Erasing History?
The Roman Way to Memorialize a Painful Past
What do you do when a violent movement that threatened to destabilize the country has been neutralized, but triumphant statues of the rebellion’s heroes still stand as visible symbols of its pernicious ideology?
If you walked through New York’s Union Square on August 18, 2016, you may have seen a rare type of monument not entirely unfamiliar to certain periods of classical antiquity: a standing nude sculpture of a prominent politician. Admittedly, the paunchy representation of Donald Trump set up in five American cities by the anarchist collective INDECLINE was missing the ephebic musculature of a nude marble Hadrian, but that was because the statue’s purpose was not to celebrate, but to degrade and humiliate its subject. The statue, entitled “The Emperor Has No Balls,” was widely criticized by Trump opponents as well as supporters.
What many on the left found horrifying about the statue was that it seemed to condone the expression of intellectual opposition to a politician’s platform through the ridicule and shaming of his body. In a way, the statue was self-defeating, since its power derived from the same objectification and fat-shaming that had helped to make Trump objectionable in the first place. It was stooping to his level.
On the other hand, stooping to his level was also part of the point. The statue, after all, was a response to the dishearteningly long-lived public debate among candidates for the Republican presidential nomination over the size of Donald Trump’s hands and implicitly corresponding genitals. In March, everyone had watched in astonishment as Trump and Marco Rubio repeatedly discussed Trump’s bodily proportions on the campaign trail with the seriousness and vigor usually reserved for policy issues of real importance.
What was surprising about the statue, then, was that its offensive bathos wasn’t original, but was a feature of the political discourse to which it was responding. Obviously the nude statue was a nasty and vulgar lampoon; what was incredible was that nasty and vulgar lampoon had now become indistinguishable from the rhetoric of actual candidates for the Republican nomination to the presidency. As a bystander observing one of the statues succinctly put it: “It’s kind of juvenile, but so is he.”
If there’s any lesson in this otherwise unedifying episode in American political culture, it may be that the statue of a politician’s body is a site for working out deeper issues within the body politic. Almost a year later, on August 12, 2017, the rhetorical power of statues was made painfully clear in Charlottesville, VA, as a demonstrator at a white-supremacist rally protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee killed a counter-protestor and injured 19 others with his car. It was perhaps the first time in American history that racial hatred and division erupted into deadly violence over a classicizing bronze equestrian statue.
Of course, the statue was not important in itself, but because of what it represented. To those who called for the statue’s removal, the valorization of Confederate heroes and romanticizing of the Old South constituted a willful refusal to work towards healing America’s history of racial violence, a failure whose long-reaching consequences included the daily humiliation, imprisonment and murder of Black people. To the white supremacists who came out to defend it, the importance of the dispute was partly tactical. As white supremacists explained in interviews with Vice, the demonstration was a chance for a predominantly internet-based neo-Nazi movement, which had hitherto been largely associated with racist Pepe-the-frog memes, to show the world that it was capable of turning out in person in substantial numbers, heavily armed with real guns and willing to kill.
But the statue was ideologically important to both sides as well, with its apologists claiming that commemorative monuments are worth preserving as a part of the nation’s cultural patrimony. Five days after the Charlottesville attack, amid renewed calls for the removal of Confederate statues, President Trump tweeted: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”
What did he mean by that? Like a typical Trumpian contradiction, the statement seems at first to resist interpretation: history, which can’t be changed, is nevertheless being ripped apart. But on a closer look, he’s exploiting an ambiguity between “history” in the sense of “everything that has happened” and “history” in the sense of “the historical record” — the sum of media representations that provide access to and constitute our knowledge and interpretation of the past.
It’s a glib tactic, but a clever one: since the past is obviously immutable, conflating the two concepts seems to suggest that representations of the past should enjoy the same immunity. But the main argument seems to be that the removal of Confederate monuments, however we may feel about them, would impair our remembrance of the past, and therefore impede our learning from it. Later the same day, Maine governor Paul LePage also condemned the push to remove the statues, which he said would be no different from dismantling a monument to the victims of 9/11. He echoed Trump’s rhetoric: “How can future generations learn if we’re going to erase history? That’s disgusting…. They should study their history — they don’t even know the history of this country and they are trying to take monuments down. Listen, whether we like it or not, this is what our history is.”
