Future Thinking in Roman Culture (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367687809, 9780367687816, 9781003139027, 0367687801

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Half Title Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents Page
List of illustrations Page
List of contributors Page
Acknowledgments Page
1 Introduction: new approaches to future thinking in the Roman world
2 The future of the past: Fabius Pictor (and Dionysios of Halikarnassos) on the pompa circensis and prospective cultural memory
3 Remembering the future in Tacitus’ Annals: Germanicus’ death and contests of commemoration
4 Ad futuram memoriam: the Augustan Ludi Saeculares
5 Staging memories in the home: intention and devotion in Pompeii and Herculaneum
6 Synagogue inscriptions and the politics of prospective memory
7 The Vicarello milestone beakers and future-oriented mental time travel in the Roman Empire
8 Ancestors, martyrs, and fourth-century gold glass: a case of metaintentions
9 Prospection in the wild: embodiment, enactivity, and commemoration
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Future Thinking in Roman Culture

Future Thinking in Roman Culture is the first volume dedicated to the exploration of prospective memory and future thinking in the Roman world, integrating cutting edge research in cognitive sciences and theory with approaches to historiography, epigraphy, and material culture. This volume opens a new avenue of investigation for Roman memory studies in presenting multiple case studies of memory and commemoration as future-thinking phenomena. It breaks new ground by bringing classical studies into direct dialogue with recent research on cognitive processes of future thinking. The thematically linked but methodologically diverse contributions, all by leading scholars who have published significant work in memory studies of antiquity, both cultural and cognitive, make the volume well suited for classical studies scholars and students seeking to explore cognitive science and philosophy of mind in ancient contexts, with special appeal to those sharing the growing interest in investigating Roman conceptions of futurity and time. The chapters all deliberately coalesce around the central theme of prospection and future thinking and their impact on our understanding of Roman ritual and religion, politics, and individual motivation and intention. This volume will be an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of classics, art history, archaeology, history, and religious studies, as well as scholars and students of memory studies, historical and cultural cognitive studies, psychology, and philosophy. Maggie L. Popkin is the Robson Junior Professor in the Humanities and Associate Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University, USA. She is the author of The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (2016). Her research on Greek and Roman art and architecture has appeared in numerous edited volumes and journals including the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Journal of Late Antiquity. She is a senior member of the American excavations in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods at Samothrace, Greece. Diana Y. Ng is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA. Her research and publications address civic engagements with mythical history via public sculpture and architecture in Asia Minor, elite commemoration, and the application of cognitive theories of learning and remembering to the investigation of Roman public statuary and theatrical space. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Roman Studies, Istanbuler Mitteilungen, and edited volumes on Roman art, memory studies, and applications of cognitive theory to classical studies. She is the co-editor, with Molly Swetnam-Burland, of Reuse and Renovation in Roman Material Culture: Functions, Aesthetics, Interpretations (2018).

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

Recent titles include: Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World Edited by Emilio Zucchetti and Anna Maria Cimino Holders of Extraordinary imperium under Augustus and Tiberius A Study into the Beginnings of the Principate Paweł Sawiński Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity Crystal Addey Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry Edited by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer Ancient History from Below Subaltern Experiences and Actions in Context Edited by Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel Jean Alvares Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Jr. Married Life in Greco-Roman Antiquity Edited by Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet Future Thinking in Roman Culture New Approaches to History, Memory, and Cognition Edited by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng For more information on this series, visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeMonographs-in-Classical-Studies/book-series/RMCS

Future Thinking in Roman Culture New Approaches to History, Memory, and Cognition Edited by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Popkin, Maggie L., 1981–editor, author. | Ng, Diana Y. (Diana Yi-Man), 1978–editor, author. Title: Future thinking in Roman culture : new approaches to history, memory, and cognition/edited by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng. Description: New York : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge monographs in classical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021033492 (print) | LCCN 2021033493 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367687809 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367687816 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003139027 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rome—Social life and customs. | Memory—Social aspects—Rome. | Prospective memory—Rome. | Time—Psychological aspects. | Future, The—Psychological aspects. | Material culture—Rome. | Cognition and culture—Rome. | Rome—Historiography. Classification: LCC DG78 .F888 2022 (print) | LCC DG78 (ebook) | DDC 937—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033492 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033493 ISBN: 978-0-367-68780-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68781-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13902-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: new approaches to future thinking in the Roman world

vii ix xi

1

M A G G I E L . P O P KI N AND DI ANA Y. NG

2

The future of the past: Fabius Pictor (and Dionysios of Halikarnassos) on the pompa circensis and prospective cultural memory

23

J A C O B A . L AT H AM

3

Remembering the future in Tacitus’ Annals: Germanicus’ death and contests of commemoration

37

AARON SEIDER

4

Ad futuram memoriam: the Augustan Ludi Saeculares

54

ERIC ORLIN

5

Staging memories in the home: intention and devotion in Pompeii and Herculaneum

73

M O L LY S WE T NAM- BURL AND

6

Synagogue inscriptions and the politics of prospective memory

93

KAREN B. STERN

7

The Vicarello milestone beakers and future-oriented mental time travel in the Roman Empire M A G G I E L . P O P KI N

113

vi

Contents

8

Ancestors, martyrs, and fourth-century gold glass: a case of metaintentions

133

S U S A N L U D I BL E VI NS

9

Prospection in the wild: embodiment, enactivity, and commemoration

150

D I A N A Y. N G

Bibliography Index

166 190

Illustrations

Figures 2.1

Pediment revetment plaque with chariot procession from the site of S. Omobono, Rome, terracotta, ca. 530 BCE. 4.1 Inscription recording the Secular Games of Augustus. 4.2 “Mama” by Melodee Strong, 2020. 4.3 Inscription recording the Secular Games of Septimius Severus. 5.1 Shrine painting from an unknown house, showing ritual procession with Lares. 5.2.a–b Atrium (a) and peristyle (b) shrines from the “House of the Menander” (I.10.4). 5.3 Votive painting, “House of Philocalus” (IX 3.15). MNN 8836. 5.4 Drawing of a graffito celebrating the birth of a girl named Iuvenilla, with a drawing of the infant embedded in the name. 5.5.a–b Funerary Altar of Iulia Victorina (a) front face, (b) rear face. 6.1 Donor inscription painted onto terracotta tile originally displayed in Dura Europos Synagogue Ceiling. 6.2 Donor inscription from mosaic floor of Susiya synagogue. 6.3 Graffito of Hiya (top); graffito of Ḥananī son of Samuel (bottom) from Dura Europos Synagogue. 6.4 Graffito of Aḥiah, Dura Europos synagogue. 6.5 Aramaic remembrance graffito from Hatra. 7.1 Four silver milestone beakers from Aquae Apollinares (Vicarello). 7.2 Drawing of the engraved itinerary on one of the Vicarello milestone beakers. 7.3 Map showing the approximate route of the itineraries inscribed on the Vicarello milestone beakers. 7.4 Milestone from the Via Augusta from Itálica to Emérita, ca. 117–137 CE. 7.5 Denarius issued by L. Vinicius, reverse showing an inscribed cippus, 16 BCE. 7.6 Replica of the Rudge Cup, Roman Britain, second century CE.

26 55 59 63 75 76 81 86 88 100 100 104 105 108 114 114 117 118 118 129

viii Illustrations 7.7 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1

Copper-alloy pan from the Sacred Spring at Aquae Sulis (Bath), Roman Britain, second century CE. Vessel base with male bust. Vessel base with Saints Peter, Paul, and Peregrina. Vessel base with Christ and saints. Artist’s rendering of the so-called Crypt of the Popes, Catacomb of San Callisto. Vessel base with Christ and saints. Drawing of reinscribed fifth-century BCE statue base from the Athenian Acropolis.

130 140 141 142 144 145 159

Tables 4.1

Comparison of rituals for Secular Games of Augustus and Septimius Severus.

64

Contributors

Susan Ludi Blevins is Senior Researcher with the excavation team at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace, Greece, where she focuses on the significance of materials and the commemorative and topographic dynamics of sculptural dedications. Her work investigates the relationship among material culture, religion, and memory in the Roman and Greek worlds; the intersection of visual culture with issues of identity, power and representation; the topography and built environment of sacred space; and cognition and visual culture. She has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, USA; the University of Georgia Program in Cortona, Italy; Emory University, USA; and Wheaton College in Massachusetts, USA. Jacob A. Latham is Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee, USA. He is a historian of the religions of the city of Rome from the late republic to late antiquity. His recent book, Performance, Memory, and Processions in Ancient Rome: The Pompa Circensis from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity (2016), examines the social significance and historical vicissitudes of the mostoften performed procession of ancient Rome. Currently, he is engaged in a project on the transformation (often labeled Christianization) of public social and ritual performance in late antique Rome. Eric Orlin is Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Puget Sound, USA. He earned his PhD from the Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is the author of Temples, Religion and Politics in the Roman Republic (1997) and Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a Roman Empire (2010), along with several articles on Roman religion and identity, and he served as General Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions (2014). He is also a co-founder of the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Aaron Seider is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, USA. Along with the construction of memory in Roman culture, his interests include Roman literature, gender in antiquity, and the landscapes of the ancient Mediterranean. He has published articles on Catullus,

