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• Trauma, Memory and Witnessing in Seneca’s Moral Epistles

  215–232.

  Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

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  2

  Spurred by the recent identification of fragments from Seneca the Elder’s historical work, ab initio bellorum civilium, this paper investigates how Seneca the Younger navigated Roman memory culture in light of the enduring, intergenerational trauma of selective imperial silencing.  It examines the complications heirs faced when preserving banned texts in an atmosphere of imperial censorship in a twist on traditional pietas that required one to preserve their father's memory. Against this historical background, and given emperors’ claim to absolute exemplarity while alive and the speedy reversal of those honors upon their deaths, Seneca’s Moral Epistles can be seen as a strategic attempt to reclaim some control over his own posthumous reception, entrusting the image of his life and of his death to a future community of like-minded individuals.

• The Destruction of the City: Loss in the Greek and Roman Memory

  19-36

  Fanni Jancsovics

  Views:

  405

  The appearance of the ethnically “Other” naturally has an impact on a society’s own identity. It provokes the confirmation or rephrasing of identity. The loss and destruction caused by an ethnically “Other” group creates an especially deep conflict in the society’s self-definition. This paper focuses on such events and the collective memory concerning these, through the case study of the Persian sack in 490 BC and one hundred years later the Gallic siege of Rome.