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Damnatio memoriae

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Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning "damnation of memory", in the sense of removed from the remembrance. It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate upon traitors or others who brought discredit to the Roman State.

Overview

Etymology

The sense of the expression damnatio memoriae and of the sanction is to cancel every trace of the person from the life of Rome, as if he had never existed, in order to preserve the honour of the Urbs; in a city that stressed the social appearance, respectability and the pride of being a civis romanus as a fundamental requirement of the citizen, it was perhaps the most severe punishment.

Practice

In Ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of Roman elites and Emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later Emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have their property seized, their names erased and their statues reworked. Because there is an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues anyway, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when damnatio memoriae actually took place.

The practice of damnatio memoriae was rarely, if ever, an official practice. Any truly effective damnatio memoriae would not be noticeable to later historians, since by definition, it would entail the complete and total erasure of the individual in question from the historical record. However, since all political figures have allies as well as enemies, it was difficult to implement the practice completely. For instance, the Senate wanted to condemn the memory of Caligula, but Claudius prevented this. Nero was declared an enemy of the state by the Senate, but then given an enormous funeral honoring him after his death by Vitellius. While statues of some Emperors were destroyed or reworked after their death, others were erected. Historians sometimes use the phrase de facto damnatio memoriae when the condemnation is not official. Among those who did suffer damnatio memoriae were Sejanus, who had conspired against emperor Tiberius in 31, and later Livilla, who was revealed to be his accomplice. The only emperor that is known to have officially received a damnatio memoriae was Domitian.

Similar practices in other societies

A photograph of Stalin with Soviet commissar Nikolai Yezhov was retouched after Yezhov fell from favor and was executed in 1940.

  • The cartouches of the heretical 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten were mutilated by his successors. Earlier in that same dynasty, Thutmose III carried out a similar attack on his stepmother Hatshepsut late in his sole reign. However, only engravings and statuary of her as a crowned king of Egypt were attacked. Anything depicting her as a queen was left unharmed (and the campaign ended after his son by a secondary queen was crowned co-regent), so this was not strictly speaking damnatio memoriae. There is also some debate whether this defacement was Thutmose's doing at all, since most of the damage is estimated to have happened some 47 years into this reign.
  • Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus to become famous. The Ephesus leaders decided that his name should never be repeated again, under pain of death.
  • Marino Faliero, fifty-fifth Doge of Venice, was condemned to damnatio memoriae after a failed coup d'état.
  • More modern examples of damnatio memoriae in actual practice was the removal of portraits, books, doctoring people out of pictures, and any other traces of Josef Stalin's opponents during the Great Purge. In an ironic twist of fate, Stalin himself was edited out of some propaganda films when Nikita Khruschev became the leader of The Soviet Union, and the city he named for himself (Stalingrad) received a new name.
  • A famous example of the concept of damnatio memoriae in modern usage is the "vaporization" of "unpersons" in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in the quote "He did not exist; he never existed".
  • In Lois Lowry's novel The Giver, the main society of the story has a ritual called the "Ceremony of Loss" where a person who has died without being "released" has their name chanted all day in an ever-decreasing volume until the chanting finally stops and the deceased is removed from memory.

See also

Notes

External links



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Last updated on Friday March 07, 2008 at 16:43:51 PST (GMT -0800)
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