x Contributors Vergil, Livy, and Sallust, and his first book, Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid: Creating the Past (2013), was a study of the role of memory in the Aeneid. He currently serves as Editor of the New England Classical Journal, and his next book project explores literary responses to grief in the Late Republic. Karen B. Stern is Professor of History at Brooklyn College, USA. Her research focuses on the cultural history and material culture of Jews in the Greek and Roman worlds. She has conducted field research throughout the Mediterranean and has excavated in Jordan, Israel, and Greece. Her most recent book is Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (2018). Molly Swetnam-Burland is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary, USA. She is a specialist on Roman material culture and Roman religion. She has received grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute and the Archaeological Institute of America and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Berlin, Germany. She is the author of Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture (2015) and co-editor of Reuse and Renovation in Roman Material Culture: Functions, Aesthetics, Interpretations (2018) and Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples (2021). Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology and the Art Bulletin.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank our contributors not only for their chapters but also for their generosity and patience as this volume came together under difficult work, research, parenting, and other circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These contributors were all participants in two paper sessions—an Archaeological Institute of America/Society for Classical Studies joint session at the 2019 Annual Meeting organized by Maggie L. Popkin and a session at the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) 2019 Annual Conference co-organized by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng. Although they are not represented in this volume, we would like to thank Nicola Denzey Lewis and Margaret L. Laird for their participation in the SBL session. Eric Orlin and Jacob A. Latham were also involved in the organizing process for the SBL session, and we owe them our gratitude. In addition, we would like to thank Karl Galinsky and Peter Meineck for their support and encouragement as we crafted the proposal for this volume and as we have continued our scholarship in memory studies and cognitive theory, areas in which Karl and Peter are leaders and mentors. We also thank Douglas Boin for his thoughtful comments on our proposal, as well as the additional reviewers who remain anonymous, whose comments and insights on the volume and individual chapters have elevated the quality of the final manuscript. We also want to express our great appreciation for Amy Davis-Poynter and Elizabeth Risch at Routledge for their constant support and understanding as this volume was put together during the unusual and stressful pandemic situation. Maggie L. Popkin would like to thank Case Western Reserve University, particularly the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art History and Art, for the time and financial support to travel to the conferences that inspired this volume and to see the project into print. Samantha Truman, doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University, provided meticulous assistance formatting the chapters in the volume and preparing the bibliographies. Popkin would also like to thank the fellows and staff of the American Academy in Rome in spring 2021, who created a particularly stimulating and supportive environment in which to complete the manuscript. Diana Y. Ng would like to thank the Dean of the College of Arts, Science, and Letters at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for funding her conference participation in 2019 and for the financial support provided for manuscript preparation.

xii Acknowledgments In addition, she would like to thank the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities and the faculty and graduate fellows during the 2019–2020 academic year. Their enthusiasm and multidisciplinary perspectives were wonderful enrichments to her work on the SBL session and on this volume. Finally, she would like to thank Nora Y. Ng for reviewing sections of the manuscript and providing her usual insightful comments.

1

Introduction New approaches to future thinking in the Roman world Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng

‘Wise man’ is the intended meaning of Homo sapiens, but . . . our name is not a description, but only an aspiration. . . . If it is not wisdom, what is it that Homo sapiens actually does so well that no other species even approaches? Seligman et al. 2016: ix; emphasis in original

A group of psychologists, philosophers, and psychiatrists asked this question recently, and the answer they settled upon was prospection (Seligman et al. 2016: ix). Prospection—the ability to imagine future scenarios and use those mental simulations as guides to future action—so aptly and uniquely describes the human species that we would, they argued, be more accurately named Homo prospectus (Seligman et al. 2016: ix–x, passim). Other animals have the capacity to respond to events that have not yet occurred based on prior experiences of pleasure, pain, or fear (for example, a mouse hides before a cat enters the room). However, as Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson argued in a groundbreaking 2007 article in Science entitled “Prospection: Experiencing the Future,” humans have far greater powers of foresight than other animals. Remarkably, we can “pre-experience” not only events we have already experienced (hence the adage “once burnt, twice shy”), but we can also pre-experience future scenarios we have not personally encountered by imagining them—by simulating them in our minds and then pre-experiencing the predicted hedonic consequences of the scenario (Gilbert and Wilson 2007). From Gilbert and Wilson to Seligman and colleagues, numerous scholars today would argue that future thinking constitutes at least part of what makes us human. Prospection, however, does not just separate us cognitively and evolutionarily from other animal species; it also, arguably, has defined and shaped human experience, both personal and social, throughout history, including in classical antiquity. Indeed, as ancient authors make clear, future thinking was on the minds of Romans, at least some of whom considered the relationship between past and future and the ways in which posterity would remember the present. For example, in a letter to Caesar, Cicero wrote of a monument (monumentum): “It should pay regard to the memory of posterity rather than the approval of the present day” (ad memoriam magis spectare debet posteritatis quam ad praesentis temporis gratiam) (Cic. Epist. ad Caes. fr. 7).1 Quintilian had much the same to say of history DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-1

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Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng

writing, which he viewed as designed “to preserve a memory for future generations” (ad memoriam posteritatis . . . componitur) (Quint. Inst. 10.1.31). For both Cicero and Quintilian, memory and the future were fundamentally connected. Artifacts we tend to associate with remembering the past—whether a physical monument or a written history—exist, in fact, for posterity; that is, they fulfill their primary function insofar as they shape future memory. Romans were not concerned only with preserving the past for future generations; more prosaic yet equally important was the ability to remember to do things in the future. A monitor in Rome was a person whose role it was to remind somebody else of something, whether that meant a counsellor who fed legal tidbits to an orator (e.g., Cic. Div. in Caecil. 16.52), a teacher of youth (e.g., Hor. Ars po. 163), or a prompter in theatrical performances (e.g., Paul. ex Fest. p. 138 Müll). The figures of the mnemon in Greece and the nomenclator in Rome were slaves tasked with helping their master remember to do (or not do) certain actions in the future, to speak certain names, and so on (e.g., Cic. Att. 4.1.5; see Bettini 2011: 31 on monitores and nomenclatores). While the figure of the mnemon/nomenclator might seem banal, these human aids for remembering were critical actors in Rome’s social networks, for the social and political ramifications of forgetting a client’s name or of failing to connect on a personal level with potential voters could be significant. Of course, as Seneca notes (Ben. 1.3.10), if a nomenclator ever forgot a name, he could just invent one, demonstrating that memory aids are not infallible! Indeed, the figure of the mnemon in Greek mythology, charged with helping a hero remember not to do something, often fails at this prospective memory task. Achilles’ mnemon fails to prevent Achilles from killing somebody from Apollo’s line (Tenes), while Hector’s mnemon does not stop Hector from killing somebody dear to Achilles (Patroclus) (Bettini 2011: 33–34). Many people living in the Roman world would have grown up learning a mythological corpus that lays bare the consequences of not remembering to remember, that is, of failing at prospective memory. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that we hear from ancient authors many examples of people employing particular strategies to remember to remember in the future. In Greek myths circulating in the Roman world, one finds prospective memory aids, such as Ariadne’s string. The mnemon/nomenclator/monitor is, of course, another such strategy—a truly embodied memory aide.2 At least some Romans located memory even more specifically in the human body. According to Pliny, memory sits in the earlobe (est in aure ima memoriae locus, HN 11.251). Romans could, therefore, jog their memory by tugging on their ear. Seneca, when writing of remembering to keep his word and fulfill a promise, says he shall give his ear a twitch (aurem mihi pervellam, Ben. 4.36.1; see also Sen. Ep. 94.55). Pulling an earlobe could also serve as a warning to do something, that is, to remember to fulfill one’s obligation. Thus, Vergil (Ecl. 6.3–5) recounts that Apollo plucked Vergil’s ear to remind him to sing a slender song instead of chasing ambitions of epics of kings and battles (cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit: “pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ovis, deductum dicere carmen”). As Maurizio Bettini has argued, “touching and pulling the ear was a gestural translation of the verb admonere” (2011: 38).

Introduction 3 If the Roman monitor and nomenclator demonstrate the importance of prospection for the careers of individual politicians, Vergil demonstrates elsewhere in his oeuvre that entire civilizations could depend upon future thinking and prospective memory. In book 4 of the Aeneid (4.220–77), Jupiter instructs Mercury to appear to Aeneas in Carthage and remind the errant Trojan of his destiny to reach Italy. Here, Aeneas must fulfill in his immediate future a promise made by his mother, Venus, in the past. In abandoning Carthage and Dido for the shores of Italy, the passage makes clear, Aeneas will ensure the future destiny of his son Ascanius and also of Rome itself. Jupiter’s words leave no doubt that Aeneas must look to his son’s future, lest Aeneas, “the father, grudge Ascanias the towers of Rome” (Ascanione pater Romanas invidet arces) (4.234). “What,” Jupiter asks, “is his [Aeneas’] plan?” (quid struit?) (4.235), a demand that Aeneas not only envision his future but also devise and follow through on a plan to actualize that future. When Mercury confronts Aeneas, Aeneas heeds Jupiter’s commands and immediately begins planning how to leave Dido: “he casts his swift mind this way and that, takes it in different directions and considers every possibility” (atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc in partisque rapit varias perque omnia versat) (4.285–86). The future, it seems, was on Romans’ minds. In all the instances just cited, the actors were motivated by how people in the future would behave or would remember them—and they often manipulated their physical worlds and even their own bodies to ensure a certain outcome in the future. It is the aim of this volume to evaluate how people living in the Roman world envisioned and shaped their futures through writing and image-making—and how, in turn, texts, objects, and images exerted an impact on how people both perceived the future and remembered to perform actions in a time yet to be. The application of cognitive theories of future thinking and prospection and of the extended mind to ancient corpora of evidence produces new knowledge about intention and motivation in antiquity, the agency of sub-elite groups and individuals, and the future-oriented nature of Roman commemorations of the past. The chapters—which range from archaeology and art history to religious studies, literary studies, and history—present diverse sets of evidence and analytical methods to argue that concern for the future throws important new light on individual motivation and intention, power and politics, and religious and ritual practice in Roman antiquity. This introduction paves the way by defining some of the key cognitive and psychological theories and terms of prospection that undergird the volume, situating the turn to the future in broader trends in historical cognitive science and ancient memory studies and presenting the major themes that unite the chapters.

