papers delivered during a series of research ta... more This volume contains revised versions of selected papers delivered during a series of research talks on the materiality of texts at Durham University in the academic year 2011/12, hosted by the Department of Classics & Ancient History, and a conference held in Durham in September 2012. As editors, we are very grateful to all our contributors for their patience, understanding, and support. We are particularly grateful to the Department and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Durham for their financial support of both the research talks and the conference. We are also very grateful to the British Epigraphy Society and the Society for Promotion of Hellenic Studies for their financial support, particularly in the provision of student bursaries. We thank the staff at University College Durham and the Calman Centre for their hospitality and unwavering support prior to and throughout the conference, and Dr. Barney Chesterton and Eris Williams Reed, then both PhD students in the Department, for their help in all organizational matters and for their general good cheer. At the University of Virginia, we are grateful to Matt Pincus, a graduate student in the Classics Department for his help with proofreading, and especially to our University of Virginia colleague Jane Crawford for her generous help with several papers written by non-native speakers of English. Kevin Scahill and Adam Gross, our editorial assistants, have provided invaluable help throughout the complex process of the preparation of this manuscript for printing. Our particular thanks go to Professor John Bodel for his encouragement to submit the volume to the Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy series, to Professor Adele Scafuro as the series' co-editor, and to the anonymous reader(s) for their feedback and advice. Both individual papers and the volume as a whole have greatly profited from all their suggestions and advice. In addition, we are very grateful to the editors at Brill, Mirjam Elbers and Giulia Moriconi, as well as to our production editor, Wilma de Weert. Finally, we are very grateful to the museums and institutions around the world that have kindly granted permissions to publish images of their material: they are thanked individually in individual papers. The abbreviations follow the guidelines of OCD and SEG, supplemented by those of the GdE; less often encountered abbreviations are explained either in the list of abbreviations following individual papers, or on the first mention of the relevant corpus. For further assistance, please consult the Index locorum.
Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society, 2018
"And he [M. de Charlus] gave a little laugh that was all his own — a laugh that came to him proba... more "And he [M. de Charlus] gave a little laugh that was all his own — a laugh that came to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had been sounding now, without change, for not a few centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could relish its precious quality like that of certain old musical instruments that have now grown rare. There are times when, to paint a complete portrait of someone, we should have to add a phonetic imitation to our verbal description, and our portrait of the figure that M. de Charlus presented is liable to remain incomplete in the absence of that little laugh, so delicate, so light."
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
The quote from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, illustrates the limitations in the human sense of sight. Only by adding sound to our visual perception of a person — or a place, an event, or indeed a city — can a full portrait be obtained. The laugh of M. de Charlus also has social implications; it is a mark of his aristocratic lineage, a culturally embedded sound adding to his social standing, to be admired or scorned by listeners and readers alike.
The question of how “to paint a complete portrait” is central to the study of the senses in antiquity, a topic which has recently and quite rapidly become en vogue in the classical fields:
• How do we, in the words of Proust, “add a phonetic imitation to our verbal descriptions” of life in the Roman city?
• How do we move beyond depictions of maps, plans and 3D-models fully to grasp how the city of the empire was perceived, not only through sight but also through sound and by way of smell and touch?
• How did the Romans themselves express their urban sensory experiences in their written testimonies?
• What can a deepened understanding of the sensual perceptions of the city in Roman times — the visual, audial, olfactory, tactile and synaesthetic — tell not only about a single individual’s experience, but of Roman culture as such?
• Was there a specific Roman way of perceiving the urban environment, and in what ways were such sensory experiences dependent on the subject and in what ways on the object — the cityscape itself, with its buildings, streets and open areas?
• What rôle did the social and historical context play? and
• How do we approach these questions in a scientific mode that takes our research beyond intuition?
