The “Damnatio Memoriae”

 

Did you know that in Ancient Rome it was already possible to ban people?
You think it was Mark Zuckerberg who introduced solutions such as the like, but the thumbs up from the public in the Colosseum to save the life of the gladiator who had been defeated, but who had fought with honor, was not a like?

The Roman Senate to “ban” people introduced the Damnatio memoriae:
the death of memory.

This was one of the most atrocious punishments for a Roman citizen:
if decreed and applied when the condemned person was still alive, it represented a real civil death.

It had the same value for social when today people are blocked.

In Ancient Rome, the memory in the history of any man had a special importance and all that made people famous were the inscriptions, epigraphs, citation in books, statues.

The weapon that therefore the Senate wielded against the enemies, such or presumed, of Rome was the damnatio memoriae that indicated an interruption of the “historical line”.

A rule that was used with the aim of erasing the person and any evidence of his existence by destroying statues, monuments, works, poems, carmina.

This was done in order to eliminate anything that reminded the memory of that person in the present and to avoid that his memory could be brought back in the future.

A practice that did not spare even the emperors, such as Domitian, the last emperor of the Flavian dynasty, who was killed in 96 AD in a palace conspiracy.

Immediately after his death, the Senate of Rome decreed the damnatio memoriae:
his name was erased from the inscriptions, many of his statues were defaced or destroyed, some of his edicts were revoked.

To this day, in fact, because of the damnatio memoriae, only a few portraits of him have been preserved.

Domitian deserved this measure for being one of the most bloodthirsty emperors of the Roman Empire, fame obtained by Caligula, who suffered the same sentence.

For the damnatio memoriae that he had suffered, many busts of Caligula were found disfigured or damaged in the bed of the Tiber, as well as the heads of his statues separated from their base and on which appears the Latin word “eradere” which means eradicate, delete.

Even, in the case of Caligula, all the bronze coins with images of the deceased emperor seem to have been withdrawn and melted.

However, some statues of Caligula were not immediately destroyed or beheaded.

These were removed and later transformed into the features of other emperors, such as Claudius and Augustus, bringing the “damnatio memoriae” to become also an artistic current that led to reinterpret the faces readjusting them to the need.