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Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning "damnation of memory", in the sense of removed from the remembrance. It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate upon traitors or others who brought discredit to the Roman State.

Overview

Etymology

The sense of the expression damnatio memoriae and of the sanction is to cancel every trace of the person from the life of Rome, as if he had never existed, in order to preserve the honour of the city; in a city that stressed the social appearance, respectability and the pride of being a true Roman as a fundamental requirement of the citizen, it was perhaps the most severe punishment.

Practice

In Ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of Roman elites and Emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later Emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have their property seized, their names erased and their statues reworked. Because there is an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues anyway, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when damnatio memoriae actually took place.

The practice of damnatio memoriae was rarely, if ever, an official practice. Any truly effective damnatio memoriae would not be noticeable to later historians, since by definition, it would entail the complete and total erasure of the individual in question from the historical record. However, since all political figures have allies as well as enemies, it was difficult to implement the practice completely. For instance, the Senate wanted to condemn the memory of Caligula, but Claudius prevented this. Nero was declared an enemy of the state by the Senate, but then given an enormous funeral honoring him after his death by Vitellius. While statues of some Emperors were destroyed or reworked after their death, others were erected. Historians sometimes use the phrase de facto damnatio memoriae when the condemnation is not official. Among those who did suffer damnatio memoriae were Sejanus, who had conspired against emperor Tiberius in 31, and later Livilla, who was revealed to be his accomplice. The only emperors that are known to have officially received a damnatio memoriae was Domitian; and later in the 200s, co-emperor Publius Septimius Geta, whose memory was publicly expunged by his co-emperor brother Caracalla, in 211.

Similar practices in other societies

• Ancient Egyptians attached the greatest importance to the preservation of a person's name. The one who destroyed a person's name was thought somehow to have destroyed the person and that this carried forward beyond the grave.
• The cartouches of the heretical 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten were mutilated by his successors. Earlier in that same dynasty, Thutmose III carried out a similar attack on his stepmother Hatshepsut late in his sole reign. However, only engravings and statuary of her as a crowned king of Egypt were attacked. Anything depicting her as a queen was left unharmed (and the campaign ended after his son by a secondary queen was crowned co-regent), so this was not strictly speaking damnatio memoriae. There is also some debate whether this defacement was Thutmose's doing at all, since most of the damage is estimated to have happened some 47 years into this reign.
• In Judaism, the curse, "May name and memory be obliterated," (Hebrew: ימח שמו וזכרו , yimach shmo ve-zichro) is the worst curse that a Jew can pronounce on another.
• Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus to become famous. The Ephesus leaders decided that his name should never be repeated again, under pain of death.
• Adandozan, king of Dahomey in the beginning of the nineteenth century, had imprisoned his brother Gakpe. Once the latter became king Ghezo, he took revenge by erasing the memory of Adandozan. Till today, Adandozan is not officially considered as one of the twelve kings of Dahomey.
• Marino Faliero, fifty-fifth Doge of Venice, was condemned to damnatio memoriae after a failed coup d'état.
• More modern examples of damnatio memoriae in actual practice was the removal of portraits, books, doctoring people out of pictures, and any other traces of Joseph Stalin's opponents during the Great Purge. (For example in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.) In an ironic twist of fate, Stalin himself was edited out of some propaganda films when Nikita Khruschev became the leader of The Soviet Union, and the city of Tsaritsyn that Stalin renamed Stalingrad for himself was renamed Volgograd in 1961.

Damnatio memoriae in fiction

• A famous example of the concept of damnatio memoriae in modern usage is the "vaporization" of "unpersons" in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in the quotation, "He did not exist; he never existed".
• In Lois Lowry's novel The Giver, the main society of the story has a practice of declaring the name of the most serious wrongdoers "not to be spoken." In this case, not only is the person's own life dropped out of discussion, but the person's name is never given to any new baby ever again.
• In J.K. Rowling's novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Sirius Black explains to Harry that his mother had burned his face off the family tree when he left home. Other family members had also been removed from the tree because they had been deemed blood traitors.
• In the Exordium series by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge, a Panarch known to history only as The Faceless One was overthrown after destroying a planet. His official statue was defaced, and the only copies of his visage in existence are those in the computer worms that travel throughout the Panarchic computer network looking for files to delete.
• The Sentry is a Marvel Comics superhero who was "forgotten" due to a conspiracy involving a mental virus that caused him to forget his own life.
• Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens with an example of "damnatio memoriae" as managed by the Soviet-backed Czech government once it came to power. It is an example of the titular "forgetting" that Kundera follows as a motif in the work.

See also

• Forced disappearance
• List of Roman emperors to be condemned
• persona non grata
• Nonperson
• Proscription

Notes

1. "Egyptian Religion", E.A Wallis Budge", Arkana 1987 edition, ISBN 0-14-019017-1
2. Peter F. Dorman, "The Proscription of Hapshepsut", from Hapshepsut: From Queen To Pharaoh, ed. Catherine H. Roehrig, Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), pp. 267–69

External links

• Livius.org: Damnatio memoriae
• "The Commissar Vanishes" — Yezhov airbrushed out of a picture with Stalin
• Pope Alexander VI and his mistress.

• Ancient Rome
• Roman Empire
• Roman law
• Historical deletion