Ridley Scotts Gladiator från 2000 var den första episka storfilm med antikt tema som producerats ... more Ridley Scotts Gladiator från 2000 var den första episka storfilm med antikt tema som producerats på 35 år. Filmen blev en succé: den slog publikrekord, möttes av positiva recensioner och vann fem Oscars. Film- och TV-industrin såg ny potential i avdankade antika teman och levererade i rask följd ett antal storproduktioner som utspelas i Hellas och Rom. Men också utanför biosalongerna gjorde filmen avtryck, emellanåt benämnd "Gladiatoreffekten". En ny generation studenter strömmade till universitetens antikenkurser, och inte minst viktigt, studiet av antiken på film tog fart. Ett stort antal böcker har sedan år 2000 utkommit som behandlar både specifika filmer och antikfilmen som genre. Vetenskapliga tidskrifter riktas åt studiet av antiken på film, och varje konferens med självaktning inkluderar numera en eller flera paneler som behandlar antiken på film och TV. Till en början rörde den vetenskapliga debatten i stor utsträckning frågor om filmens historicitet. Många upprörda röster kritiserade antikfilmens sätt att handskas med fakta, och den akademiska konsult som anlitats till Gladiator lät stryka sitt namn från eftertexten i protest. Senare studier har i stort lämnat frågan om historicitet och istället ägnat sig åt tolkning av antikfilmen som samtidsfenomen. Vilka temata berörs? Varför är de viktiga just nu? Vad säger de om vår syn på antiken och på vår egen tid? Jag tänker i denna text diskutera olika aspekter av "Gladiatoreffekten" inom film och akademi. En fundering rör också det framtida studiet. De senaste åren har sett en rad film- och TV-produktioner som närmast sågats av både filmkritiker och antikvetare (t.ex. Pompeii, 300: Rise of an Empire). Diskussionen om historicitet har blossat upp på nytt. Sedan Gladiator utkom 2000 har de vetenskapliga diskussionerna närts av och förts med särskilt fokus på filmer och TV-serier av god kvalitet (såsom Gladiator, Troja, Rome). Vad innebär den nya storproduktioner av "Bfilmer" för studiet av antiken på film?
The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, ... more The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, but nor were they formal processions. They did, however, often share several traits with the ceremonial pompae; many included a larger number of participants, had an ordered sequence and strived at specific ends, they moved through the city centre, took use of symbols and insignia, and they were certainly watched, noted and discussed. This paper analyses aristocratic escorted movements, here labelled ‘power walks’, as movements set between processions and promenades, the formal and the informal, ceremony and everyday life, social distance and physical presence. Besides the central person of the aristocrat himself, the paper looks at his escort and the spectators, and also at the interplay between the various participants and the Roman cityscape.
Svenska Dagbladet, 26 maj 2015
Svenska Dagbladet, Under strecket, 21 maj 2015
This article examines how the victors in late Republican Rome expressed and celebrated military s... more This article examines how the victors in late Republican Rome expressed and celebrated military success in
civil war. It is argued that the Senate and the victorious generals turned to the traditional triumph as a means to embrace civil war victories within an accepted frame of external conquest. It is further argued that the triumphal procession, in its capacity as a well-established spectacle performed as a role-playing between Roman victors and foreign losers, proved an inadequate means to give voice to Romans conquering other Romans. Novel forms of expressions were hence exploited: the memorial and the calendar. The memorial was alien to the Roman culture and did not succeed in winning acclaim. The calendar proved a more effective means. Both Caesar and Octavian were able to use the fasti anni as a medium to articulate their success in civil war, commemorating even their victories at Pharsalus and Philippi.
Battles and battlefield strategies have long held a prime place of interest among Roman scholars.... more Battles and battlefield strategies have long held a prime place of
interest among Roman scholars. In recent years, attention has
also turned to martial rituals, war memorials and the sense of
oneness as shaped by joint experiences of war. These current
discussions focus almost without exception on Roman victories.
