Ovid reinvented Roman cultural memory by re-constructing the memories of Servius Tullius, the sixth mythical king of Rome. In so doing, he joined historians, antiquarians, poets, and even the emperor Augustus in their efforts to rebuild and recover the Roman past.1 Furthermore, Ovid commemorated their collective endeavours in the Fasti, a didactic poem which discusses the aetiologies of Roman festivals (fasti) and highlights how Augustus appropriated Rome’s calendar by filling it with festivals dedicated both to his own achievements and those of his family, the domus Augusta.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed.

In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline.

Sulla’s dictatorship transformed Rome politically, socially, and physically.1 The changes which he imposed created winners as well as losers; but collectively the experience of his rule was traumatic, combining unprecedented violence directed at individuals with continuing uncertainty around fundamental citizen rights.2 The trauma persisted, in the transformation in the operation of the res publica, the Roman state, which was regularly repeated through the annual political cycle; in the reshaping of the fabric of the city, including Sulla’s self-memorialisation and the elimination of memorials to his chief rival Marius; and in the ongoing marginalisation of the descendants of his victims, not simply deprived of their property which had been transferred to new owners but also deprived of their citizen rights.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases.

In Cicero’s Lucullus of 45 BC, we find a moment often ignored by scholars, in which the proponent of anti-skepticism and Antiochus’ Stoic dogmatism in the dialogue, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, draws a lengthy analogy from oratorical practice to critique one of Cicero’s arguments as the proponent of Academic skepticism. Fortunately for us, the analogy opens a rare window onto the oratorical appropriation of certain politicians as exemplary populares.1 And so Lucullus argues.

Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the spatial dimension and conditionality of memory – its connectedness and links to space and place – have been well known.1 Halbwachs asserts that collective memory is only possible if it is ‘localized’.2 Hence, the trope of a city or town as a landscape of memory has become fixed in memory studies and has even given rise to the term ‘urban memory’.3 Urban memory can refer to anthropomorphic phenomena (as when the city is said to have a memory of its own). More commonly, however, it points to the city’s status as a physical place and an ensemble of objects and practices which enables recollections of the past and embodies it through traces of successive building and rebuilding.4 The inhabitants of a city thus draw upon its image to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural, and social entity. In that sense, the urban landscape of Republican and Imperial Rome has thoroughly been investigated and reconstructed as a landscape of memory.

In 36 BC, after the battle of Naulochus, Octavian decided to dedicate a temple to Apollo in memory of his victory over Sextus Pompeius and to have it built on the Palatine, on the spot where lightning had struck, which was taken to be a sign.1 The temple, however, would not be erected until 28 BC, after the battle of Actium, and would both commemorate Naulochus and Actium. Apollo was effectively linked to the battle of Actium: after his victory, Octavian restored the temple of Apollo at the entrance of the Ambracian Gulf; he also consecrated a sanctuary to Apollo on the site of his camp at Actium.

Unlike Cicero the orator, philosopher, and celebrated opponent of tyrants, Cicero the poet died a relatively speedy death and left an uncontested legacy. Cicero’s poetic activity earned little mention after his death, and, except for a more holistic assessment from Plutarch, was typically discussed only to be mocked or wished away.1 Regardless of its literary value, I suggest that Cicero understood his poetry as a means to influence and codify memory, and that discussions of his poetry led him to intuit concepts relevant to modern memory studies. To demonstrate this, I turn to Cicero’s De Legibus, a fragmentary dialogue from the late 50s BCE.2 Although the work’s central concerns are legal and political philosophy, it opens with a discussion of a scene from Cicero’s Marius, alongside consideration of Cicero’s potential to write history. Because of this, scholarly treatments that eschew philosophical and legal approaches often examine questions of genre and historical writing.3

This chapter argues that the military and political history and prosopography of the early fifth century cannot be reconciled with the existence of the Notitia system. Specifically, the military challenges the east Roman empire faced during this period, most notably Alaric’s depredations in the Balkans, Gaïnas’ revolt in Asia Minor, and attempts to prop up the struggling western empire, all point to a systemic under-militarization in the east that forced Constantinople to rely heavily on barbarian manpower, often with calamitous results. By the 420s, we find evidence for a gradual remilitarization taking place in the east, which set the stage for the major reforms of the 440s.