Uwe Walter explains how memoria in Rome was rooted in institutions vital to the res publica. Many of these were embedded in an oral context with highly suggestive settings – public speech, the theatre, festival performances, among others. Hence, they had only a limited capacity to store memories and preserve them over time. In similar fashion, buildings and monuments were subject to decay, and with their splendour their memorial force vanished. Historiography was of a different quality. Fabius Pictor attempted to create a unified memory of the res publica, distilled and synthesized from multiple individual and collective repositories of memory across a variety of media – and charged with the authority of the senatorial voice. Two concluding case studies illustrate how Walter envisions the relation between narrative synthesis and the production of meaning: one, the case of L. Marcius Septimus, lower commander during the Punic Wars; and the other the highly politicized episode of ten high-ranking prisoners released after the battle of Cannae by Hannibal on their word of honour that they would raise a ransom in Rome in exchange for their comrades. Each tradition integrated different elements of memory to generate a qualitatively new knowledge of past events.

Modes and purposes of the memorial practices of aristocratic families were formative to Roman readings of the past. The memoria of the gentes was imprinted deeply on the Republic’s history culture, but was subject to the challenges from other formats of remembering the past, historiography in particular. The pompa and laudatio funebris both heralded and magnified a family’s esteem through the display of imagines and the recollection of narratives of exemplary virtue. While these achievements were uncontested among the gens itself, in the public arena they might have been a bone of contention. The memoria of the gentes distorted that of the Republic as a whole, influencing the work of the first historians, the compilation of lists of magistrates and office-holders, and the outlook of public space. Historiography also distanced and indeed distinguished itself from the memoria of the elites. Discourses of decadence widened the gap between the two media. Meanwhile citizens outside Rome were more removed from the mechanisms of aristocratic remembering and could only access a history of Rome in written format. Elite memories ceased to wield their magnetic force, but they also lingered on in historiography.

An analysis of the preface and opening sections of Sallust’s Catiline, arguing that Sallust is writing with ironic cunning in his presentation of his subject matter. He is undermining his audience’s understanding of what a work of Roman history should look like as he presents the villain who is the subject of his monograph.

The chapter argues against recent attempts to analyse religious aspects of Latin literature without paying attention to the question of genre. History, antiquarianism, epic are all very different ways of representing the divine, and the specificity of each genre is crucial for understanding how the texts function.

Republican Rome saw a range of laws designed to moderate the acquisition of wealth, and this chapter focuses on two such measures, the Lex Licinia de modo agrorum (367 BCE) and Tiberius Gracchus’ agrarian law of 133 BCE. In our later sources these two historical moments tend to be conflated, and the chapter begins by confronting the ensuing methodological problems. A critical review of the previous scholarship establishes that whereas the pre-Gracchan limit applied to all landholding not just public land, Gracchus, who was interested in reclaiming public land for distribution rather than putting a limit on elite wealth, revived the earlier limit, but applied it only to public land. These findings serve as basis for a discussion of the law carried by the tribune C. Licinius Stolo in 367 BCE, including the identification of an ‘ethos of frugality’ in mid-republican Rome which was meant to prevent individuals from accumulating excessive material resources. The final part of the chapter traces the history of the tension between the pursuit of personal enrichment and the interest of the wider community to keep such pursuits in check – an endeavour rendered increasingly difficult given Rome’s foreign conquests.