Foreword: Memory, History, Forgetting
Christopher Smith
The study of memory in antiquity has a long history, depending on whether one is interested in memory as a source for history, memory feats, in the way Frances Yates describes, or, more recently, memory as a collective action which through various levels of distortion or invention presents the past to the present as a locus of legitimation, contestation or comparison.1
This collection of essays explores the recent view, that the past is constructed, to a greater or lesser degree, and that memory is in a sense a discursive argument around this constructed past, and it focuses on memory as an act in the ‘now’ reflecting upon a ‘then’ which may be distant, imaginary, or somewhere between the two.
This remains a valid and useful approach, and it cannot be disputed that in antiquity there was a strong desire and capacity to re-evaluate and remember the past. We see this at every stage from Herodotus to Augustine; in monuments, public spaces, and even personal behaviour - such as the selfconscious reference to the past in a work such as Macrobius’ Saturnalia, which presumably had some correlate in practice.2
This series of essays takes a strongly interdisciplinary line, and by adding cultures such as ancient Mesopotamia, and especially Egypt, with several essays considering the role of Isis, encourages broader reflection. The reference to a culture which was known precisely for its antiquity, whilst also being an innovative intruder into Roman culture, adds an element of complexity, but placing into question precisely what past is being remembered. Was the Mediterranean past ever an uninterrupted continuum of experience which could be drawn upon by all? To what extent at any point in time was the past a local or a global phenomenon?3
As with many of the questions which are raised and encouraged by the study of cultural memory, the answers are difficult to find and are complicated.
The Romans were clearly able to adapt aspects of the Egyptian past to their own circumstances, even while differentiating between the moral values of Rome and those of an eastern empire, a moral evaluation which itself changed over time. As a symbol of this, the obelisks of Rome represent a fascinating repository of real and invented history.4This observation, itself banal, leads us to other kinds of arguments. For the rest of this brief reflection, I want to use Paul Ricoeur’s powerful work Memory, History and Forgetting to explore some of the challenges which are raised by the current focus on cultural memory. I want to raise questions concerning what the memory to which we are referring is actually about; who does the remembering, who are the conscious agents; and where history is left as a discourse, a discipline and a political act within a broader argument about the construction of the past?5 Ricoeur worked largely with reference to contemporary societies, and has a range of evidence and practice which is broader than we can have for ancient culture, but his questions remain pertinent in the context of understanding the practices of memory.
To give a context for these reflections, it is perhaps enough to think about what is at stake when we think about the construction of the past or the development of collective memory. What the past actually is, how we have defined it, is itself not straightforward, and has been the subject of much philosophical debate. Similarly, the nature of the historical enterprise has varied over time, and as Geoffrey Lloyd recently noted, the discipline is deeply ambivalent, and even at its allegedly most objective risks ‘descent into subjectivity, if not pure fiction or naked ideology’.6 To introduce memory into this resolves little, in a way. Neither at a cognitive neuroscience level, nor at a philosophical level has memory been fully understood. It is clear that memory can be both an actual physical process, observable at the level of the neurone, and also that it can be invented; it is also clear that there is an interaction between memory and narrative, which is critical for any process of transfer.
But it is precisely because memory is labile, constructed, but evidently critical to our mental functions; that it can be both individual and social; that attempts can and are made to direct and erase memory, whilst we often see simultaneously resistance and recollection, that we cannot resolve the ambivalence of history as a discipline through reference to the reliability or otherwise of memory; they to a degree share the same ambivalence. Recently there has been a good deal of debate about the value of memory in relation to history, and it is not at all a straightforward move from one concept to the other.7 It is within this complex world that Ricoeur located his massive late masterpiece.Ricoeur's work is important because he navigates between the belief that there is no single objective historical knowledge - no grand Marxian history - and the conviction that history is not therefore simply narrative contingent on contemporary concerns. We shall return to whether this applies to ancient historiography at the end, but let us begin with a brief and far too cursory summary of Ricoeur's own rich argument.
The frontispiece of the volume is the statue in Wiblingen Monastery in Ulm in Germany which represents the dual figure of history. Kronos, the god of time, grips a large book with his left hand and endeavours to tear out a page with his right. Behind him, History, displaying a book, inkpot and stylus, checks time's ravages. Within this tense relationship between recovery and loss, memory plays a significant role - but memory of what? Since Plato, the question of what is the nature and object of remembering has been a significant concern. Quite apart from the cognitive neuroscience of memory, we face deep problems over what a memory recalls.8 Is it my response to an event? How discursive is the memory, and how far is it an image, and how far is it a repetition or re-enactment? Critically, as is clearly emphasized by those who work on cultural memory, the sharing of memory is fundamental.