In contrast, this paper aims at exploring aspects of defeat, asking how battlefield failures were received, remembered and
how they contributed to the creation of identities in ancient
Rome. The basic questions are these. How did Rome handle her
own defeats? Which losses were forgotten and which were remembered? How were defeats committed to memory (or consigned to oblivion)—what rituals, monuments and narratives
were employed? This paper will argue that, while contemporary
battle losses must have triggered enormous sorrow and fear,
there are very few traces of former defeats visible in Roman
ceremony and cityscape. Only a very limited set of failures
from the distant past were embraced as specific events by the
communal Roman memory. Most defeats were instead taken up by the writers of the Early Empire as preludes to later victories and were thus absorbed into the larger picture of constant Roman success.
Without doubt, veni vidi vici is one of the most famous quotations from Antiquity. It is well kno... more Without doubt, veni vidi vici is one of the most famous quotations from Antiquity. It is well known that it was Julius Caesar who coined the renowned expression. Less frequently discussed is the fact that ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ was announced as written text. According to Suetonius, Caesar paraded a placard displaying the words veni vidi vici in his triumph held over Pontus in 46 b.c. (Suet. Iul. 37.2): Pontico triumpho inter pompae fercula trium verborum praetulit titulum VENI VIDI VICI non acta belli significantem sicut ceteris, sed celeriter confecti notam.In his Pontic triumph he exhibited among the biers of the procession a placard (titulus) with three words VENI VIDI VICI, not to show the deeds performed in the war, as in the others, but to mark out how fast the war had been concluded....
Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman …, Jan 1, 2009
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral is generall... more “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral is generally considered to be a rhetorical masterpiece, not least so due to the influence of Shakespeare (Julius Caesar Act III, Scene II). Ancient sources confirm that the speech made a profound impact on the audience and contributed to turning Rome against the assassins (Cic. Phil. 2.90–1, Att. 14.10.1; Nic. Dam. 17; App. BCiv. 2.143–7, 3.2). In this paper, I will emphasize that far from using mere words, Antony delivered a full-blown spectacle that included visual devices, acting and hymns. Antony, I will argue, turned the funeral into a jointly performed ritual, which triggered emotions of such political force as to determine the course of events after the Ides. I will further show that the funeral staged the murder itself, as it had happened, before the eyes of the people. Through the rhetorical effect of enargeia, I argue, the funeral produced a comprehensible story of the events on the Ides of March, which came to influence how Rome imagined and wrote about the murder.
Many traditional historical studies are more concerned with the causes and effects of the murder than the funeral display. Gelzer’s account (1968) ends with Caesar’s death. Syme (2002, 98) notes Antony’s oration almost in passing, calls the speech ‘brief and moderate’ and adds that ‘the audience was inflammable’. Lintott (2009) makes no mention of the funeral, and Woolf (2007, 39–40) writes briefly that Antony took the opportunity to read out Caesar’s will. In the wake of the ‘performative turn’, scholars are more willing to acknowledge the funeral as a significant event (Wiseman 2009, 227–34; Strauss 2015, 171–7). Most importantly, Sumi (2005, 97–122) presents a detailed survey of the funeral’s components, as part of his study on spectacle and power. Still, to this date, most accounts of the funeral are rather descriptive and present the evidence from the sources with little in-depth analysis of the contents and effects of the performance.
My paper has two aims. One is to emphasize the persuasive effects of Antony’s performance by placing it in a context of Roman spectacles, the other to argue that the funeral set the murder itself on stage and contributed to shaping views of what had occurred at the Senate’s meeting.
I intend to analyze the funeral as a Roman performance set in a long tradition of visual spectacles (funerals, triumphs, fabulae pretextae). I aim to show that the funeral intentionally played on people’s emotions by incorporating them as active partakers in the ritual itself (Bell, Ahmed). Through speeches, hymns, voices, gestures, tears and props (Appian BCiv 2.101), Antony’s performance created a strong communal sense of empathy for Caesar that turned Rome against the assassins. In particular, I will stress the importance of the inclusion of Caesar’s dead body in the spectacle, and argue that by way of his physical corpse, the large image of his stabbed body and through his re-enacted voice, Caesar himself had a central role in the play.
