Chapter 8 - The Message of the Medium

Summary

Uwe Walter explains how memoria in Rome was rooted in institutions vital to the res publica. Many of these were embedded in an oral context with highly suggestive settings – public speech, the theatre, festival performances, among others. Hence, they had only a limited capacity to store memories and preserve them over time. In similar fashion, buildings and monuments were subject to decay, and with their splendour their memorial force vanished. Historiography was of a different quality. Fabius Pictor attempted to create a unified memory of the res publica, distilled and synthesized from multiple individual and collective repositories of memory across a variety of media – and charged with the authority of the senatorial voice. Two concluding case studies illustrate how Walter envisions the relation between narrative synthesis and the production of meaning: one, the case of L. Marcius Septimus, lower commander during the Punic Wars; and the other the highly politicized episode of ten high-ranking prisoners released after the battle of Cannae by Hannibal on their word of honour that they would raise a ransom in Rome in exchange for their comrades. Each tradition integrated different elements of memory to generate a qualitatively new knowledge of past events.