Relevant areas of cognitive research into prospection Since Gilbert and Wilson’s seminal 2007 article on experiencing the future, cognitive and psychological research on human prospection has exploded. As the anecdotes mentioned earlier indicate and as the following chapters flesh out, many of these studies of prospection map onto Roman mentalities, which are

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not necessarily so dissimilar from ours. Nietzsche recognized the importance of remembering to keep promises to the fabric of societies (Nietzsche 1994[1887]: 38–71, esp. 39–50), but, long before Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, Seneca too opined at length about promises and the social contexts in which they must be kept or could in good faith be broken (Ben. 4.34.1–3). Although Romans’ imaginings of the future were culturally conditioned, it appears that they were responding to similar concerns to many people today and that their future-oriented cognition operated in ways similar to ours. For example, whether Jews living in the Levant or Romans residing in Iberia, people around the Roman world externalized prospection and intention into the world, adopting often strikingly similar strategies to simulate the future and to remember to remember, even as they operated in culturally and historically specific contexts. Though this volume does not argue for universalism in modes of future thinking and cognition, the evidence of future thinking as a phenomenon of coupled mind and environment presented throughout this volume demonstrates that astute applications of cognitive research can illuminate how texts, objects, and rituals functioned in antiquity in ways that both responded to simulations of the future and shaped the future. Here, we offer an overview of key areas of research that inform the following chapters in this volume. Prospective memory In the words of psychologists Jan Rummel and Mark McDaniel, prospective memory “can be broadly defined as the mental ability to remember to perform previously formed action plans (intentions) at an appropriate moment in the future” (Rummel and McDaniel 2019a: 1; see also McDaniel and Einstein 2007). It encompasses the encoding, storage, and eventual retrieval of these intended actions (Kliegel, McDaniel, and Einstein 2008: xiii). Remembering to perform actions in the future, banal as it may seem, is critical to our personal lives. Remembering to pick your child up from soccer practice on Tuesday afternoon may seem like no big deal—until you forget to do it. Failures of prospective memory can have fatal consequences; one would not want to be on a flight where the pilot has forgotten to adjust the wing flaps correctly for takeoff (Dismukes 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017)! The number of publications on prospective memory in recent years has increased exponentially (see Figure 1.1 in Rummel and McDaniel 2019a: 2), with literally hundreds of articles appearing just within the past five years. Much of this research into prospective memory has focused on how people form, maintain, and retrieve intentions, a topic that scholars have explored from neuroscientific, developmental, and applied perspectives. From a neurological perspective, prospective memory is supported by a network in the brain that includes structures in the rostral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and hippocampal complex; the prefrontal cortex areas are especially active when people engage in prospective memory tasks (West 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017: 21–39; Cona and Rothen 2019). Developmentally, prospective memory is crucial to people’s abilities to function autonomously and care for themselves effectively (Ballhausen et al. 2019). From

Introduction 5 an applied perspective, scholars have investigated how to identify and treat people with deficits in prospective memory and how prospective memory can improve healthy habits such as remembering to take medications correctly. Happily, several key volumes offer informative overviews of prospective memory and of recent theoretical, methodological, and applied advances (McDaniel and Einstein 2007; Kliegel, McDaniel, and Einstein 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017; Rummel and McDaniel 2019b). Particularly relevant to many of the chapters in this volume is research into the metacognition of prospective memory. “Metacognition” refers to our awareness, beliefs, and knowledge about our cognitive processes—it is, as commonly formulated, how we think about thinking (Beran et al. 2012; Fleming and Frith 2014). Metacognition includes “our ability to assess and control our current performance on a cognitive task,” including prospective memory tasks (Kuhlmann 2019: 60). Metacognitive processes apply to all stages of prospective memory: forming and encoding, retaining, and retrieving an intention. A person who makes a doctor’s appointment in April for two months in the future needs to assess whether they will successfully remember the appointment in June. If they are worried about forgetting it, they can employ various metacognitive strategies (Kuhlmann 2019). Our imaginary person, for example, might write the appointment in their daily planner. Here, they have made the cognitive decision to offload their intention (to go to the doctor in April) into the physical environment (a paper planner or, for the more technologically savvy, perhaps an e-calendar in a smartphone) (Gilbert 2015). In Rome, as we saw earlier, a person seeking to remember to do or say something in the future might offload their intention to a nomenclator or monitor, whose very presence attests to their master’s assessment that he will not otherwise remember successfully. In fact, people may underestimate their capacity to remember to remember (metacognitively undervaluing their memory abilities) and thus are biased toward using external reminders (Schnitzspahn et al. 2011; Gilbert et al. 2020). Some scholars have described prospective memory as inherently metaintentional, a view that positions intentions—forming them, retaining them, and acting upon them—as the crux of prospective memory (Smith 2016). Episodic future thinking/future-oriented mental time travel Prospective memory is one form of prospection or future thinking. Some scholars (Ward 2016; Cohen and Hicks 2017) have argued that it subsumes episodic future thinking, which refers to the capacity to simulate mentally—or imagine—scenarios and experiences that might occur in one’s personal future (Schacter, Benoit, and Szpunar 2017). When engaged in episodic future thinking, a person essentially projects themselves into a future event and “pre-experiences” that event and their affective reactions to it (Atance and O’Neill 2001). Episodic future thinking—also called episodic foresight or episodic future simulation (see Bulley 2018: 80 for an overview of the terminological debate)—refers specifically, as the terms suggests, to thinking about one’s personal future. As episodic memory refers to one’s autobiographical memory—that is, one’s memory for events one has experienced

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personally—so episodic future thinking (or foresight or simulation) refers to mental simulations of an event that a person might expect to experience in their future. Studies of episodic future thinking tend to focus on episodic simulation (see Schacter, Benoit, and Szpunar 2017: 41), but simulation is just one form of future thinking, or prospection. People not only simulate the future but also evaluate those simulations and use them to guide future thought and action (Seligman et al. 2016: 6). Karl Szpunar and colleagues have created a quadripartite taxonomy of prospection: simulation (construction of a detailed mental representation of the future); prediction (estimation of the likelihood of, and/or one’s reaction to, a particular future outcome); intention (the mental act of setting a goal); and planning (the identification and organization of steps toward achieving a goal state). (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016: 21, emphases in original; see also Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2014; Szpunar, Shrikanth, and Schacter 2018.) A person might simulate or imagine a representation of a future in which they have lost ten pounds, predict that they will feel better about their appearance, set the intention to eat better and exercise more, and plan to join a gym and buy more healthful foods at the grocery store. The example we have just given is episodic; it has clearly to do with the future that an individual imagines for themselves. But prospection can also be semantic in nature or a hybrid of semantic and episodic (Michaelian, Klein, and Szpunar 2016a: 3). In contrast to episodic memory, semantic memory refers to our memory for events that we have not experienced personally, that is, to our general knowledge about the world. When we remember our tenth birthday party, that is an episodic memory. When we remember that George Washington was the first president of the United States, that is a semantic memory. Just as we may simulate a personal future, we may also simulate a semantic future having to do with “more general or abstract states of the world that may arise in the future” (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016: 21–22). Examples of semantic future thinking might include strategic planning for a corporation or urban planning (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016: 29). When Mercury reminds Aeneas of his obligation to leave Carthage behind and venture forth to Italy, both episodic and semantic future thinking are at play. Aeneas’ response to Mercury’s appearance follows Szpunar et al.’s taxonomy of future thinking. Mercury’s words cause Aeneas to simulate a future scenario (one in which he never leaves Carthage), to predict how he would respond to that scenario (with horror), to set an intention (to leave Carthage at once), and to plan how to do so (which, notably, he does by mentally simulating different possibilities of how to break the news to Dido). Aeneas’ future thinking is episodic, as he simulates and plans for what he personally will do in the future of his own lifetime. It is also, however, semantic, insofar as he simulates and plans for his son’s future and the future of his people. Ultimately, of course, Aeneas’ future thinking in this passage ensures the founding of Rome.