The question over what we have memories of is necessarily related to the question of who remembers. Since Halbwachs, we have become familiar with the notion of collective memory.9 Ricoeur is surely right to worry about the ease with which we slide from individual to collective memory, and he posits a threefold attribution of memory, to oneself, one's close relations, and to others. In a way this is purely practical, but in another sense, especially taking a broad view of Ricoeur's definition of ‘those who count for us and for whom we count', it is an absolutely necessary part of the critique of Halbwachs' work. Halbwachs' brilliant assertion of the capacity of a group to be an agent which remembers has been immensely valuable - it is in a sense a critical part of the whole movement which identifies the manufacture of identity and community, even though his work has only recently been re-established as a common part of our intellectual heritage - but the premise as he puts it is questionable: ‘A person only remembers by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective thought.'10 Is this really the case? Halbwachs is pointing out that we do not hold within ourselves a connected and complete memory; through internal discourse and external discussion we construct memories. But the idea that no one ever remembers alone seems extreme, and the move towards the notion of the collective is sharp and potentially troubling. As Tvetan Todorov noted, collectives - or rather groups - exist in relation to others - and thereby some level of defence is found against the totalitarian control of memory; that is, we need not posit a single collective memory within any culture, although totalitarian regimes tend to demand precisely that level of conformity.11 Ricoeur’s intermediate group allows not only for the transmission of memory, but also for the contest and interplay of memories, as the past is narrated, related and reflected upon at diverse levels.
For Ricoeur and for cultural memory studies more generally, history begins in the archive; it is written; it works from original testimony to historical text and whilst the work of history may be careful and sound, ultimately there is an insurmountable problem of reliability and verification which cannot be dissociated from the fact of history as a literary genre. If testimony is the first and original ground of history, then we may need to think again about the sorts of memory games that are played in collective history, of the kind discussed throughout this volume. If there is no testimony available, but rather a description or an act which refers to the existence of knowledge rather than necessarily being part of that knowledge - that is, refers to the existence of an immeasurably old and strange Egypt12 for instance - then we are perhaps in a place where history would not be a legitimate title for what is happening, nor, perhaps, memory. One valuable corrective which this volume and the general trend of thinking through the construction of a history of the past in the past, and separate from a focus on the limiting nature of ‘testimony’, is that it challenges some of Ricoeur’s potentially reductionist focus, and lends greater weight to the generation of memory.
Ricoeur’s final section on forgetting relates to his reflections on the use of history and memory, and it is the most politically charged part of the work. It is here that Ricoeur engages with the work of Pierre Nora, whose concept of the place of memory is repeatedly invoked in the current collection.13 The concept of the lieux de memoire has become fashionable for ancient historians lately, and it has considerable attraction. Not only does it seem to hint at the memory games in which Cicero and others used spatial dynamics to assist in phenomenal feats of memory, but it also encourages the contemplation of the ways in which memory and history inhered in spaces; the Roman fora are an especially good example and explored again through the ficus Ruminalis in this collection.14
Ricoeur, however, is much more ambivalent about Nora's enterprise.
His very interesting account traces the development of Nora's thought and the scope of the exercise, which gradually expanded from essays to the enormous collections. From a concern about identity, somehow the places of memory became an act of commemoration, a representation of national identity. Even Nora himself seems to have become concerned with this slide from investigation to commemoration, and Ricoeur cites a telling phrase from towards the end of lieux de memoire where Nora imagines a new way of coexistence in which we will no longer need to return to these markers of the past: ‘the era of commemoration will be over for good. The tyranny of memory will have endured for only a moment - but it was our moment.'15Yet this leads to some uncomfortable thoughts about forgetting.16 Do we have a duty to forget? How is forgetting compatible with forgiving? Ricoeur's complex arguments about the value of memory and the dangers of forgetting, which, inevitably, return to the uneasy contemplation of the sites of the greatest horrors of our own age, are well summarized by Todorov. The danger of the appeal against forgetting is that it is often made by those who have a vested interest in the outcome; ‘What we are being invited to undertake is the defense of a particular selection of facts that allows its protagonists to maintain their status as heroes, victims or teachers of moral lessons, against any other selection that might give them less gratifying roles.' Todorov then quotes Ricoeur for his appeal to avoid falling into the trap of the duty of memory and to ‘devote ourselves rather to the work of memory’.17
The work of memory refers back to Ricoeur's claim that, without overstating our capacity to attain some objective value-free access to the past, the archive as a selection of what is or was known remains the locus for our investigation. We are not incapable of tracing the development of memory from the individual through those who count for us and for whom we count to the concept of a collective memory; but the slide from investigation to commemoration is dangerously close to the trap of the duty of memory.