I aim further to show that the funeral staged not only the dead dictator, but also the very way in which he had been killed. Various rumours of what had really happened at the Senate’s meeting were circulating after Caesar’s death, and the funeral provided a first fully constructed version, which highly influenced how people were to imagine the event. Again, Caesar’s body played a central role. By pointing out the blood and the scars, Antony was able to transmit a version of the murder that exposed it as an cowardly ambush aimed at an innocent victim who was likewise the saviour and father of the assassins. At the funeral, the people of Rome saw the murder as it had happened before their own eyes (enargeia). Antony’s performance established a story in which the conspirators were morally guilty rather than liberators of the res publica.
WORKS CITED
Ahmed, S. (2004, 2014) The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh.
Bell, C. (1992) Ritual theory, ritual practice. Oxford.
Gelzer, M. (1968). Caesar. Politician and statesman. Cambridge, Mass.
Lintott, A.W. (2009) “The assassination.” In Griffin, M., ed., A companion to Julius Caesar, 72–82. Malden, MA.
Strauss, B. (2015) The death of Caesar. New York.
Sumi, G. (2005) Ceremony and power. Performing politics in Rome between Republic and Empire. Ann Arbor.
Syme, R. (1939, 2002) The Roman revolution. Oxford.
Wiseman, T.P. (2009) Remembering the Roman people: Essays on late Republican politics and literature. Oxford.
Wolf, G. (2007) Et tu, Brute? A short history of political murder. Cambridge, Mass.
This paper sets out to explore Roman memories of military defeat with particular focus on events ... more This paper sets out to explore Roman memories of military defeat with particular focus on events that suggest political resistance and social conflict.
Roman history as it is presented in our sources suggests very little resistance to communal views. But military defeats are traumatic and emotional events that might have triggered and shaped alternative interpretations. One such example occurred in the aftermath of Cannae, when the Senate rejected the Roman war prisoners offered by Hannibal. Sources describe the event as very emotional, with the prisoners and their families begging for mercy and offering to pay the ransom. The event thus displays a conflict of interest between the people, who wanted their relatives back home, and the Senate, who firmly refused. We might suspect that people's experience of the event did create popular, or subjugated, memories, which were not taken up by the communal Roman version of the event, which boasted firmness and heroic resistance.
Later examples might be found in Tacitus' story of how Germanicus took a detour to bury the fallen in the Teutoburger forest in defiance to Tiberius, and his similar depiction of how Cn Domitius Corbulo, in the reign of Nero, had part of his army to march to the location of Lucius Caesennius Paetus' earlier defeat to bury the place. Both these instances paint the act of burying the defeated as critique of empire. They provide small signs of an alternative view, a resistance against the traditional Roman condemnation of the defeated. As in the example of Cannae, these stories underline the emotional force and political conflict that defeat might trigger. But whereas the memory of Cannae turned into a commemoration of strong communal consensus, Tacitus' narratives chose to remember the individual heroes who acted against the will of the men in power. In this paper, these different examples of commemoration will be discussed as a reflection of the change in political systems, from Republic to Empire.
"Describing defeat: Roman explanations of Republican military failure Ancient Rome was crowded... more "Describing defeat: Roman explanations of Republican military failure
Ancient Rome was crowded with monuments that celebrated victory in war. Memories of defeat, on the other hand, were almost non-existent. Anyone who walked through the city would have made innumerable encounters with success but met with few notions of failure. At the same time, ancient literature abounds in lengthy stories of Roman defeats. The pugna Cannensis takes up as much space in Livy as the victory at Zama.