Introduction 7 Some scholars have coined the term “future-oriented mental time travel,” or FMTT, to describe the prospective cognitive process of simulating future events, that is, of projecting oneself into the future (Michaelian, Klein, and Szpunar 2016b). Compared to terms such as episodic future thinking or episodic foresight, FMTT has the benefit of recognizing the capacity of future thinking to be semantic as well as episodic. Additionally, FMTT necessarily raises past-oriented mental time travel (see Michaelian 2016 on mental time travel) and thus evokes the cognitive and neural links between prospection and retrospection. It has become increasingly clear over the past fifteen years or so that our ability to imagine the future—to create mental simulations of future scenarios and events and to predict, set intentions, and plan based on those simulations—is, neurologically speaking, intimately intertwined with our ability to remember the past. For example, neural imaging studies have demonstrated that the regions of our brains involved in episodic—or autobiographical—memory of the past and FMTT overlap considerably; both implicate the default mode network, or DMN (Schacter and Addis 2007; Perrin and Michaelian 2017; Addis 2020). The DMN is an interconnected network of regions in our brains (including the medial and lateral parietal, medial prefrontal, and medial and lateral temporal cortices) that is most active when the brain is “at rest”—that is, when it is engaged in internal mental-state processes instead of tasks that require attention to external elements. Such internal processes include imagining, daydreaming, or retrieving autobiographical memories (see Raichle 2015 for an overview of the DMN). Donna Rose Addis has recently gone even further, arguing that memory, imagination, and even perception are part of a single neurocognitive system, which she terms the simulation system. Remembering and imagining the future both draw on elements of experience that we glean from sensory perception and generate internally from information and schemas that we acquire as social(ized) beings (Addis 2018, 2020). 4E cognition Studies of prospective memory that explore how people remind themselves to remember suggest some overlap between prospective memory and theories of 4E—extended, embodied, enactive, and embedded—cognition (Landsiedel and Gilbert 2015; Gilbert 2015). Tying a string around your finger to help you remember to call your mother on her birthday implicates parts of your body other than your brain (your finger) as well as something external to your body (the string) in your prospective memory, raising the specter of the embedded and/or extended (prospective) brain. The thread of Ariadne was laid down by Theseus acting out of a prospective intention—to prevent him from forgetting how to find his way out of the labyrinth after his encounter with the Minotaur. Rummel and McDaniel (2019a: 2–3) suggest that prospective memory, long segregated from other forms of cognition, should be better integrated with cognitive research. Scholarship on distributed cognition and the “4Es” it encompasses accommodates many variations and opinions. Yet, it makes sense to think of the first three of these “Es” as a series of overlapping frameworks. Extended cognition is the

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fundamental proposition that cognition is not “brainbound” but extends through the body to sensory receptors and even beyond the skin (Clark and Chalmers 1998). In an extended cognition model, or extended mind hypothesis (EMH) as it is more formally referred to in philosophy-of-mind scholarship, cognition occurs across a “coupled system” comprising both the mind and active external co-agents (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 8). In arguing for the EMH, Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced what has become an oft-cited and debated comparison: Otto’s notebook and Inga’s brain. Inga hears that a museum is located at a certain address, forms a belief that the museum is indeed at that location, and recalls the address at a later time when she wants to visit. In contrast, an Alzheimer’s Disease sufferer named Otto relies on external resources to guide his actions in the world rather than his unreliable mental resources. He records information such as the location of a museum in a notebook that he always carries with him with the belief that the address is correct and later consults the information in his notebook when he wishes to visit the museum (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 12–13). For Clark and Chalmers, Otto’s notebook functions in the same way as Inga’s memory: they can be consulted as needed in accordance with beliefs held by Otto and Inga. The key to accepting Otto’s notebook as a cognitive extension rather than external storage is in Otto’s automatic consultation of it and endorsement of its contents as he goes about his life: he refers to his notebook constantly as he executes the tasks of life, he writes in the notebook things that he believes, and when he reads information from the notebook he believes it (1998: 17). With the understanding that cognition can and does occur beyond the brain, embodied cognition recognizes that the entire body is cognitively agentic through its sensorimotor perceptions. In theorizing the relationship between the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain, scholars in neuroscience and philosophy of mind such as Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, and Francisco Varela have argued that consciousness arises from intertwined sensorimotor perception and cognition (Noë 2004, 2007; Noë and Thompson 2004; Thompson and Varela 2001). Using the examples of visual perception and of seeing a cat sitting behind a fence, Noë and Thompson point out that, while only the parts of the cat not hidden by the fence posts are visually perceptible, “the unseen portions of the cat are experienced as present because one implicitly understands . . . that one can actively bring them into primary focus through movements of the head and redirections of attention” (Noë and Thompson 2004: 16; see also Noë 2004: 60–64). Thus, bodily and perceptual experiences of the external world not only provide stimuli and information that activate cognition. They are also fundamentally instrumental—through one’s “expectation (or knowledge or belief or anticipation)” about how physical actions affect perception (Noë 2007: 533; Noë and Thompson 2004: 17)—in how the brain seeks out information and what it then “experiences as present” or true. David Milner and Melvyn Goodale’s model of two visual processing streams similarly imbricates visual perception with cognition and personal expectations (see Noë 2004: 11–12 on its compatibility with enactive approaches). The dorsal

Introduction 9 visual processing stream leads to physical movements to engage with the seen world, such as to grab for something, while the other, ventral, visual processing stream uses information already encoded in the brain to recognize, sort, and memorize what is seen (Milner and Goodale 2006: 63–65, 229). Thus, a person’s visual sensory perceptions of the world allow for their “behavior . . . to be guided intelligently by events that have occurred at an earlier time” (Milner and Goodale 2006: 20). To illustrate, one sees a block of ice, and the dorsal processing stream generates movement to touch it. When one’s fingers touch the ice, the sensations felt by the skin and flesh signal to the brain that the block of ice is cold. The brain encodes the tactile percept of coldness with the visual percept of the physical properties of the ice block, forming an internal belief in the coldness of ice that can guide later interactions with and intentional uses of ice. The “sensorimotor coupling” between body and environment as the basis of sense-making shown in the examples of the ice block and of the partially hidden cat is the basic premise of enactive cognition (Thompson and Varela 2001: 418, 423–24; Wheeler 2017; 460; see Gallagher 2017 for a survey of the scope of enactivist approaches). The implications of 4E cognition—especially of the closely related embodied and enactivist cognition—for humans’ creation and use of external representations and material culture are fundamental to the field of cognitive archaeology. The originators of this field, Lambros Malafouris and his collaborators, have over the last two decades refined the material engagement theory (MET) as a framework for understanding the agency of new materials and forms to shape human cognition and to coevolve with it (e.g., Malafouris 2020, 2013, 2004; Malafouris and Renfrew 2010; Knappett and Malafouris 2008; Idhe and Malafouris 2019). The example of a vessel being made on the potter’s wheel in MET emphasizes the creation of a new artifact as a bidirectional process flowing between the potter’s hands and the constantly changing clay on the wheel, rather than as the intentional manifestation of a mental concept of a vessel (Malafouris 2020: 5–6, 2019: 111, 2008: 28–33). An example of MET that grapples with internal representations such as memory and knowledge is that of the Linear B tablet. What may seem obvious as a passive storage device is shown to be much more when the investigative focus is placed on cognitive processes rather than on representation of information. The formal innovation of the small clay tablets first afforded the keeping of records using inscribed pictograms and dictated the amount of information that could be inscribed on them before they quickly dried. The tablets also enabled new ways to sort information physically and epistemically by adding engraved line divisions in the clay and by organizing them in archives (Malafouris 2013: 68–73). Moreover, new cognitive processes are brought into existence through the creation of this artifact type: forgetting what has been inscribed and filed away and then reading to recall or to know, rather than remembering in one’s mind (Malafouris 2013: 81–82; Orlin, this volume). Artifacts thus are seen to have a determinative role in how humans and cultures think and understand their world, starting from sensory engagement and material interactions. MET’s radical enactivist stance represents one—but not the only—approach to cognitive archaeology based on the 4E cognition models. Thompson and Varela

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noted that embodied and enactive cognition are also crucial to intersubjective interaction and social cognition in perceiving and responding to physical cues like gesture and facial expression (2001: 424). In explicating “thoughtful” perception, Noë allows that “perception content is conceptual” at different levels, such that prior knowledge and beliefs make sensory stimulation understandable (Noë 2004: 181, 182–90; Noë 2007: 534–35). Thus, there are multiple avenues for applications of 4E cognition models to the understanding of how text and artifacts can be cognitive partners in personal, social, and cultural reckoning, as argued in scholarship on enactive cognition and ancient Roman statuary and visual culture (Ng 2019a; Ng 2019b: 360–61). Theories of future thinking also integrate processes taking place inside the mind—intention, simulation, prediction, planning—and their translation into action and into the external world, making embodied and enactive cognition frameworks especially relevant in their investigation. The ramifications of the enactivity of minds and bodies through the physical world in the context of simulation and preparation can be clearly connected to prospection and FMTT. Whereas one might initially consider the act of writing down an appointment or a set of directions in a notebook to be a simple offloading of information onto a passive external storage device, one now can consider the frequent, panicked visual scan across one’s desk for a pencil and paper when confronted with a key piece of information or the small and seemingly random movements of a pen in hand, hovering over paper, to be physical enactments of both intention and the simulation of a future in which a written note would play an important part in an individual’s action. Predictive processing The multiple enactivist approaches and arguments that emphasize environmental interaction and cognitive cost-savings have propelled some cognitive theorists toward the model of predictive processing and prediction error minimization (PEM). These frameworks posit that, in seeking to maintain optimal efficiency, the brain constantly anticipates its perceptions of the world through expectations— predictions—generated from existing internal models: According to this emerging class of models, naturally intelligent systems (humans and other animals) do not passively await sensory stimulation. Instead, they are constantly active, trying to predict the streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. Before an “input” arrives on the scene, these pro-active cognitive systems are already busy predicting its most probable shape and implications. Systems like this are already (and almost constantly) poised to act, and all they need to process are any sensed deviations from the predicted state. (Clark 2015: 2) The predictive brain devotes attentional resources not to stimuli that accord with prior experience and beliefs, but only toward “prediction errors,” percepts that

