Cultural Memories in the Roman Empire

Edited by Karl Galinsky and Kenneth Lapatin
With contributions by Susan Alcock, Jas’ Elsner, Alicia Jiménez, Zena Kamash, Rachel Kousser, Elizabeth Marlowe, Carlos Noreña, Felipe Rojas, C. Brian Rose, Steven Rutledge, John Weisweiler, Tim Whitmarsh, Greg Woolf, and Ann Marie Yasin

Memory studies—one of the most vibrant research fields of the present day—brings together such diverse disciplines as art and archaeology, history, religion, literature, sociology, media studies, and neuroscience. In scholarship on ancient Rome, studies of social and cultural memory complement traditional approaches, opening up new horizons as we contemplate the ancient world.

The fifteen essays presented here explore memory in the Roman Empire, addressing a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena from a range of approaches. Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence and memory pervades all aspects of Roman culture, from literature and art to religion and politics. This volume is the first to address the cultural artifacts of Rome through the lens of memory studies. An essential guide to the material culture of Rome, this book brings important new concepts to the fore for both scholars of the ancient world and those of social and cultural memory throughout human history.

Karl Galinsky is Floyd A. Cailloux Centennial Professor of Classics and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Kenneth Lapatin is associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum and is most recently the coeditor of Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World(Getty Publications, 2015) and author of Luxus: The Sumptuous Arts of Greece and Rome(Getty Publications, 2015).

“In her introduction essay, Susan Alcock, one of the pioneers in the field, compares the undertaking to a kaleidoscope. This metaphor could describe this book: not a lens or filter, but a Roman world in all its variegate aspects.”
–Art Newspaper