ANDREW B. GALLIA. Remembering the Roman Republic: Culture, Politics, and History under the Principate.

Abstract

This monograph is a comprehensive analysis of the persistence of the memory of the Roman Republic in the principate, focusing on the period between the end of Nero's reign and Trajan's rule (68–117 a.d.). Andrew B. Gallia has chosen this relatively narrow period for its “central place in the institutionalization of the power of the emperors,” as well as for the wealth and variety of evidence available for analysis—archaeological, textual (both prose and poetry), and numismatic (p. 8). To call this a study of the commemoration of the Roman Republic in the principate is to understate the author's aim and accomplishment. Gallia rather analyzes how various political figures and authors of this period challenged and engaged with the memory of the republic and with Roman political and cultural identity more generally in often complex ways. Because of a lack of a centralized mass media, and therefore the emperor's inability to organize opinion in a systematic way, memory under the principate was much more “contentious” and “decentralized” (pp. 7–8). Another factor that complicated the memory of the republic under the principate was the clear chronological separation of the republic as a period of history from this phase of the principate (one hundred years had elapsed between Actium and Nero's suicide), while at the same time it boasted a political culture that the elite of the principate idealized and to which they clung. Continuity with this idealized past was one of the contested issues around the memory of the republic.