American Academy in Rome - Role Models Abstract

History and Memory in the Construction of Identity in Early Second-Century Rome

Richard Alston

In the early second century, Titinius Capito is attested as paying particular reverence to busts of Brutus and Cassius. Such a display of Republican values is remarkable given Capito's distinguished record of service in the imperial household. The tensions between Republican ideology and the Imperial present in the construction of elite male identity in the second century CE lie at the heart of this paper.

Identity can be conceptualised as an issue of location within a particular system. Instrumentalist views of the politics of national identity have associated the rise of nationalism with bourgeois desires to gain access to or monopolise the new sources of power in an industrialising state- education, bureaucracy, the 'professions'- to build a local ethnic establishment in competition with those of the hegemonic power. This is (largely) to omit a chronological dimension to the construction of identity or to treat that chronological dimension (so prominent in many of the discourses of nationalism) as 'mere' rhetoric, obscuring an economic-political agenda. I argue that identity should be mapped against axes which are contemporaneous (measuring an individual's place within a social system according to current political, economic, and social structures) and historical (measuring status against a perception of an equivalent person in past times). Tensions, psychological or political, are manifested when a particular individual or group has a self-perception at variance from an allotted location within that system. Thus, someone whose past equivalent was of high social status, but currently feels that he or she enjoys a lesser status may as unhappy as a person who feels that their social status is at variance with their intellectual accomplishments, social contribution, or whatever characteristic should determine their status.

Although most of the major conspiracies against the emperors are reported as ideologically neutral, the literature and politics of this period are marked by a profound crisis of identity as the elite adjusted to the political realities of monarchy. These men did not necessarily aspire to imperial power, nor work for a restoration of the Republic, but acted as Republicans, displaying the virtues of that age. History constructed a past against which the present could be judged, establishing a model to be re-enacted in the present. The weight of history was a formidable burden. Pliny and Tacitus offer us a way into this discourse, Tacitus critiquing Republican views as romanticising a lost age, while Pliny, almost obsessive about the judgements of fame, plays the 'long game', aware of the redundancy of Republicanism as a political system, but conscious that a place in history was assured for men of the Republican spirit of Cassius and Brutus, whose memory cannot be expunged by the tyranny of emperors. Pliny could aspire to be Cicero, a stance Tacitus expressly condemns. For Pliny and Tacitus, memory survives the political present, defeating tyrants who attempt to monumentalise their power and thereby control history. For Pliny, the triumph of Republicanism comes in the fama which ensures immortality. Tacitus is more practical. Both authors dramatise psychological and sociological tensions in Roman society.

Classics Department, Royal Holloway, University of London, EGHAM, Surrey, TW20 0EX.

r.alston@rhul.ac.uk