This conference proceedings taps into a wider contemporary scholarly interest in memory and the use of the past, and will therefore be of interest to many. It comprises 28 papers plus a summary of themes, and I can only discuss some here. While the papers share a number of links, the organisation does not help to elucidate them since papers with very different concerns are collected under general headings such as ‘past of early Greece’ or ‘religious settings’. Rather than replicating the programme of the conference (I. Edlund-Berry, p. 321), it would have been better to reorganise the papers for publication, either along the lines suggested in Edlund-Berry's summary or (differently) as identified below.

One recurring theme is the use made of the past and the mores maiorum in the creation of Roman identities. J.R. Brandt's paper looks at uses made of the Lupercalia and Lupercal by Julius Caesar and Augustus, while S.E. Cox considers the Flavian evocation of Republican values via the revival of older coin types. Her consideration of the importance of exempla also has resonances with A. Karivieri's discussion of the iconographic programme in the House of C. Iucundus at Pompeii, which combines myth and familial imagery to present the owner as a man of education, virtus and dignitas. The contested uses of tradition in the formation of Roman identity in Late Antiquity are discussed in B. Bureau's analysis of the poetry of Claudian and Prudentius, while D. Trout looks at how accounts of Christian martyrs and their memorialisation in the cityscape of Rome create a new sort of Roman identity. Conversely, I. Östenberg considers deliberate forgetting, in her analysis of Roman attitudes towards military defeats.

Another theme is the creation of civic identities through appropriation of symbols with a long history. C. Higbie's paper on the forging of Homeric pasts in the Roman period has an interesting discussion of authenticatory devices and bears relation to P. Scherrer's paper on civic foundation myths as well as H. Schörner's discussion of the revitalisation of interurban burial cult in the Roman period. N. Papalexandrou's discussion of Messenian tripods identifies this as deliberate appropriation for the creation of civic identity, while R. Taylor stresses the distinctiveness of local cult in the worship of the Sirens around the Bay of Naples. In many of these discussions the Roman period emerges as one in which traditions were created or revitalised, as is also clear in J. Rocca's analysis of the construction of Hippocrates as the father of medicine.

While two papers consider the creation of identity through opposition (C. Scheffer on representations of the Etruscans and E. Skwara on Plautus' Poenulus), elsewhere A. Rathje and M. Nielsen show how external traditions (Greek myth) can be combined with Etruscan history for familial self-representation in the François Tomb at Vulci and the tomb of the Purni near Chiusi (cf. Karivieri).

The majority of the papers are case studies, with little explicit discussion of methodology. C. Morgan's paper is the exception, posing the important methodological question of how to identify intent and distinguish between deliberately objectified memory and the material results of changing rituals. There are many interesting papers here, and much food for thought, though a theoretical introduction would have been a welcome addition.