Their Writing on Our Walls
A Humane Approach to Monuments
Recent protests against monuments such as those to John C. Calhoun at Yale, Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, Thomas Jefferson at William and Mary, and Cecil Rhodes in South Africa and at Oxford, have garnered national attention. As Dan-el Padilla Peralta noted in a recent Eidolon article, classicists should feel encouraged that dead men and their commemorative spaces are being hotly debated by young people.
Despite its apparent concern for history, the conversation has rarely strayed from a contemporary, and almost exclusively American and British, context — perhaps because we like to think of the present situation in America as unique. We trust that we are enlightened, fighting a battle of truth over ignorance, good over evil, equality over discrimination. We reexamine stories and figures of America’s past to expose elements that our ancestors whitewashed as part of a campaign to construct a more just and representative society.
The problem with this approach is that it makes monuments immediately accessible to and reflective of the concerns of contemporary culture. But monuments are more complex than that. On the one hand, they are historical artifacts of a bygone culture. They reflect the values of the people who put them there. Destroying artifacts is vandalism: nobody (nowadays) protests the Parthenon, even though it was built by, and celebrated, slaveowners. Nor do we (usually) burn books.
On the other hand, the dead people who erected these monuments — be they the Great Pyramid at Giza or the Jefferson Memorial — did not intend for them to go unnoticed or to be studied historically. They meant for them to speak meaningfully to present and future generations — to remind us that, no matter how different we have become, they came before us and have something to tell us if we only care to listen. But they’re dead now and we, the living, presumably get to decide whether we want to listen to what they have to say (or what we think they have to say), and what to do with the relics they left us.
Clearly, doing so has not proved easy.
This month at Stanford, Michael Penn of Mt. Holyoke College showcased some Syriac Christian manuscripts from the late Imperial period. The Syriac Church was a contentious one, ultimately splitting into several sects divided on minute points of doctrine. As doctrinal treatises were transmitted back and forth, the sections deemed heretical were effaced, written over, glossed, rewritten, and then even added back in. Early readers were torn between the need to learn from these objects as sources of information and the competing sense that the objects themselves were heretical and therefore needed to be expunged.
Let me suggest that a similar division exists when it comes to theorizing how to interpret monuments as objects: as a specific source of information, or as a privileged speech act demanding veneration. Princeton, Oxford, and other institutions have not defended the structures to Rhodes and Wilson on the grounds that they convey everything there is to know about these men, or that they silence other perspectives. They have claimed that these structures were intended to commemorate specific significant contributions.
On the flip side, detractors tend not to disagree that Rhodes or Wilson made said contributions. They have argued that these monuments should be toppled because they do not tell the whole story — all the bad things Jefferson, Rhodes, and Wilson did — and silence or downplay other potential narratives. They interpret the University as an instrument of power, and its speech acts as historically oppressive to minorities.
The most salient counterargument is that Princeton and Oxford have admitted to Wilson’s and Rhodes’ troubled legacies. But why should the University get to build a monument and dictate its interpretation? How far are we willing to validate authorial intent? Is oppression in the eye of the (historically oppressive) institution or the historically oppressed? The fact that Wilson and Rhodes were seen for decades as little less than saints indicates that, regardless of original intent, these monuments have participated in the exclusion of other, disenfranchised perspectives. They did not stimulate serious historical inquiry, but instead allowed complacency and platitudes to fester.
The problem is that history is multifaceted, while monuments are binary — they are either “up” or “down”. If they are meaningless and uncommunicative, there is no compelling reason to leave them intact except that they are historical artifacts; no reason to destroy them unless we couldn’t care less about artifacts. But if we believe they still communicate an important message, perhaps the intended message should be clarified. I think the way forward has been paved by museums like the Atlanta History Center, where “midway between complacency and destruction”, educational panels linking to encyclopedia articles and competing perspectives have been added to Confederate monuments. They spell out that what is intended is knowledge, not worship.
I have been thinking about the Parthenon, too. Throughout its more than two thousand-year existence, every new population of Athens surely faced the question of what to do with the big temple atop the Acropolis. Plausibly, during each crisis debates were held in which views similar to the ones we are voicing now were expressed. Some must have advocated the conservation of a historical relic; others must have thought it immoral or inappropriate to live near the residue of a fallen god or toppled culture. Hence, an archaic temple became a Classical masterpiece, a Christian church, a mosque, a heap of rubble, and a reconstruction of the Classical design.
At every turn, the moral difference between the present and past seems to have been the most cogent reason for toppling the old structure. But later reflection demonstrates that what looked like an ethical choice at the time was almost totally arbitrary. Would it have been wrong for Christians to leave the Parthenon intact, or Muslims a Christian church? No. The decision was pragmatic, one of taste masked as truth. Erasing the previous version had more to do with pretending a prior culture had never existed in the first place, and asserting the superiority and right to permanence of the present culture into the future.