Where then do we place ancient historiography and ancient cultural memory within this sort of discourse? Where do we place our own investigation of this distant past?
The success of the concept of memory within anthropological and historical studies is striking, but what Ricoeur reminds us of is the necessity to be precise in what we mean when we deploy this term. Memory of what and remembering by whom are critical issues. Before we leap to assume a collective memory, in Halbwachs' sense, we need to ask questions about agency, which are difficult to answer with the evidence we have. It is inevitable that ancient historians return to their texts, and we then have fascinating arguments to deploy about the extent to which texts become communal possessions; the letters, speeches, sermons, commentaries which survive spread ideas, and perhaps their readers and listeners could function as the close relations which Ricoeur posited.
It is important to decide where we feel this memory behaviour should be situated in terms of the ongoing debate over the nature of ancient historiography. For Rome, this is particularly acute because of the gap between event and the narrative record in the early Republic.18 Yet this is simply one rather troublesome aspect of a more complex debate over the nature of the historical process. Only in the imperial period perhaps was there anything like the kind of archive which Ricoeur refers to, and even then, the nature of the scholarly activity was surely far different. (One imagines libraries as noisy places for recitation and competitive display, not hushed well-ordered repositories.)19 The challenges for us over the interplay between the elaborately rhetorical structures of Latin prose imagination, and the factual content, the sort of sequence of events which Bernard Williams identified, are profound, and we need to add to this some understanding of the commemorative and contaminating aspects of Roman imperial culture too.20 How far should we see Roman culture as participating in the same duty of memory rather than the work of memory which Todorov and Ricoeur warn us against?
This volume's broad geographical spread encourages further contemplation of the extent to which Rome shares characteristics in the sphere of historical memory and commemoration with other empires such those of Persia or Egypt. Is the recollection and worship of an emperor at Rome to be compared usefully with imperial ideology in Egypt or Babylonia centuries earlier? What are the grounds of that comparison? The prospect is opened up of a project which takes questions such as memory of what and remembering by whom as the grounds of a comparison between empires and cultures.21
Finally, I want to turn to the other term in the title of the collection, that of religion. Ricoeur's description of the difference between testimony and archive is interesting here: ‘The moment of the archive is the moment of the entry into writing of the historiographical operation. Testimony is by origin oral. It is listened to, heard. The archive is written. It is read, consulted. In archives, the professional historian is a reader.'22 This is challenging, but not wholly persuasive.
Were ancient religions testimonies, or archives, or both? How does religion in antiquity contribute to the constitution of memory? Christianity claims the eyewitness authority of the gospels and rehearses that testimony; that seems to have been a critical part of the evolving liturgy. The narrative of the return of the statue of Marduk described in this volume,23 for instance, is differently deployed; it is less the memory of an act so much as the commemoration of the restoration of an imperial state. The religion discussed within this volume falls in some instances into the category of a commemoration of power structures or constructed identities. That is not to say, however, that religion, even in these instances, neither recalls nor constructs cultural memory, or that it does not constitute in some sense a testimony.