Introduction 11 are unexpected or present wholly new information, exerting effort to reconcile what “should be” and what actually is (Hohwy 2013: 196–97; Clark 2016: 57–77; see also Noë and Thompson 2004 for active and attentional perceptual content). The brain can resolve the prediction error by revising existing beliefs or through sensory resampling (Hohwy 2013: 42–46; Friston 2014: 119). The result of prior beliefs or knowledge undergoing revision is new learned information that itself becomes the “generative model” for “predictions and correcting mistakes . . . [and] is refined under the supervision of the prediction-error ‘learning signal’ provided by the world itself ” (Marchi and Hohwy 2020). Predictive processing, therefore, is an enactive cognitive “spiral” that extends ad infinitum for the life of the subject (Hohwy 2013: 34). It is important to note that “prediction” in the theory of predictive processing is not a conscious or intentional action. Instead, the mind anticipates on a subconscious level its (and its attached body’s) interaction with the external world to conform to prior beliefs formed based on previous experiences. Predictive processing differs, therefore, from the conscious simulation, prediction, intention, and planning that are at the core of prospection, as outlined earlier. Nevertheless, the predictive brain is inherently both enactive and prospective, constantly simulating a near-to-immediate future and engagement with the external world while, at the same time, constantly updating its generative models to avoid prediction errors (Clark 2016: 271). Predictive processing theorists also posit a hierarchical structure of internal representations, at the top of which are shared social and cultural constructs (Clark 2016: 278–80). In allowing for questioning the validity of high-level beliefs such as relationships, values, and norms in the face of disruption, predictive processing provides an opening into considerations of prospection: a mental simulation of what one might expect from—and, consequently, how one should act to fit into—a world that might have shifted under the feet. Embedded and socially situated cognition and prospection Much of the cognitive theory and science that has been detailed up to this point is individually oriented. Yet it is impossible to attempt to study textual and material cultures solely on the level of the individual, as one’s bodily cognitive engagement with text, artifacts, and ritual is mediated by and embedded within larger cultural and other contexts. The cues that prompt any individual subject to think, understand, and imagine are also thusly situated. Embedded cognition, the final of distributed cognition’s 4Es, calls for the understanding of cognition not only as extended to sensory perceptions and physical environments but also into the particular historical, political, social, and cultural circumstances in which those environments, tools, and the interactions with them exist. Thus, this system is fundamentally compatible with Edwin Hutchins’ cognitive ecology, first introduced in his 1995 Cognition in the Wild (see also Hutchins 2001, 2010). Hutchins argued that perception, learning, and action are shaped by a subject’s physical interactions with its historically and technologically specific environment—or cognitive ecology.3 In social psychology, the concept of situated cognition similarly emphasizes that “[k]nowing (and not

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just learning) . . . is inextricably situated in the physical and social context of its acquisition and use” (Brown, Collins, and Duguid 1989: 1; emphasis in original). John Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid take the position that “[k]nowledge is fundamentally a co-production of the mind and the world” (1989: 1–2).4 This volume advocates for a slight rephrasing to say “future thinking is fundamentally a coproduction of the mind, body, and the world,” for the enmeshment of cognition with culture and society also holds true for modes of prospection. When we make commitments to or make contracts with others about what we are going to do, our ability to remember to perform future actions becomes critical to the fabric of societies (see the previous discussion of Nietzsche and Seneca). Although cognitive and psychological research still focuses predominantly on the individual neurological processes—and potential failures—of prospective memory, scholars have begun to explore the social contexts of remembering to remember (Brandimonte and Ferrante 2008; Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2011). Such scholarship situates prospective memory not as a purely individual cognitive activity but rather as an activity dependent upon and shaped by social interactions (actual, imagined, or implied) and by socially determined values that can, for example, color certain intended actions as more significant and valuable and thus more worthy of being remembered (Brandimonte and Ferrante 2008; Penningroth, Scott, and Freuen 2011). Collaboration and socially driven motivation can also have an impact on individuals’ prospective memory performance (Brandimonte et al. 2010; D’Angelo et al. 2012), as can socially constructed gender roles (Niedźwieńska and Zielińska 2020). These social and collaborative dynamics of remembering may be familiar to many from the work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose seminal publications on collective memory argued that even individual memories originate in and are shaped by social milieus and circumstances (“les cadres sociaux de la mémoire”) (Halbwachs 1950, 1952). Yet, even today, research on prospective memory tends to sidestep the social contexts in which prospective remembering and future thinking occur (Cohen and Hicks 2017: 10). We believe this is an area where scholars outside of cognitive science can contribute significant insights and raise vital questions for future research. This volume’s chapters are not psychological or cognitive studies, but they suggest the potential of considering prospective memory from historically and socially situated perspectives outside highly controlled—and thus to an extent artificial—laboratory conditions (see Rummel and Kvavilashvili 2019 on the need for greater study of prospective memory in naturalistic and real-life settings). In historical cognitive science, detailed later, the movement from individual psychological and cognitive capacities to the level of the social and historical has already begun. This volume demonstrates the value of this trajectory for prospective memory and other forms of future thinking. Like studies of prospective memory, studies of episodic future thinking and FMTT operate largely in constrained laboratory conditions and often focus explicitly and exclusively on the neural and cognitive mechanisms and functions of episodic future thinking: for example, the reliance on the episodic memory system

Introduction 13 (a cognitive mechanism, namely, our ability to encode and retrieve memories of personal experience heavily reliant on the medial temporal lobe) and the activation of the brain’s core—or default mode network (a neural mechanism, on which see Raichle 2015; Schacter, Benoit, and Szpunar 2017). As some recent studies suggest, however, episodic simulation can have a broader social impact, including on some of the most urgent problems our contemporary society faces. A recent study, for example, found that pre-experiencing climate change through episodic future thinking motivates people to engage in more pro-environmental behavior (Lee et al. 2020; cf. Bø and Wolff 2020). In short, prospection is rightly being recognized as critical to human society as well as to individuals’ lives and well-being (Oettingen, Sevincer, and Gollwitzer 2018; Seligman et al. 2016). Beyond the social import of promise-keeping that philosophers from Seneca to Nietzsche have intuited, prospection has had extraordinary evolutionary significance for humans (Gilbert and Wilson 2007; Suddendorf, Addis, and Corballis 2009; cf. Crystal and Wilson 2015). Additionally, mobilizing to act on the idea of a future benefit or cost can result in innovation but “also lies at the foundation of human social, moral, and economic life” (Seligman et al. 2016: 22). Indeed, there are few aspects of our individual or social lives that do not implicate the future or vice versa.

Situating future thinking in historical cognition and memory studies In his 1998 Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism, John Sutton first advocated for a historical cognitive science, an interdisciplinary methodology by which cognitive phenomena—specifically memory in that work— could be studied and understood as part of historical and cultural phenomenology (1998: 10–15). That is, how humans made sense of their environment, how they thought and remembered, would be considered as situated in, aided by, and changing with the social, historical, technological, and cultural circumstances of a given time and place. In later descriptions of and advocacy for historical cognitive science, Sutton draws on and responds to cognitive archaeology to argue that the modes of extended and embodied cognition that exist in a particular historical moment were also of key importance in historical cognitive science (Sutton 2008). Similarly, we suggest that how humans simulate the future and respond to future simulations requires an understanding of cultural and historical contexts that cannot be achieved by cognitive and psychological studies alone. Gilbert and Wilson (2007), in their foundational article mentioned previously, give as an example of a pre-experienced hedonic consequence a person who imagines a liver popsicle and pre-experiences how disgusting it would be to eat such a concoction. To our minds, however, such a culinary example underscores the extent to which our anticipations of certain hedonic experiences are culturally determined. A twentyfirst-century American asked to envision eating a dormouse would likely respond, “Gross!” An ancient Roman, for whom dormouse was a delicacy, would likely have responded, “Yum!” Here, the same cognitive process—mentally simulating

14 Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng eating something in the future and pre-experiencing the hedonic consequence— could result in two very different “prefeelings.” The socially and historically embedded nature of cognition exemplified by this dormouse delicacy is at the center of the historical cognitive science approach, which has been pioneered especially by scholars of Early Modern England. Evelyn Tribble applied the distributed cognition and cognitive ecology frameworks to the analysis of Early Modern theater production. Tribble argued that Shakespearean actors’ and audiences’ cognition were distributed to the Globe Theatre’s stage doors and to large sheets of paper called “plots” that mapped out entire casts’ stage movements throughout a play (2011: 29–51, 2005: 143–47). Such cognitive practices were so historically and professionally specific to the world of Elizabethan stage-acting that the plots have proven hard for modern scholars to understand (Tribble 2011: 45–51). She further argues that the contemporary social, economic, and theatrical contexts of educational innovations such as grammar schools and apprenticeship systems were vital to the “enskillment” of actors in the period to learn and play many roles at any one given time (Tribble 2011, especially 115–18 for enskillment concept). Moving outside the Globe Theatre to consider learning and cognition in Reformation England, Tribble and Nicholas Keene convincingly argued that the radical alterations made to de-Catholicized churches—the casting out of multiple competing visual, olfactory, and auditory stimuli—were not merely symbolic, but also introduced a new environment for the embodied cognition of Protestantism. Congregants no longer moved through the church but sat in pews to listen to long sermons delivered from the visually commanding pulpit and read the written scriptures (Tribble and Keene 2011: 47–70). In such a setting, where cognition was distributed to architecture and spatial experiences, former Catholics learned how to be Protestants. The continuing development of historical cognitive sciences is evidenced by the History of Distributed Cognition Project led by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns, Mark Sprevak, and Mike Wheeler at the University of Edinburgh. Out of this interdisciplinary and multichronological project have come an array of scholarly activity and multiple volumes spanning classical antiquity (Anderson, Cairns, and Sprevak 2019) through the twenty-first century. In ancient studies, Peter Meineck’s Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition, and the Imperative for Theatre (2018) takes a similar system-level, historical cognitive science approach to the investigation of Greek drama and its performance. Meineck applies neuroscientific research such as on mirror neurons and the DMN to argue that the dramatic texts, masks, movements and gestures of the actors, and musical and physical environments of performed Greek drama created a cognitive experience conducive to the heightened emotion and empathy that were particularly urgent in the fifth-century BCE Greek world. Separately, the value of applying cognitive theory to the studies of classical literature and linguistics, archaeology, and religion was persuasively demonstrated in Meineck, William Short, and Jennifer Devereaux’s 2019 Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory. These examples of historical cognitive science dovetail with other calls for greater cross-disciplinary investigation into the social construction and negotiation