Nor am I denying that there is an ethical dimension to monuments. But I am trying to put said ethical dimension in its proper place. There are celebratory monuments that would be heinous to condone — to Hitler, say, or the KKK. But concerning historical individuals who achieved recognizable good in the world but also made (rather glaring) mistakes, whether they should stand or fall is a matter of context and consensus, in the eyes of their builders and interpreters.
For that reason, I posit that it would be valuable to examine how other cultures have negotiated similar crises in their self-perceived road from shame to enlightenment. By straitjacketing the controversy in a current, national context, we have starved ourselves of a more nuanced view of what happens when monuments rise and fall as a reflection of cultural growth. After all, monuments inherently cross temporal and cultural boundaries, and the past is only growing. A thousand years from now it will be as heinous to desecrate the Jefferson Memorial as the Pyramids; five thousand years ago Egyptian dynasts tore down rivals’ obelisks.
Because this is a Classics journal, I specifically focus on what has been labeled as the Roman, and to some extent Greek, practice of damnatio memoriae, or “condemnation of memory”. This was not a term the Romans used, but rather one that was adopted later by scholars who noticed that the Romans regularly erased the features of condemned individuals in portraiture or statues. Here I highlight a few broader trends, which Harriet Flower masterfully details in her 2011 study The Art of Forgetting: Oblivion and Disgrace in Roman Political Culture.
The comparison initially reveals that successful instances of erasure cannot be studied. Only the victor’s version remains. A recent column in the Daily Princetonian argued that erasing Woodrow Wilson’s name would not remove him from history but as an object of veneration. We would not forget “who Woodrow Wilson was”. But ambivalence surrounding “who Wilson was” is precisely the cause of the controversy: the removal would constitute a historical intervention upon his legacy, and replace the Wilson once deemed fit to be plastered at Princeton with the Wilson who was not. This version of Wilson would then be transmitted to later generations.
The Greek evidence highlights that memory retributions were reserved almost exclusively for political offenders. Tyrants targeted rivals, and democratic regimes retaliated against tyrants. In his preface to the Cambridge Antigone, Mark Griffith notes that “the same political leader who was hailed one week as defender of the people and savior of the city, might the next be hounded into disgrace or exile as a would-be tyrant or traitor.”
The reservation of memory retribution for a strictly limited category of crimes mirrors its current use against historical figures who project modern watchwords such as racism or sexism. Toppling the monuments of men whose actions offend certain values could open the floodgates to a host of other ones. Would it be appropriate to demand the destruction of the names of oil tycoons (Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller) regardless of how much of their fortune they contributed to philanthropy and universities, because institutions built in their names and by their fortunes suggest a disregard for the dangers of climate change? The danger of allowing audiences, rather than institutions, to interpret monuments at will is that then the only monuments allowed to stand — in the present, at least— may be those that honor popular people: a dangerous precedent, perhaps, when the epitome of “popular” today seems to be Donald J. Trump.
Greek practices also highlight the variability of memory retribution tactics, which alternated between erasing the offender’s memory from the community entirely, and erecting signposts (paradeigmata) that permanently memorialized his/her crime(s). Negative markers like these could be compared with the Black Justice League’s recommendation that “the University not just remove his [Wilson’s] name but also take responsibility for its history by formally recognizing Woodrow Wilson’s racist legacy in perpetuity, either with a plaque or with a web page.”
Roman memory practices are especially relevant to the modern focus on the role of privilege in monuments. Commemoration was the exclusive right of the nobiles, the political and moneyed class — being remembered was the defining prerogative of privilege. The American context seems little different in this respect, thanks to the awkwardness of capitalism — only rich men found institutions. Mary Beard has remarked that it is hypocritical for students to criticize Rhodes and take his money. But the bigger problem is that free-thinking institutions are beholden to big donors, often forced (or all too willing) to turn a blind eye to how their profits were made.
Roman magistrates were granted the right to have an imago, or funeral mask. At funerals, young men donned the masks of their illustrious ancestors, literally miming their achievements and stressing that the survival of the state depended upon their continued emulation. According to Flower, these imagines effectively whitewashed the family’s legacy — they concealed their wearers’ darker sides, pleading for veneration, not factual recall. Naughty or unspectacular family members did not earn a mask, and no ellipsis marked their absence: “Brutus’ mask would have been here, but…” An uninterrupted sequence of mask after mask of family greats made it appear as though the annals of Roman history could be reproduced by a close study of these images.