In an age of panoptic documentation and limitless cloud storage, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that any event could be utterly erased from memory, or that the removal of statues could somehow limit the working of our historical consciousness. But more importantly, the claim fundamentally misunderstands how monuments work and what their removal achieves. “Erasing history”, to use LePage’s phrase, is a near-ubiquitous phenomenon, but it doesn’t do what Trump and LePage think it does.
In 31 CE, ancient Rome faced a situation in some ways comparable to that of the modern United States. The conspiracy of L. Aelius Sejanus, whom our sources depict as a power-hungry villain, had been put down, and Sejanus himself executed as an enemy of the state; but honorary statues of Sejanus still adorned the city.
What do you do when a violent movement that threatened to destabilize the country has been neutralized, but triumphant statues of the rebellion’s heroes still stand as visible symbols of its pernicious ideology, waiting to be reactivated by viewers and put to new uses? The answer was obvious: the statues were simply too dangerous. The Senate voted to formally condemn the memory of Sejanus by a process known as damnatio memoriae: his statues were to be removed, defaced or destroyed. His name would be obliterated from public inscriptions. It would be as if he had never existed.
Sejanus is only one example of a figure posthumously subjected to damnatio memoriae, “memory condemnation” — a frequently recurring method in ancient Rome of working through the legacy of a divisive and controversial past. As St. Jerome reports, the memory of oppressive or vicious leaders was controlled after their death by the mutilation or alteration of their statues.
“Whenever a tyrant is overthrown,” Jerome writes, “his images and statues are removed. They change the face and put on a new head to represent the person now in power, so that only the body remains the same.” Many such statues survive with altered or replaced faces; the disproportionately tiny head on a statue of Nerva, for example, makes obvious that it was originally a statue of the hated emperor Domitian, whose head was filed down after Domitian’s death to represent someone else.
Other statues were simply disfigured or destroyed. Pliny the Younger reports the positive exhilaration of doing violence to Domitian’s statues as surrogates for the body of the dead man himself. “It was a thrill to smash those smug faces to the ground,” he writes, “to attack them with swords and rage with axes, as if real blood and pain would follow the blows.” Statues of figures whose memory was condemned still survive with smashed-in faces due not to the ravages of time, but to deliberate mutilation.
Clearly these statues weren’t innocent: even if the people they represented now belonged to a petrified “history,” their images were still active, and the very sight of them stirred up violent hatred in their viewers. But the cases of Sejanus and Domitian raise the question of whether all this destruction really succeeded in—or ever even aimed at—erasing their memory. Obviously if an ancient person’s memory ever was successfully obliterated, later generations wouldn’t know about them. Yet the public condemnations of Sejanus and Domitian are well documented subjects. Writers were interested in them, and by preserving the memory of the statues’ destruction, they preserved the memory of the actors as well — and with it, the judgment that contemporary audiences had passed.
Altered and defaced monuments stand out just as visibly as any others. When Romans saw a statue with a smashed face, they knew whose face it had been, and were reminded why it had been made to look that way. The tiny head of a statue of “Nerva” speaks equally clearly: in many cases, only the face of a statue’s head is recarved with the hintermost hairstyle left original, a clear and intentional reminder of deliberate mutilation. And when a name had been scratched out from a public inscription, Roman viewers knew how to read between the lines—especially as the deleted name was often left faintly legible.
The gaps left by removed statues, too, are still visible testaments not only to why they were set up, but also to how and why they came down. LePage’s equation of Confederate monuments with a 9/11 memorial may have been unconvincing, but calling attention to the New York skyline was apt in one respect: it illustrates how conspicuous a well-known structure becomes through its absence once it’s no longer there.
Removing statues doesn’t constitute a refusal to acknowledge the past. Every senator who voted for Sejanus’ damnatio memoriae well knew that the total erasure of a prominent person’s legacy from the collective memory was impossible. People would still talk; historians and poets would (and thankfully did) still tell his story at length; coins he had minted and stamped with his name were still in circulation, only with the word “Sejanus” scratched out.
Of course, if one really wanted to forget Sejanus, those coins could have been melted down and re-minted. But the visibly deleted name preserved the memory not only of Sejanus, but also of his erasure. The effect, and often the point, of damnatio memoriae is not to make something unrememberable, but to demonstrate to contemporaries and to future generations what the group collectively repudiates. The presence of a Confederate memorial tells the world what we were; its removal tells the world what we’ve decided no longer to be.
Stephen Blair is a New York native and a PhD candidate at Princeton, looking into claims of continuity and difference in writing about the past.