In this paper, I will reflect on why Roman defeats were acknowledged in literature but suppressed in the monumental landscape. Above all, I will focus on how the ancient authors described and explained the Roman Republican military setbacks. Nathan Rosenstein has argued that defeated generals (imperatores victi) were given only very limited blame for the failures, but that Rome instead held her gods and soldiers responsible. The sources do not support such an interpretation. Generals were often criticized; their greed for glory and lack of patience are regular components in the literary accounts. Other standard explanations were also employed. Authors often characterize the enemy as treacherous, and ambush and deceit were frequently given as reasons of defeat. In many accounts, Nature itself plays a role. The wild and foreign landscape supported the adversaries by luring the Roman army into an unknown and difficult terrain.
I shall discuss the nature and function of the recurrent explanations of defeat in ancient literature – the overambitious general, the deceitful enemy, the untamed nature. Why were these particular excuses so frequently emphasized? What do they tell of the Roman way of handling reverses? What role did they play in shaping Roman identity and history?
Ida Östenberg
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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"The Roman habit known as damnatio memoriae is usually described as a measure aiming to erase the... more "The Roman habit known as damnatio memoriae is usually described as a measure aiming to erase the memory of a person deemed to be an enemy of the state. This definition is not untrue. Memories in ancient Rome were preserved very effectively through inscriptions and images. The erasure of inscribed names, as also the destruction of portraits, did in a way remove traces of the unwanted person from the monumental cityscape.
However, it will be argued in this paper that damnatio memoriae not only erased but also memorised the targeted individual. Roman inscriptions kept their erased names. At times, the deleted name was still legible, at others, the very cutting, often conspicuously visible, preserved the memory of the erased, and also of the very act of removal. For example, everybody who gazed at the arch of Septimius Severus would have noticed first and foremost the erased name of Geta. The material of the arch did not allow for oblivion, but preserved both the name and the process of erasure. Damnatio memoriae was inscribed into the stone.
In this paper, I intend to look further into the materiality of damnatio memoriae by examining how erased inscriptions both removed and perpetuated Roman names. I will also discuss the issue of intent. Was oblivion the aim of the erased texts? I will focus principally on inscriptions, but to be able to discuss the cultural significance of damnatio memoriae, I will also include the parallel phenomenon of re-cutting and destruction of portraits in the analysis."
"Brothers in arms: representing victory and defeat in the civil wars of the late Roman Republic ... more "Brothers in arms: representing victory and defeat in the civil wars of the late Roman Republic
Ida Östenberg, University of Gothenburg
This paper aims to discuss Rome's civil wars in the light of her long bellic history and martial traditions. As is well known, war permeated all aspects of Roman culture and constituted the core of Roman civilisation. Tradition and rituals set war in a continuous process and understandable form that explained conflict and placed confrontation and violence in a larger frame. Hence, for example, success was always announced by way of certain ritual proceedings, the victor entered the city by a specific route in a time-honoured triumph, and victorious wars were represented in text and image according to well-establish and easily comprehended patterns. Defeats too, according to my present work, were noted and remembered along recurrent standard lines.
Roman representation of victory and defeat in war was based on a traditional historic and dramaturgic notion of external wars, in which Rome fought against outer enemies. Us and them were the basic entities that structured the stories from the battlefields. Whether Rome won or lost, the idea of us, as represented in text and image, created a strong sense of participation, identity and notion of common values. All this changed with the civil wars of the late Republic.
Battles in civil war resulted in Roman victory alongside Roman defeat. How did Rome handle this novel and very different construction of us and them? How did she choose to represent and remember the single battles of these domestic conflicts? How was victory and defeat in civil war described and depicted? In this paper, I will compare Roman traditional ways of expressing victories and explaining defeat to parallel descriptions of civil war. Special attention will be given terminology in the literary texts and inscriptions. The main aim is to be able to discuss Roman textual and visual strategies at a time of change, and the central question is this: Did Rome take refuge in her customary schemes of representing war at this time of confusion and turmoil, or did civil war rather force Rome to develop novel kinds of verbal and visual expressions in order to better articulate and understand this very different reality?"
