True ruin-mindedness begins with the poet Petrarch, the subject along with his successors of the fourth chapter. He was the first person we know of who visited Rome with the intention of seeing the ruins. Thanks to his unrivalled knowledge of Latin literature, he viewed the ruins as ‘sites of memory’, complementary to and made comprehensible by the texts of Roman poets and historians. For Petrarch and his successors, the ruins became an essential part of the historical and cultural heritage of the ancient Romans, a material complement to the history of Livy and the poetry of Virgil. Such complementarity was crucial to endowing the ruins with some context and meaning; they were not just piles of broken rubble but a valuable part of the Roman cultural achievement as a whole. Petrarch’s enthusiasm was infectious and it can be claimed that he initiated two new disciplines, urban topography and antiquarianism, the subjects of the next two chapters, 5 and 6. From this point on, progression will be largely chronological, as the sentiment of ruin-mindedness is developed and enlarged.

This chapter brings together literary responses to the ruins of Rome. Over the centuries after Petrarch, the ruins had acquired historical, cultural and aesthetic validation, all the outcome of the development of a sentiment favourable to ruination; in short, ruin-mindedness. For an emotional validation we must turn to writers, who put into plain words how they felt about the ruins. The feelings are surprisingly various: sometimes elation, sometimes moral disgust. Whatever the reaction, it is usually founded, as was Petrarch’s, on the fact that the ruins of Rome have a historical and cultural context, thanks to the survival of Latin literature. The physical remains of the ancient city are given meaning by the Roman literary heritage, and it is that above all which enables writers to record a varied range of nuanced responses to them that are not likely to be evoked by a ruin without a history. Reactions to the ruins are affected by shifts in sensibility, especially the influence of romanticism, which insisted upon recording impressions of the ruins in moonlight. The ruins of Rome are signs to be interpreted in endless ways. This cannot be said of any other ruins anywhere.

The historian’s task is to narrate, but he must also win credibility for that narrative: his task is therefore also to persuade his audience that he is the proper person to tell the story and, moreover, that his account is one that should be believed. In his capacity as persuader, the historian will often try to shape the audience’s perception of his character and to use this as an additional claim to authority; indeed, among the Roman historians, where explicit professions of research are rarer than with the Greeks, the shaping of the narrator’s character takes on a correspondingly larger role. But most of the historians, Greek and Roman, try to shape their audience’s perception of their character. Nor is this surprising when we consider the teachings of rhetoric.

It is convenient to regard neutral-based interaction as, so to speak, the nominative kind and, accordingly, define extra-grammatical interaction with reference to it, as I in fact did, to some extent, in the case of intrusion. In the exposition that follows, this is done without further argument. Whatever minor qualifications must be made, it is clear that on the whole neutral terms operate within or through the grammatical structure of the sentence to which they belong. I say and have said ’grammatical’, although it may appear that what I am ultimately appealing to is not grammar but logic. But whether the structure is better regarded as logical or grammatical, there is the fundamental distinction to be made between interactions that work within it and interactions that work outside and obliviously of it.

Modes and purposes of the memorial practices of aristocratic families were formative to Roman readings of the past. The memoria of the gentes was imprinted deeply on the Republic’s history culture, but was subject to the challenges from other formats of remembering the past, historiography in particular. The pompa and laudatio funebris both heralded and magnified a family’s esteem through the display of imagines and the recollection of narratives of exemplary virtue. While these achievements were uncontested among the gens itself, in the public arena they might have been a bone of contention. The memoria of the gentes distorted that of the Republic as a whole, influencing the work of the first historians, the compilation of lists of magistrates and office-holders, and the outlook of public space. Historiography also distanced and indeed distinguished itself from the memoria of the elites. Discourses of decadence widened the gap between the two media. Meanwhile citizens outside Rome were more removed from the mechanisms of aristocratic remembering and could only access a history of Rome in written format. Elite memories ceased to wield their magnetic force, but they also lingered on in historiography.

In a new essay, Harriet I. Flower gives her personal overview of key themes in the German scholarship translated in this volume. German and anglophone scholarship have pursued different paths for reasons including differences in how the boundaries of disciplines are constituted, but also because of the strong influence in Germany of work by Christian Meier which remains untranslated. Three lenses are suggested which can help us categorize this volume’s contributions to the study of Roman political culture: procedures and rules, ritual and spectacle, and the context in the city of Rome.

Observing that the history of the Roman Republic has been one of turbulence, conflict, and dynamic change throughout, Martin Jehne investigates the integrative and indeed moderating force of standardized forms of interaction between the upper and the lower classes. He sees the corresponding modes grounded in what Jehne labelled a Jovialitätsgebot, that is, a communicative and behavioural code of benevolence that structured and lent meaning to the mutual relations between unequals. Under this unspoken code, members of the governing classes were expected to encounter ordinary citizens deliberately and pointedly as if they were on terms of equality with one another, even though all parties understood that they were not. In its Roman context, Jovialität allowed both the nobility and the people to cultivate an institutionalized conversation that supplemented the realm of prevailing power structures and social asymmetries. To flesh out the argument, Jehne discusses a prominent incident from 414 BCE, the battle of words between M. Postumius Regillensis and M. Sextius.

At the court of the Phaeacians, Demodocus sings of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles and delights his listeners, all except the still unrevealed Odysseus who covers his head and weeps. During the feast that follows, Odysseus, despite his grief, sends the singer a rich portion of meat and salutes him, praising how well he sang ’all that the Achaeans did and suffered and toiled, as if you were present yourself, or heard it from one who was’. In this simile, Odysseus anticipates the twin methods of validation for contemporary historians: eyewitness (autopsy) and inquiry of the participants in events. In ancient historiography, professions of autopsy and inquiry are found from Herodotus to Ammianus, and they serve as one of the most prominent means of claiming the authority to narrate contemporary and non-contemporary history. In this chapter, we shall survey some of the issues revolving around inquiry for ancient historians, treating the theoretical observations of the historians on the difficulties and problems raised by inquiry, as well as the explicit claims made by historians in the course of their narratives.

The Roman Capitol was a place of memory. Several conceptual traits of a Roman lieu de mémoire are identified: an ever-present signposting to other stories, notions of humble origins, portents of a prosperous future, and great men who tie it all together. The concrete places related to these stories are not only visible but, in fact, vital to the story they tell; without them, the symbiotic interlinking between narrative and numinous place evaporates. Discussion of the Roman triumph demonstrates how space is created by ritual. From this emerged an implicit hierarchy of space that lent additional quality to place. The Republic’s greatest imperatores wished to see their fame immortalized on the Capitol. But the Capitol was also somewhat removed from everyday politics, for instance, in the Comitium or in the Forum. Here, aristocrats had to confront the people, directly and in person. In turn, the encounter was critical to the way in which the people awarded public offices in the voting assemblies on the Campus Martius. Between these various locations there developed a distinctive hierarchy of place that was defined by proximity to the present of politics, prestige, and war.

Despite increasing dilapidation, many of Rome’s ancient buildings survived in a form to impress visitors. During the Middle Ages a number of them – Hildebert of Lavardin, Master Gregorius, Benjamin of Tudela – left a brief record of the favourable impression the ruins made upon them. More widespread, however, were the legendary accounts, as found most extensively in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, of the history and function of a number of the ruins of the pagan past. Such fables can be seen as forerunners of later ruin-mindedness in their attempt to explain the original role in the urban fabric of what was now ruinous and puzzling.