Current scholarship on élite munificence in the Roman Empire often sees architectural benefactions as being at least partially driven by the élite desire for personal commemoration. I use juristic opinions from the Digest and other textual evidence related to building gifts to argue that there was an ancient understanding of the physical and symbolic ephemerality of architectural benefactions. In contrast, I present legal and epigraphic evidence to argue that there was an explicit expectation for gifts of spectacles and monetary distributions to be lasting memorials for their donors, and that the perpetuation of identity was also a motivating factor in the euergetic choice of a spectacle.