The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocrats were daily escorted by their clients to ... more The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocrats were daily escorted by their clients to work at the Forum, magistrates were led by lictors, men at risk were protected by body guards, candidates were at election times accompanied by nomenclatores (name-whisperers), high-classed men and women carried in litters by groups of bearers, popular leaders followed by gangs and returning generals were met and followed home by the people. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, nor were they formal processions. They did, however, often share several traits with the ceremonial pompae; many included a larger number of participants, had an ordered sequence and strived at specific ends, they moved through the city centre, took use of symbols and insignia, and they were certainly watched, noted and discussed.
In this paper, I aim to discuss aristocratic escorted movements, here entitled ‘power walks’, as movements between processions and promenades, the formal and the informal, ceremony and everyday life, social distance and physical presence. Besides the central person of the aristocrat himself, my paper looks at his followers and the participating spectators, as also at the interplay between these people and groups. Terms in focus are: performance, movement, space, monuments, power, character and communication. Aristocratic power walks will be discussed as both reflecting and shaping communal ideas about Rome and as forming part of the continuous struggle for political powers and cultural capital between her leaders.
This contribution discusses the form and contents of Antony’s renowned speech at Caesar’s funeral... more This contribution discusses the form and contents of Antony’s renowned speech at Caesar’s funeral as set in its full context. Antony spiced his speech with strong sentiments and with the display of Caesar’s blooded mantle. In Appian’s description, there was also a wax image of the murdered body, which, as it was turned around, showed all dagger marks to the people. In this paper, words, gestures, emotions and images will be read together as a manifest spectacle that succeeded in turning the people of Rome against the assassins. Particular attention will be given the mantle and the wax representation of Caesar’s body, which, it will be argued, highly contributed to set the act of murder in front of the eyes of the spectators. By displaying the stabs given body and face, the image uncovered the massiveness of the assault. Together with Antony’s insistence on the vow earlier given by his murderers to protect Caesar with their lives, the blood-stained vestment and the image of the stabbed body communicated a strong sense of betrayal to the audience. The paper hence pays particular attention to the importance of visual effects and the power of emotions in Roman performance and public space.
The title pater patriae seems intimately connected to the honours held by Roman Emperors. Already... more The title pater patriae seems intimately connected to the honours held by Roman Emperors. Already in the Republican period, however, a few leading citizens were named parens patriae as a reward for having saved the Roman people from utmost danger. Written sources link the title with famed names such as Camillus, Fabius Maximus Cunctator, Marius and Sulla. The most pronounced examples from the Republican age appear at its very end: Cicero and Caesar. As it seems, only these two were officially bestowed with the title “Father of the Fatherland” by way of a senatus consultum.
Cicero received the title in 63 BC after his handling of the Catilina affair. As might be expected, he was vey proud of the honour and frequently boasted both fatherly mildness and firmness towards the Roman people. Caesar was named Parens Patriae in 45 BC, also by decree of the Senate. His title became a central issue especially after his murder. The plebs erected a monument with the inscription “To the Father of the Fatherland”, and the Senate decided to call the Ides of March “the day of the Parricidium”. Caesar’s followers also issued a number of coins picturing Caesar with the legend Parens Patriae.
Cicero and Caesar were the two men of the Republic given the official title “Father” by the Senate, and both were killed by political motives. In this paper, I aim to discuss the deaths of Cicero and Caesar in terms of Roman fatherhood and patricide. The use and function, legal and symbolic, of family terminology in Roman politics will receive attention. In particular, the paper will discuss relations, rights and responsibility between fathers and children. The central question dwells around the deaths of Cicero and Caesar: How did Rome deal with having killed their own Fathers?