Introduction 15 of prospective memories. The present volume seeks to answer this call. While cognitive and psychological studies focus overwhelmingly on individual prospective memory (as they have focused on individual retrospective memory as well), Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2011) proposes that we think about collective prospective memory—or what Piotr Szpunar and Karl Szpunar have more recently called collective future thought (the “act of imagining an event that has yet to transpire on behalf of, or by, a group”) (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 378). Collective memory is a mainstay of cultural memory studies but overwhelmingly focuses on how the past is remembered in the present. Calls for studying collective future thinking and/or collective prospective memory envision the collective (imagined) future as having discernible impacts in the present and on how the past is remembered and reconstructed in the present (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 382; see also Seligman et al. 2016: 133–53). This volume seeks to turn the attention of cultural memory studies of antiquity from the past to the future. Memory—but not necessarily the cognitive processes of remembering—is a not a new topic to Roman studies by any stretch of the imagination. That the Greeks and especially the Romans were highly concerned with memory as a human faculty is no secret; hardly any work on classical memory is without a reference to Quintilian’s advice for students of rhetoric to locate their memories in their minds as though in the parts of a house (Inst., 11.2.20–21) or Cicero’s description in De Oratore of Simonides’ crushed banqueters (2.352–54). Works investigating Roman memory for text (Small 1997), Roman memory as part of artistic viewership (Bergmann 1994; Koortbojian 1996), and Roman memory as an element in imperialism and colonialism (for example, Alcock 2002) have made memory one of the most widely adopted interpretive frameworks in Roman studies. In recent years, numerous publications have continued to advance our understanding of how images and monuments shaped collective memory and constructed historical narratives in the Roman world (e.g., Gowing 2005; Flower 2006; Stein-Hölkeskamp and Hölkeskamp 2006; Shaya 2013; Galinsky 2014, 2016; Galinsky and Lapatin 2015; Latham 2016; Popkin 2016; Ng 2016). These works are especially notable in that the authors interrogate collective and cultural memory as analytical frameworks as much as they examine the ancient historical and archaeological evidence. Concepts of collective and cultural memory emerge as historiographically useful lenses through which to consider the revival or persistence of religion, myth, and local history in different eras. Overall, memory studies in scholarship on the Roman world have understandably emphasized the retrospective and presentist aspects of memory: how Romans looked to the past for precedents and guidance to shape present action or how they sought to reshape or deny the past through damnatio memoriae, for example. More recently, however, the future has begun to emerge as a greater concern in Roman studies. Emma Dench devotes a chapter in her recent book on Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World to “time,” arguing that Romans’ ideas of empire included imagining its inevitable future end (Dench 2018: 147–54). And certainly scholars have commented on the contractual nature of Roman religion, with gods often invoked to affect and effect future outcomes

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(see, recently, Egri 2019–2020). In a recent article, Brent Shaw asks explicitly, “Did the Romans have a future?” (Shaw 2019). His answer, however, is “No, not like us.” Shaw argues for a fragmented and short-term Roman futurity, concluding that Romans were “fixed in the present and with a heavy dependence on magical revelation for knowledge of the future” (Shaw 2019: 5). He bases his argument largely on analysis of evidence for commercial, military, and municipal fiscal planning, focusing on why Romans did not develop an institutionalized system of credit and loans. Shaw’s study, though valuable, generalizes beliefs about the future from the practices of elite political leaders, excluding large segments of Roman people and glossing over material and textual evidence for prospection, future thinking, and Roman futurities outside of economic practice and policy. Shaw implies that, because Romans did not have a concept of the future that corresponds to today’s market economy, they therefore did not have a rich, complex culture of future thinking. As Astrid Van Oyen has demonstrated in her excellent discussion of grain storage in Gaul and Iberia, a close examination of agricultural and commercial practices and technologies reveals a much more highly developed anticipation of and desire to intervene in the future (Van Oyen 2020: 59–91). That Shaw and Van Oyen arrive at different answers suggests the extent to which Romans’ conceptions of the future remain poorly understood. Both Shaw and Van Oyen focus primarily on economic and commercial institutions and practices, leaving open questions of how future thinking occurred, in the Roman world, beyond economically oriented speculation. This volume’s contributors, in contrast, turn to the rich material and textual evidence of Romans’ engagements with the future that extend beyond institutional or clearly elite bounds.5 Additionally, through the emphasis on enactivism and enacted prospection that runs throughout the chapters, the volume demonstrates the value of using modern cognitive theory to elucidate phenomena of the ancient world. As Garrett Fagan argued compellingly in his social-psychological study of Roman gladiatorial spectacle, contemporary psychological research can illuminate individual motivations in a way that cultural functional explanations of historical phenomena do not (Fagan 2011: 1–12). Similarly, cognitive theories help reveal the individual motivations, intentions, and stakes at play in something as fundamentally human yet still culturally conditioned as imagining the future. Rather than claiming that we can recapture the exact nature of Roman future thinking using modern cognitive research, the volume advances the claim that in ancient times and today there is not a single monolithic future thinking. Instead, thinking through the ancient material with cognitive theories of prospection reveals cognitive processes enacted in environments. The same processes, enacted in brains and material worlds in different times and places, will result in different future thinking. Our approach is, therefore, ultimately less universalist and more contextualist. The beauty of prospective and predictive models is that they recognize a mechanism as widely shared as the human brain but simultaneously prioritize the culturally specific inputs that shape how and what the brain thinks.

Introduction 17

Organization and recurring themes The volume is organized with contributions on literary texts first, chapters on inscriptions and graffiti next, and chapters on objects last. The first two chapters examine, respectively, literary descriptions of the pompa circensis, that is, the parade preceding circus games (Jacob A. Latham), and Tacitus’ account of the death of Germanicus (Aaron Seider). The following four chapters focus on inscriptions and graffiti, from the monumental Augustan and Severan inscriptions of the Ludi Saeculares, or games marking the end of a 100- or 110-year period (Eric Orlin), to graffiti marking personal events from Pompeii (Molly SwetnamBurland), and Jewish graffiti from tombs and shrines around the Mediterranean (Karen B. Stern). The next two chapters examine objects: metal vessels in the form of Roman milestones manufactured in Spain and ultimately deposited as votive vessels in Italy (Maggie L. Popkin) and gold glasses reused in Rome’s catacombs (Susan Ludi Blevins). A concluding chapter explores the embodied and socially extended cognitive aspects of prospection raised in the preceding chapters and emphasizes the fundamentally prospective, future-thinking nature of commemoration (Diana Y. Ng). The chapters are diverse in chronology as well as subject matter, ranging from the Republican period to the fourth century CE. As a group, they demonstrate the enduring significance of future thinking in the Roman Empire. The chapters show that an analytical stance on future thinking reveals new insight into the roles that texts, images, and material objects played in mediating Romans’ conceptions of the future and in extending individuals’ intentions and agency beyond the body and into the future. The chapters’ spectrum from text to object shows how theories of future thinking and prospection illuminate otherwise overlooked aspects of the motivations behind and the individual and social impacts of a wide range of Roman cultural artifacts, from literary works and monumental inscriptions to graffiti and votive offerings. At the same time, there is significant overlap between categories of literature, inscriptions, graffiti, and objects. Texts were material, and physical objects often boasted inscriptions. The contributors elucidate these similarities while also highlighting the distinctive relationships of literary texts, inscriptions, and threedimensional objects to modes of future thinking and remembering. There are topics missing—architecture for example (see the discussion of the prospective nature of triumphal monuments in Rome in Popkin 2016: 84–87; also Gutteridge 2010: 165–66 and Hughes 2014 on the Arch of Constantine)—but this volume is not intended as a comprehensive treatment of prospection in the Roman world, a task surely beyond the scope of a single book. Instead, the aim is to bring future thinking to the fore in Roman studies and to chart a new course for, well, future research. It should also be noted that as the first to apply a specific set of cognitive research—prospection and future thinking—to the study of Roman culture, this volume and each chapter by our contributors aim to achieve multiple goals. On the one hand, each chapter demonstrates the value of applying one or multiple overlapping cognitive approaches to the study of Roman textual and material culture. On the other hand, each chapter also seeks to deepen our understanding of Roman

