Seeing Caesar in ruins: towards a radical aesthetic of ruins

Abstract

This paper considers two ancient instances of engagement with the ruin: resonant descriptions of Troy in the second-century historian Tacitus and in the Neronian poet Lucan. Both represent the encounter with the ruin as alienating, which provokes interpretations corresponding to those of modern engagements with ruins. These instances undermine the particularity of the modern experience of ruins and instead introduce a dialectic between the ruin and the imperial state. Although one might assume that the ruin as a symbol of times past offers a locus outside Modernity or the (Roman) imperial state from where an oppositional perspective becomes possible, this alienation works instead to reinforce political norms. The ruin operates as an illusion of opposition. Although totalitarian systems operate with monological visions of history and unitary imaginaries, and the ruin would seem to encourage plurality, imperial time operates in more complex ways, which allow different historical periods to be enfolded in and subordinated to the imperial dialectic. Collective memory in the imperial society is critically ambivalent and that ambivalence imbues imperial society with a pervasive sorrow.