Battles and battlefield strategies have long held a prime place of interest among Roman scholars.... more Battles and battlefield strategies have long held a prime place of interest among Roman scholars. In recent years, attention has also turned to martial rituals, war memorials and sense of oneness as shaped from joint experiences of war. These current discussions focus almost without exception on Roman victories. In contrast, this paper aims at exploring aspects of defeat, asking how battlefield failures were received, remembered and how they contributed to creating identities in ancient Rome. The basic questions are: How did Rome handle her own defeats? Which losses were forgotten and which were remembered? How were defeats memorised (or consigned to oblivion) – what rituals, monuments and narratives were employed? The paper will argue that while contemporary battle losses must certainly have triggered enormous sorrow and fear, there are very little traces of former defeats visible in Rome ceremony and cityscape. Only a very limited set of failures from the distant past were embraced as specific events by the communal Roman memory. Most defeats were instead taken up by the writers of early Empire as preludes to later victories and were thus absorbed into the larger picture of constant Roman success.
In this paper, I will focus on changes in the triumphal ritual that Augustus implemented in 19 BC... more In this paper, I will focus on changes in the triumphal ritual that Augustus implemented in 19 BC. At his return to Rome in this year, the emperor declined a triumphal procession and instead chose to manifest his success by celebrating specifically the recovery of the Parthian standards. Such a pronounced celebration of signa recepta is something quite new in the Roman triumphal history, and though in general terms transmitting a message of a victorious campaign, the symbolic meaning of the recovered standards differed quite substantially from spoils normally carried in triumph. In this paper I will discuss Augustus’ emphatic manifestation of the signa recepta as a deliberate measure to stress his role as world leader rather than world conqueror. Augustus’ preference to celebrate the signa recepta instead of a traditional triumph also signalled the end of Republican conquests and triumphs, a statement visually manifested in his edition of the Fasti triumphales that ends in the same year, 19 BC.
The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in th... more The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in the ancient city of Rome, exploring the interaction between people and monuments. Representing a novel approach to the Roman cityscape and culture, and reflecting the shift away from the traditional study of single monuments into broader analyses of context and space, the volume reveals both how movement adds to our understanding of ancient society, and how the movement of people and goods shaped urban development.
The Arch of Titus. From Jerusalem to Rome – and Back, ed. Steven Fine, p. 33-41, 2021
Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien Årsbok, 2019
, in The Materiality of Text - Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity, eds. Ivana Petrovic, Andrey Petrovic, Edmund Thomas, Brill, Leiden 2018., 2018
This article targets erased Roman inscriptions in terms of materiality. It argues that the physic... more This article targets erased Roman inscriptions in terms of materiality. It argues that the physical material and form of inscriptions played a crucial part in the phenomenon commonly termed damnatio memoriae. Materiality is further applied as a theoretical concept. Hence, the paper discusses changed, attacked, and erased inscriptions as agents that transmitted novel messages of the past and present to their viewers. It argues that these messages often differed from the original purpose of the erasures.
Descriptions of Roman military failure in the ancient sources employ a set of standard explanatio... more Descriptions of Roman military failure in the ancient sources employ a set of standard explanations for defeat. The general's greed for glory and lack of patience is one, the enemy's use of ambush and deceit another. In many accounts, Nature itself also plays a central role. Writers often describe how the Romans were caught into a narrow pass (Caudium, Lake Trasimene and Teutoburg) and attacked. Desert plains caused thirst and exhaustion. Mist and dust were recurrent elements that helped in defeating Rome, as were rain, snow, storm (at sea), sun (hindered sight) and marshes. Nature itself, often in alliance with the enemy at place, played against Rome. Rivers, mountains and forests displayed in the triumphs were not just there for the embellishment, but actual enemy prisoners captured and tamed by Roman civilisation. This article explores the role of the wild Nature as a constant antipole to civilised Rome. It analyses how the enemy landscape is portrayed in the defeat narratives, by what means Nature manages to take down the Roman forces, and how it is, in the end, conquered, tamed and rearranged to work for, instead of against, the Roman military cause.
The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome deals with movement in publ... more The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome deals with movement in public space in the city of Rome. This topic represents a novel approach to the Roman cityscape that pays attention to movement as interaction between people and monuments. Movements give form to the cityscape by tying together areas and monuments through, for example, commercial activities, power displays and individual strolls. The city, on the other hand, shapes movements, by way of its topographical settings and built environment.