Augustan Reconstruction and Roman Memory (original) (raw)

Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity (Karl Galinsky ed.), 2016

Abstract

The building projects of the emperor Augustus have long been the subject of both popular fascination and scholarly attention, and rightly so. From the time of his return to Rome following his triumph over Mark Antony until the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus, scarcely a year passed without the construction or reconstruction of a significant monument. These projects affected virtually every part of the city, from the Palatine and Capitoline hills in the heart of the city to the Aventine on the south and the Campus Martius on the north. Augustus clearly took pride in his accomplishments, as evidenced not so much by the (possibly apocryphal) story of claiming to find Rome a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble, but by his own words: the emperor devoted three full sections of the Res Gestae, his own accounting of his accomplishments, to his building efforts in the city, including his oft-cited claim that “consul for the sixth time I rebuilt eighty-two temples of the gods in the city by the authority of the senate, omitting nothing which ought to have been rebuilt at that time.” These building projects have often been studied, either individually or as part of a “program”, to shed light on various aspects of the Augustan era, and these studies have brought greater awareness of how art and other visual media can inform our understanding of a particular period. What has been overlooked, however, are the implications of the reconstruction program for how the Romans remembered their past. Focusing on the area of the Circus Flaminius in the southern Campus Martius, this paper reveals how these reconstructions dramatically reshaped Roman memory, helping to create a focus on the figure of the emperor as the central pillar of Roman identity.

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