Imagines demonstrate that the design of monuments and the deliberate preference of certain elements over others not only tell a single story, but also deliberately exclude other potential narratives. Nevertheless, at times other narratives managed to break through, and how they did so is fascinating. Let me give two examples. First, in 121 B.C. the consul Lucius Opimius ordered the lynching of the populist politician Gaius Gracchus and his followers. Their bodies were thrown in the Tiber — and thus denied commemoration through a proper funeral and burial in the family tomb. Afterwards, Opimius erected a temple to the goddess Concordia, signaling that what was left of Gracchus’ uprising was only the “concord” of reasserted aristocratic control.
If Roman literature were our only guide to Roman history — which it was for centuries, before archaeology came into its own — we would have little idea that Opimius’ monument was met with popular backlash. With few wondrous exceptions, Roman literature was penned and read by the elite, and buttressed aristocratic values carved in stone. Cicero, for one, in his First Oration Against Catiline, unreservedly praises Opimius’ actions. He gives no indication that Opimius was soon exiled— much like Cicero himself a few years later. He does not mention, as Plutarch does, that “graffiti soon mocked the temple of Concord as a monument to discord”, or that neighborhood shrines to the Gracchi sprang up in the very places where they had been killed: populist anti-monuments to state-sanctioned ones.
That Cicero is able to praise Opimius so unreservedly before a Roman Senate sixty years after Opimius’ exile demonstrates the elite’s antipathy to — even neurotic denial of — populist concerns. At the same time, the very existence of repressive aristocratic structures allowed opportunities for material expressions of dissent, in the form of graffiti or parody, that the everyday person was not authorized to initiate on his own.
A similar instance of popular backlash occurred more than a century later, after Nero had ordered the execution of his mother on the visibly trumped-up charge of plotting against him. A prominent statue of Nero appeared in the Forum with a sack tied to it, hinting that he should be punished in the traditional way that Romans dealt with parent-killers: tied up in a sack with snakes and dogs and thrown into the Tiber. A statue of Nero’s mother, before it was officially banned, was draped with rags, in the style of mourning. Nero was known for his theatrics, but here the plebs picked the costumes, and staged an alternate ending to his would-be monologue. Compare this statue-play with what happened at the College of William and Mary: Thomas Jefferson’s statue was plastered with post-its reading “rapist”, “racist”, and “Black Lives Matter”, while other students who opposed the action draped Jefferson with an American flag.
I wish to offer a final comparandum from the Roman evidence as a word of caution. If bans against memory and portraiture were originally defended as championing freedom against tyranny, they soon became exploited by tyrants. In 101 B.C. the populist agitator Lucius Saturninius was executed and his portrait was banned. Ironically, it seems that his own law against treason (de maiestate), which he had directed against the use of undue force by elite magistrates, was used against him to legalize the ban of his portrait. Later, the same senators who had prosecuted the possessors of such portraits were persecuted by Sulla. Decades of memory bans left such a bad taste in the mouth that it became the mark of a bad emperor to impose these sanctions.
We have watched as our own controversy became entangled in competing claims to free speech. Protesters claim that offensive monuments do not have the right to exist, to “speak” their offense, while they themselves assert the right to protest. Black Justice League and protesters at Yale, among others, have argued that decades of oppression entitle them to employ aggressive free speech and equally aggressive censorship of potentially racist content. Conservative groups, like the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, have responded in kind that their ability to engage in free debate about campus issues has been diminished by protesters. A debate promoting campus-inclusiveness has veered, perhaps inevitably, into designating the groups and categories that must first be excluded to achieve the desired “safe” space — but safe from what?
The ascendancy of Christianity over paganism was seen as a moral triumph, justifying the demolition or conversion of old shrines into Christian sanctuaries. Late Antiquity is one of the most interesting periods of Roman history because it shows how competing instincts — to preserve, destroy, or integrate — were fleshed out. On the one hand, some of the best minds of the age, like Augustine, Jerome, and Plotinus, had been inculcated in the pagan Classics, and worked out astounding syntheses of the best of Classical literature and culture and Christian beliefs. On the other hand, the survival of so little from the ancient world is due to the marauding barbarians who ravaged everything in their wake, and to the prudish monks who thought it a sin to read or write anything but the Bible.
This is not to stay monuments should stay up at all costs — that would be the opposite extreme. This is to urge caution, humility, humanity, and a concern for history in the exercise of our right to shape our culture around our modern values. It would be more meaningful to discuss what monuments of our own we would create in the absence of allegedly offensive statues, or what latent evils we will bequeath to our posterity. They will then come along and decide what to do with our tombstones.
Brandon Bark is a graduate student in Classics at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Classics at Princeton in 2013. He participated in the Paideia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome excursion in 2012, which sparked a fascination with the intersection between monuments and texts.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
