This volume collects seven articles published by H. between 2001 and 2020 as well as an opening new chapter. Whoever follows the still lively debate about the nature of the Republican political order will want to revisit some of the author's thought-provoking contributions, and the volume also offers rewards for new readers in the field. Covering a broad spectrum of different aspects of Roman political life, in which the ensemble of the buildings, statues and other monuments created powerful associations, memoria is a defining topic of investigation in this volume. H.'s central concept, ‘political culture’, intricately linked to other disciplines such as social and cultural anthropology, is presented as a paradigm that opens up a new look at the symbolic dimensions of politics. Rome and its literature, social and political history, art, architecture and – less extensively – religion are addressed through the lens of theoretical concepts by, for example, C. Geertz, P. Bourdieu and P. Nora, regularly cited throughout, without neglecting classical scholarship and empirical research.
Chapter 1, ‘The Politics of Elitism’, is an overview of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. H. looks at the controversy in the 1980s, when the constitutional and factionalist ‘old orthodoxy’ was called into question, especially by F. Millar's interpretation of the libera res publica. H. also briefly points to significant theoretical and methodological advances that prepared the ground for this debate (e.g. by C. Meier). H. then presents his refined ‘elitist view’, showing the Roman Republic as having a unique political culture, listing a host of fascinating topics of research, such as the Roman aristocratic value system; competition in war and politics; the symbolic language of public meetings, ceremonies, monuments, architecture and urban topography. This chapter is an updated synthesis of some of H.'s previous works, especially Rekonstruktionen einer Republik (2004, Eng. transl. 2010).
Chapter 2, ‘Fact(ions) of Fictions?’, is a complement to the previous chapter, featuring a review article on F. Münzer's Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien (1920, Eng. transl. 1999), published in 2001. It is an outstanding historiographical analysis of the success of Münzer's model and factionalist assumptions on, for example, R. Syme, W. Schur, H.H. Scullard, M. Gelzer, G. De Sanctis and E. Badian, as well as its criticism and abandonment arising from the confrontation of the model with the development of systematic studies and empirical research.
The following chapters offer case studies in which H.'s interpretative model is applied to the Middle and Late Roman Republic. Politics becomes a space of negotiation and communication built by a repertoire of ceremonies and ways of communication between different actors, carried out through performative practices, images and monuments in a hierarchical context that was understood by all participants.
Chapter 3, ‘The Roman Republic as Theatre of Power’, published in 2011, explores the symbolic role of the consulship within Republican Rome and its protagonism in civic rituals and spectacles, with particular emphasis on the rituals of the beginning of the consular year and the profectio. In this combined theoretical reasoning and empirical research, an essential notion is ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu). Rome is presented as a theatrical landscape of memory in which discourses, monuments and buildings create a hierarchical and performative symbolism of power.
Chapter 4, ‘Self-Serving Sermons’, also published in 2011, addresses the importance of excellence in oratory for a political career. Based on S. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning (p. 96), H. distinguishes the strategy of the homo nouus in the framework of a meritocratic system, from the strategy of the nobilis, favouring the accumulation of family merits within the competitive structure of elite assessment and ranking. This chapter presents well-documented cases of speakers directly addressing different audiences in, for example, the laudationes at funerals and the contiones, or indirectly, as in epitaphs, in an asymmetrical mode. On the strength of this ‘self-advertising’, as H. calls it (p. 74), the speaker creates consensus within an ‘imagined community’ sharing the same code of values, including submission to power relations, hierarchies and auctoritas.
Chapter 5, ‘The Self-Fashioning of the New Elite’, published in 2020, continues the study of self-fashioning in the Roman aristocracy and its ‘meritocratic code of behaviour’ (p. 113), addressing the use of war spoils in this socio-political context of competition and consensus. H. expands and reinforces his point on the meritocratic ideology of the Roman elite created and expressed in monuments and memory, based on specific cases such as manubial temples, divine and human statues and other works of art, whose forms, genres and location interact with each other, with previous monuments and with exempla in a network that H. calls ‘intermediality’.
In Chapter 6, ‘History and Collective Memory in the Middle Republic’, published in 2006, H. analyses a range of Republican experiences from the assemblies to the triumph, and the multi-layered messages such events contained. H. delineates the links between Roman memory and its ‘monu-mentality’ (T. Hölscher), considering topics such as the urban space and the world of images in stone, exploring the nexus between monuments and rituals, images and texts, arguing that they formed an intrinsic part of Rome as a ‘cityscape of memoria’ (p. 122).
Chapter 7, ‘In the Web of (Hi-)Stories’ published in 2016, focuses on the statue of M. Tremulus. H. speaks of memoria on two levels: first- and second-order memoria, developing a picture of Rome's ‘imagined community’. This is a well-documented and powerfully argued chapter in which memoria does not stand still but works in an ongoing recontextualisation of what H. calls ‘(hi)story’, including the creation of genealogies in the statues’ tituli. H. then turns to a locus classicus of civic memory. Tracing the ‘inter-signification’ of the equus Tremuli and his deeds from a brief quotation in Cicero's Phil. 6, to the different branches of the Marcii and ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm), H. demonstrates the complex and evolving interplay between place, monument, ritual and text.
In the last chapter, ‘Memoria by Multiplication’, published in 2018, H. reads monuments related to the Cornelii Scipiones in the second and first century bce as constructing a web of intersignification in equestrian statues and other artworks, places, narratives and inscriptions in the city, spreading their monumental presence, which supports claims to power and authority, and also instilling and compelling a competitive ethos. Thus power, conceived as multidimensional, is understood as communication in different media.
It can be argued that it is somewhat reductive to link Roman monumentalisation almost exclusively to aristocratic competition, as it derives from multiple processes including the control of the pontiffs, the decision of the senate and the validation of the comitia; in addition, little attention is given to the religious expression of the consensus (or dissent). Even so, H.'s argument is sound and illuminating. As a whole, the book is deeply grounded in ancient sources, and an extensive (updated) bibliography of 49 pages cites works in German, French, English, Italian and Spanish, achieving a good level of fruitful international debate, as H. comments in the preface, criticising the ‘arbitrary selectivity combined with systematic ignorance of other scholars' efforts’ in classical scholarship (pp. 9–10). The articles have been updated, with slight changes to avoid repetition, but in several passages the text jumps back and forth between topics, while the introduction of paragraph headings in the articles increases their clarity. The footnotes are instructive, provide plenty of information and references, deserving thorough study, and the indexes are well edited and useful, reflecting H.'s coherence and scrupulous attention to detail. Above all, the articles are grouped so as to be in dialogue with one another in such a way that the overall project of this refined collection is laudable, offering an in-depth study of the political culture of the Roman Republic.
