History as Memory: Remembering the Past in Republican Times
Ana Rodríguez Mayorgas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
This paper will explore how the Romans viewed and conceptualized the knowledge of the past in the Roman Republic. With that purpose it will address the concepts of historia and memoria attested in Republican literature, in order not only to investigate their meaning, connotations and relationship but also to ascertain what they reveal of the historian’s task. It will be argued that despite the introduction of historical writing as a literary genre that transformed historical events into a linear narrative, the Romans continued framing the past in terms of memory as an oral recollection, that is to say, what people remembered about past facts.
Romans borrowed the term historia from the Greek language to name the rerum gestarum cognitio (TLL), which clearly indicates that there did not exist previously in Latin the idea of “historical account.” But what is of more significance, as this paper argues, is that in Rome historia is inextricably linked to the notion of writing, so that it designates, above all, a written narrative of historical events and becomes a synonym of “book of history.” Only in a few instances in Republican literature historia goes from meaning a particular report or narrative to cover the idea of all the past events of a people, a level of abstraction that approaches the term to our modern concept of history. However, it will be argued that memoria (always expressed in singular) is the term that Romans used to convey the global idea of what is known about the past stressing the notion of remembrance. The paper will conclude by pointing out the distinction between this conceptualization of the past and the modern idea of history.
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Prof. Douglas Boin