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literary and epigraphic practices and Roman experiences with visual and physical media. Therefore, the chapters in this volume can be grouped in multiple ways depending on the interest of the reader and also cohere around several common approaches and major themes. For a reader with a particular interest in historical cognitive sciences as applied to Roman antiquity, the chapters in this volume showcase how ways of thinking about the future in the Roman Empire can engage with a variety of the theoretical models outlined earlier. In demonstrating the partnership between the mind and external cognitive partners such as inscriptions and different forms of writing, as well as the enactive cognitive phenomenon that is the act of writing itself, the chapters by Orlin, Swetnam-Burland, and Popkin can be considered a collection of studies on Roman distributed or 4E cognition as it pertains to future thinking. Seider, in focusing specifically on how Romans grappled with the uncertainty around public mourning in the early empire, directly calls upon the theory of predictive processing. Aspects of FMTT such as—but not limited to—semantic and episodic future thinking are deeply woven into chapters on projecting a vision of state ritual into an imperial future (Orlin), imagining a new use for an object as part of travel and religious ritual (Popkin), and establishing a literary model of orthodox processional practice for subsequent authors (Latham). In extending metaintentions and prospective memory beyond the brain and into physical objects, space, and indeed other people, the chapters on domestic shrines and graffiti (SwetnamBurland), inscriptions that command action on pain of curses (Stern), drinking vessels inscribed with travel itineraries (Popkin), and repurposed gold glass and their associations with saintly veneration to family commemoration (Blevins) can be grouped together. By drawing together these advances in cognitive and psychological studies of prospection with cultural memory studies, the contributors reveal how turning to the future offers a greater understanding of several key themes. The chapters that follow explore how texts, objects, and monuments in the Roman world engaged with, shaped, and manipulated ways of thinking about the future. The authors’ innovative use of prospection as a heuristic framework allows them to consider how material and textual culture enabled people not only to concretize past events but also to imagine future actions, events, performances, and relationships, consequently shaping how people behaved in and engaged with their worlds. The cognitive theories of prospection and 4E cognition described earlier help us understand how ancient objects, texts, and monuments functioned in their ancient contexts. The application of cognitive theories of future thinking and prospection to ancient corpora of evidence produces new knowledge about intention and motivation in antiquity, the agency of sub-elite groups and individuals, and the future-oriented nature of Roman commemorations of the past. Balancing the theoretical with the empirical, each of our contributors delves into the ancient evidence of Romans’ multilayered and multivalent concerns for the future, showing that prospection is an understudied Roman phenomenon to which modern cognitive theory gives vocabulary, shape, and nuance. The texts, objects, and rituals that our contributors study emerge not just as facets of the past or as mere aesthetic or utilitarian objects but rather as vital things and practices that activated cognition—in this case, future thinking.

Introduction 19

Major theories and themes Several major themes recur throughout this volume. First, chapters by Latham, Orlin, and Seider highlight the fundamentally future-thinking intention of Roman historiography. Latham argues that, in creating an authoritative account of the pompa circensis, Fabius Pictor defined how later historians and poets would think and write about this ancient ritual. This prospective intention continues in the work of Tacitus and the actions of his characters. Seider demonstrates that Tiberius in the Annals understands the examples of history in a forward-looking manner, which in turn informs his intentions and actions regarding Germanicus’ death. Seider uses the theory of predictive processing to illuminate what happens when historical examples of appropriate mourning are inaccessible to the public. In creating his version of these historical events, Tacitus created new models for future mourning and for the reception of the people and events he detailed. These two chapters reveal how a Roman historiographical mentality functioned like a chain stitch, looping back to the past to lay down new models for the future, always with the intention to move forward. This bidirectional Roman historical and political gaze is externalized from authorial composition into performance and monumentality in Orlin’s chapter on two inscriptions recording the Ludi Saeculares of, respectively, Augustus and Septimius Severus. Orlin underscores the crucial role of prospection and future thinking in political thinking and in the monumental commemorative and epigraphic habits that defined so much of Roman imperial culture. Augustus’ radically innovative reign necessitated the creation of authoritative versions of Roman history and ritual for the new imperial future. Second, in emphasizing embodied cognition as it relates to prospection, many of the contributors illuminate individual motivation and intention in antiquity, both of the creators of texts and objects and of people who later encountered those texts and objects. Orlin shows that Romans and modern cognitive theorists alike have recognized that people distribute thinking—including future thinking—beyond the brain and body into objects and the external world (for example, stone inscriptions). Extended cognition and prospection existed in all sorts of artifacts, which, whether humble or rarified, shaped future memory, extended the maker’s intention, and gained agency themselves in guiding Romans’ future actions. The graffito of a birthdate tangibly reflects the writer’s intention and pursuant action to remember a deeply personal event such as the birth of a child (Swetnam-Burland). Jews around the Roman Empire were motivated to write graffiti in shrines and synagogues by a desire to vie for future viewers’ attention, asserting a political visibility otherwise restricted to elites (Stern). As these inscriptions demanded a future utterance of one’s name to avoid divine wrath, they enacted their creators’ intention into the external world, as can also be seen with a wide range of Roman material objects, from metal drinking vessels (Popkin) to gold glasses (Blevins). These objects invited users to practice particular actions that rendered the objects both ritually efficacious and capable of effecting desired future outcomes. Artifacts, rituals, and texts targeted and implicated people in the future, who became instrumental in fulfilling the original maker’s intentions and in extending the artifact’s relevance in time.

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Third, in highlighting the agency of such a wide range of people, texts, and things, our contributors demonstrate that the politics of prospective memory, to borrow Stern’s phrase, pervaded the full socioeconomic spectrum of the Roman Empire’s population, not just elites such as Augustus. An ability (or at least a belief in one’s ability) to shape the future and realize particular outcomes was the prerogative of individuals ranging from elite authors such as Fabius Pictor and Tacitus (Latham, Seider), patrons of monumental inscriptions (Orlin), and owners of luxury silver vessels (Popkin) to members of Pompeiian households, including slaves (Swetnam-Burland), and Syrian Jews (Stern). Indeed, future thinking is a particularly valuable theoretical tool for studying the motivations and intentions of sub-elite individuals whom histories of Rome tend to overlook (see our previous critique of Shaw 2019). At the same time, as Stern reminds us, the future was political, and one’s ability—or lack thereof—to affect it constructed and reified power relations. The impact of the written word on prospective memory, which we see in all the chapters, even those about votive offerings and gold glasses, raises questions about the potential of writing to exclude certain members of society from exercising power over their and others’ futures. Literacy—or the economic means to hire a scribe—was sometimes a prerequisite for transforming one’s intentions into future reality. The future was everybody’s concern, but inhabitants of the Roman Empire had unequal access to resources for shaping it. Fourth, the chapters in the volume underscore the importance of various modes of prospection for future performances of religious rituals, ceremonies, and processions in the Roman world. As our contributors demonstrate, from private funerary rituals (Swetnam-Burland) and public responses to death (Seider) to the Secular Games (Orlin), the circus procession (Latham), and more intimate ritual action at spring sanctuaries (Popkin), literary and inscribed texts and physical objects informed and guided future action in ritual spheres of Roman religion as much as they shaped how Romans remembered past rites and ceremonies. A concern to extend intention and enact it in the future shaped Jewish and early Christian practices as well (Stern, Blevins). Imagining scenarios in time yet to be and the belief in one’s ability to affect the future by transforming intention into reality prove vital for understanding religion and ritual action across the religiously pluralistic Roman Empire. As is the case with Roman historiography and acts and objects of commemoration, as described earlier, retrospection and prospection were inextricably intertwined in both state and lived religions of the Roman world, including Judaism and proto-Christianity. In some objects our authors discuss, this temporal bidirectionality could implicate travel as well as religion, as in silver drinking vessels inscribed with itineraries and only later deposited as a votive offering at the sacred spring sanctuary of Vicarello (Popkin). Finally, the volume demonstrates the value of future thinking and prospection as heuristic tools for Roman studies that enable us to move beyond the modern conception of Rome as a culture obsessed with its past and to reveal, through careful analysis of surviving texts, inscriptions, and objects, that the future loomed just as large in Romans’ social, religious, and political lives. As chapters by Latham,

Introduction 21 Orlin, and Seider show, literary texts and public inscriptions set expectations for proper ritual procedure for future audiences. Writing in the Roman world, on an intimate and individual as well as monumental and public scale, was a fundamentally future-oriented action, even when words ostensibly commemorated the past; this argument holds true not only for literary works and public inscriptions but also for Latin and Jewish graffiti (Swetnam-Burland, Stern), and inscriptions on votive vessels and gold glasses (Popkin, Blevins). Objects and texts could also prime expectations for future actions and generate shared semantic memory—or knowledge—in ways that their makers might not have intended but that cognitive research illuminates (Latham, Popkin). Ng’s concluding chapter looks back on the variety of approaches and archives of evidence in this volume to highlight the importance of embodied and enactive cognition and the imbrication of individual and collective intentions and agency in the connection between commemoration and prospection. Future avenues of research in Roman prospection may, for instance, extend beyond the boundaries of rituals of worship and commemoration to understand how cognitive processes of future thinking underlie other forms of beseeching the divine, such as magic. The methodical recipes and actions entailed in creating magical drawings—and in one’s decision to use magic to effect a desired outcome—again bring our attention to the connections between writing, drawing, and prospection.6 Furthermore, as the first three chapters (Latham, Orlin, Seider) in this volume show, during the early years of the Roman empire retrospection and prospection were urgently intertwined in politics, culture, and ritual. The Augustan and Julio-Claudian eras, in which Romans used the archaic and legendary past to define the transitional present and to shape the Roman future, invite further consideration as a unique ecology of prospection cognition. Ultimately, rather than diminishing the importance of retrospective memory, this volume asserts prospection not only as the natural companion of retrospection but also as a necessary framework for fully understanding Roman culture—one that opens a new window on the motivations, experiences, and agency of people and things in antiquity.

