Remember the Aventine: Memoria Renovata, Fama Nova, and the Creation of Cultural Geography
Lisa Mignone, Brown University
Texans remembered the Alamo; Rome’s plebeians recalled the Aventine. With the latter as a case study, this paper explores the transformation of place into landmark: how does a space become imbued with ideological meaning and cultural memory?
Over the course of the early Republic, the Plebeian Secessions, that is, the plebeians’ repeated refusal to participate in military service, forced the renegotiation of governmental institutions. Narratological references in Sallust, Livy, and Dionysius demonstrate the importance internal characters later placed on remembering these early Secessions. They were more than mere exempla of the plebeians’ rigorous pursuit of justice; their recollection was an act of reanimation and a threat of present action.
This action, furthermore, was bound to a particular location. According to extant historical sources, the three canonical Plebeian Secessions withdrew respectively to Mons Sacer, the Aventine and Mons Sacer, and the Janiculum. Only one of these secessions is, in fact, historical: that of 287 BCE on the Janiculum. Early tradition, furthermore, sited the first two Plebeians Secessions on Mons Sacer. Yet it was the Aventine that came to be, and continues to be, inextricably linked to the Secessions and plebeian rights. Why?
I argue that the key is the flight of Gaius Gracchus in 121 BCE. As a lynch-mob pursued the tribune, he fled to the Aventine hill. The usual interpretation insists that Gracchus reactivated the Plebeian Secessions to rally popular support. I suggest instead that the notion of Aventine withdrawal was in fact retrojected as a false precedent for Gracchus’s flight. Livy himself indicates the fiction’s ultimate source: the account of Calpurnius Piso, a known inimicus capitalis of Gracchus.
I thus suggest that stories authored by annalists in the second century were able not only to supplant those of oral tradition but also to transform Rome’s cultural landscape.
Prof. Douglas Boin
