Remnants of Remembrance: Power, Identity, and Associative Memory During the Punic Wars
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2025-07-08
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en
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Remembrance is under pressure. In a time of pandemics, wars, and genocides, the way we engage with our past has become strongly associative. We reference to past dictators to articulate the threat of populism, the HIV/AIDS-crisis to talk about COVID-19, and genocides from the past century to remember those today. This thesis studies this ‘associative’ memory in the distant past. I reconstruct how Romans remembered the First and Second Punic Wars (3rd century BCE), memories which strongly shaped their identity and imperialism. In fragments of monuments, parades, currency, and theatre, we can see aristocratic Romans stress heroic memories, and lower class Romans emphasise trauma. Both groups used Rome’s past and mythical origins to shape their remembrance, allowing them to come to terms with their experiences. This thesis aims to increase our understanding of Roman processes of memory and to provide insight into modern associative memory, its reasoning, and its effect.
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Faculteit der Letteren