One might construe this testimony as history reinterpreted as myth; or as history reinterpreted as ritual. In some instances at least, priests are custodians of memory as much as they are of religious knowledge - and the connection between religion and memory is well illustrated in the cult of Juno Moneta.24 It is of particular interest for Rome, where the pontifices maintain a record which looks like our best candidate for an annalistic account, of the kind which Hayden White once (rather innocently) saw as the raw and unvarnished data of history.25
Ricoeur's characterization of the professional historian in the archive is, of course, a fully modern one. The political seriousness of history, which is often derived from the totalitarian abuses of the past in the service of a dangerous present, also to some extent limits the extent to which one can apply this philosophical critique to previous times, but we should not perhaps overplay that hand. Herodotus' account of the Persian Wars contains within the foreshadowing of the terrible conflict between Athenians, Spartans and their respective allies and it is hard not to see the Punic Wars as having an influence upon the Roman desire to start to write history in a particular kind of way.26
Moreover, if we do wish to conceive of history in the past as a reflection, a reworking of memory, and we also wish to use memory as a critical concept in our approach to the construction of community and identity in antiquity, we need to combine the case studies collected here with the development of some methodological approaches to understanding the passage from memory to history. We may also want to think about how an understanding of the huge demands which ancient imperial regimes placed upon the past as a repository of specific lessons - that particular selection of facts which Todorov alludes to - authorized the move to commemoration, especially through religion, the development of convenient amnesia, the occlusion of uncomfortable history, and the invention of duty to forget. Ancient empires had already arrived at many of the more uncomfortable manifestations of the use, or abuse, of history, and indeed of collective memory. This volume, and the broader project with which it is engaged, begin to sketch a mental landscape which is at once deeply unfamiliar to us, but at the same time shares many features with our own, not all of them attractive. As David Mattingly has shown, the work of comparison, which will sometimes not be in favour of the Romans, is a valid and important heuristic exercise, but also one which has consequences for our understanding of imperialism more generally.27
The essays in this volume open up various approaches to the relationship between cultural memory, religion and history, a relationship which is fraught with methodological challenges. The bringing together of these case studies encourages us to explore, and be more confident with, the sorts of ambivalences and difficulties which are uncovered. If we do accept, as Geoffrey Lloyd claimed, that history is ambivalent as a discipline, then one response will surely come from examining with care the relationship to cultural memory. The recent trend to lay more emphasis on memory brings with it substantial advantages and new ideas, but it also demands a close attention to the difficult challenges of memory studies. The wider project within which this volume sits therefore should help us understand how memory worked within ancient societies, individually and collectively, and in turn, how history emerged and how it related to ancient testimony.
Notes
The bibliography of ancient memory studies may be gleaned from this volume; a key contribution is Small 1997, and much goes back to Yates 1966. Cultural and exemplary memory, and the use and reuse of the past, are discussed in the stimulating collection of essays, Lianeri 2011.
Two recent works which survey the whole field for Greece and Rome are E. Stein-Holkeskamp and Holkeskamp 2006; Stein-Holkeskamp and Holkeskamp 2010.
The best study of the ancient Mediterranean, which tends to lay emphasis on highly connected but fundamentally local experiences, is Hordern and Purcell 2000. For a good example of the use of local past, see Lafond 2006 and more broadly Clark 1999.
Curran, Grafton, Long and Weiss 2009; Sorek 2010.
Ricoeur 2004. For a recent and somewhat critical approach to Ricoeur, see O’Gorman 2010: 117-30.
Lloyd 2009: 58-75. The debates go back to Collingwood 1946, a posthumous publication; see now the edition edited by J. van der Dussen 1994, and beyond. R. Poole 2008; see also Bommas 2011.
For some comments on combining the advances of neuroscience with concepts of history more generally, see Smail 2008; more work is needed here. It would be interesting to understand more clearly for instance whether there is any potential scientific basis for generalized claims about folk or inherited memory.
Halbwachs 1992; the original was published in 1925. One of the most influential subsequent volumes was Connerton 1989; see also Assmann 1995: 125-33. Klein 2000: 127-50 is a valuably critical introduction to the field, and see also the appeal for precision in Berliner 2005: 197-211.
Cited ar Ricoeur 2004: 121.
Todorov 2003: 168-76. More recent works include Tony Judt’s moving The Memory Chalet (Judt 2010). See also Stone 2011: 17-36.
See the articles of Bommas and Harrisson in this volume.
Nora 1984-92.
See the article of Hunt in this volume. On exemplary history in the Roman context, see Roller 2004: 1-56; Roller 2009: 214-30; Roller 2011: 182-210. Ricoeur 2004: 411.
For a study of forgetting and damnatio memoriae in antiquity, see Flower 2006. It is significant that forgetting could be demanded within the political culture of the Roman empire, even if it could never be assured. See the articles of Hunt, Westerfeld and Bommas in this volume.
17 Todorov 200: 175-6
18 For a succinct sceptical introduction, see Lendon 2009: 41-61; cf. Wiseman 2007: 67-75.
19 Nicholls, forthcoming
20 Williams 2004 argues that the objective ground of history lies at the least in the fact that one event preceded chronologically another, or was simultaneous with it.
21 The work of comparing ancient empires is well explored in Alcock 2001.
22 Ricoeur 2004: 166.
23 See the article of Nielsen in this volume.
24 See the article of Miano in this volume.
25 White 1987: 1-25. (Partner 1998: 162-72 argues, I think unconvincingly, that this is White's ‘best joke') On the pontifical annals, see Frier 1999.
26 Harrison 2000: 84-96; Momigliano 1990: 80-108.
27 Mattingly 2010.