Notes 1 Translations of ancient sources are adapted from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise noted. 2 Examples from Greek historiography include Herodotus’ well-known account of the aftermath of the battle between the Argives and Spartans for the land of Thyrea. After the Spartans emerged victorious, the Argives decreed that their men, who had previously let their hair grow long, would now shave their heads, and their women would wear no gold jewelry until they recaptured Thyrea. For their part, the Spartans, who had previously worn their hair short, now legislated long hair (Hdt. 1.82). As John Dillery has argued, the physical transformation of the people of Argos “was linked to a determination to recover their lost land” (Dillery 1996: 230; see also Bettini 2011: 35). The shorn heads of Argive men and the unadorned bodies of Argive women were to serve as reminders—and symbols of commitment—to retake Thyrea in the future. 3 The emergence of an ecological approach to cognition is traced in Hutchins 2010.

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4 Brown, Collins, and Duguid were introducing their theory with the awareness of both earlier works by cognitive activity theorists and the work by Hutchins that was then in press. 5 Clare Rowan (2020: 262) has hinted at the ability of various media—she focuses on Roman coins and related tokens with imperial imagery—to shape people’s future experiences. 6 We thank Margaret L. Laird for her insights on how future thinking informed the making of curse tablets and magical texts, as well as made literary references to magical practices evocatively immediate for readers of works such as the Idylls by Theocritus.

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The future of the past Fabius Pictor (and Dionysios of Halikarnassos) on the pompa circensis and prospective cultural memory Jacob A. Latham

During the reign of Augustus, Dionysios of Halikarnassos penned a long description of the pompa circensis (a religious procession that preceded the chariot races), drawn from the late-third-century BCE work of Quintus Fabius Pictor.1 Fabius Pictor, in turn, seems to have offered a detailed account of an early—but not the earliest—republican procession in ca. 490 BCE, almost certainly with no archival foundation (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 5.57.5: an earlier instance, ca. 500 BCE). Despite its dubious historicity, Fabius’ primordialist account and his annals more broadly found a place in the canon of Roman cultural memory—an authoritative simulation—or even simulacrum—of the past that subsequently enabled simulations of the future. To travel mentally into the past is strikingly similar to projecting oneself into the future. Indeed, as Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng detail in the introduction, both remembering the past and imagining the future rely on many of the same cognitive and neural processes. Or, to put it another way, Fabius Pictor’s description primed responses to and remembrances of future processions for literate or learned audiences at least, encoding expectations, shaping experience, and molding memory. In fact, precisely because the passage was part of the canon of Roman cultural memory, it became a kind of prospective cultural memory resource. Fabius Pictor almost certainly did not describe an early pompa circensis, but still his narrative could have and probably did, I argue, shape the organization, performance, experience, and remembrance of future processions, even (other) textual ones, inspiring Vergil and Ovid, both near contemporaries of Dionysios, as well as Statius in the late first century CE. As a prospective cultural memory resource, Fabius’ past, even if a fabrication, structured possibilities for the future, much like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus—a structuring structure that conditions future perception, action, and affect in a nexus of text, memory, and performance.

Cultural memory In The Roman Triumph, in a section pointedly titled “The Limits of Gullibility,” Mary Beard takes to task “modern historians of the triumph (and of other ancient parades and processions) [who] have erred on the side of credulity.” In particular, DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-2

24 Jacob A. Latham Beard scolds E. E. Rice, who supposedly sought out “reasons to believe” the incredible second-century BCE account of Kallixeinos of Rhodes, who conjured an over-the-top procession of Ptolemy Philadelphos II from the early third century BCE—a passage only preserved as a “fragment” in Athenaios’ Deipnosophistae from the late second century CE. Rice’s allegedly gullible defense of Kallixeinos depends heavily on a reference to “the records of the penteteric festivals,” which—if they existed—possibly included a parade protocol of some sort but which Beard dismisses as a “scholarly alibi” (Ath. 5.197C—203B; Beard 2007: 168, 365 n. 57, 169; Rice 1983; and see also Walbank 1996; Thompson 2000; Bell 2004: 119–38). Setting aside Beard’s rhetoric, how might one loosen, not tighten as Beard did, such a tangled evidentiary knot? How does one assess a secondcentury BCE account of an early third-century BCE procession, based supposedly on some sort of records, that only survives in a so-called fragment from the late second century CE? More specifically, how might one tackle Dionysios of Halikarnassos’ digression on the pompa circensis, which poses very similar problems? Though this chapter tackles the cultural work performed by the description of Fabius Pictor-Dionysios and not the procession per se, still a brief reconstruction of the pompa circensis may be useful. Before the chariot races in the arena, the president of the games, accompanied by an entourage, charioteers and other athletes, along with musicians, dancers, and myriad others, conducted a procession to the Circus Maximus to escort (images of ) the gods to the games. After all, the games honored the gods, who therefore needed to be present (Latham 2016: esp. 19–66). Ranging across a landscape of memory and drawing on a common ritual koine, the procession traversed Rome from its sacred and sovereign center through its political core to the seat of popular pleasures—at once a political performance and a religious ritual (Hölkeskamp 2017: 189–236). To inaugurate ludi circenses, a magistrate with imperium or even a specially appointed dictator dressed in “most majestic garments” that were worn in both circus processions and triumphs and mounted on a chariot (a biga, or chariot drawn by two horses) probably led a procession from the Capitoline sanctuary of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Juno, and Minerva, through the Forum to the Circus Maximus—the only known itinerary, though there would have been others (Liv. 5.41.2, 8.40.2–3, 27.33.6, and 45.1.7; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 5.75.5; Plin. HN 34.20; and Gailliot 2011, noting that the position of the magistrate was never given). Roman boys on the verge of manhood followed on foot or on horseback, depending on their families’ census status, arranged with military precision. On their heels came the charioteers and competitors in boxing and foot racing, arranged according to their own hierarchy. Then two choruses of dancers took their turn. The first chorus, divided into three groups, men, boys, and children, performed a martial choreography; while the second, consisting of satyrs and Silenoi in costume, taunted the first chorus with a risqué routine. Finally, a group of incense-bearers and those carrying rituals vessels introduced the gods. In the honored position at the end, the gods were represented or made present in two modes: anthropomorphic images of the gods were borne on litters

The future of the past 25 (fercula), while symbols, attributes, or relics of the gods were secreted away in tensae or processional chariots. These tensae were so well known and so clearly associated with the pompa circensis that they could even symbolize the procession as a whole (Livy 9.40.16; Suet. Aug. 43.5; Estienne 2014; Latham 2015). In addition, grotesque effigies of folkloric figures, colossal wooden puppets, and stilt walkers imitating deities rounded out the procession, with sacrificial animals bringing up the rear (Latham 2016: 59–61). After almost half a lap around the circus, the procession ended at the pulvinar, a temple-loge, where the gods, both their statues and their symbols, would be installed to enjoy the games. Though many sources help to fill in this picture of a pompa circensis, any reconstruction depends a great deal on Fabius Pictor as taken up later by Dionysios. In the words of Dionysios: 7.72.1: Before the beginning of the games those who held the most powerful office conducted a procession for the gods, leading it from the Capitolium through the Forum to the Circus Maximus. At the very head of the procession were those sons of the Romans who were near manhood and were of an age to lead the procession. . . . 7.72.2: These were followed by charioteers. . . . After them came the competitors in the light and heavy games. . . . 7.72.5: The competitors were followed by many troops of dancers, who were distributed into three groups. . . . They were closely followed by flute-players . . . and cithara-players. . . . 7.72.10: After the armed bands, those of the satyr players marched in the procession. . . . 7.72.13: After these troops all the citharaplayers together and many flute-players would pass by. And after them came those carrying censers. . . . Then came those exhibiting the gold and silver processional vessels. . . . Last of all, the icons of all the gods were paraded. . . . There were not only the icons of Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the others whom the Greeks count among the twelve gods, but also icons of the older gods . . . Kronos, Rhea, Themis, Lato, the Moirai, Mnemosyne, and all the others who have sacred rites and sanctuaries among the Greeks. And next . . . there were icons of Persephone, Eileithuia, the Nymphs, the Muses, the Horai, the Charites, Dionysos, and also of those who became demigods . . . Herakles, Asclepios, the Dioskuroi, Selene, Pan, and countless others.2 7.72.1: πρὶν ἄρξασθαι τῶν ἀγώνων, πομπὴν ἔστελλον τοῖς θεοῖς οἱ τὴν μεγίστην ἔχοντες ἐξουσίαν, ἀπὸ τοῦ Καπιτωλίου τε καὶ δι᾽ ἀγορᾶς ἄγοντες ἐπὶ τὸν μέγαν ἱππόδρομον. ἡγοῦντο δὲ τῆς πομπῆς πρῶτον μὲν οἱ παῖδες αὐτῶν οἱ πρόσηβοί τε καὶ τοῦ πομπεύειν ἔχοντες ἡλικίαν. . . . 7.72.2: τούτοις ἠκολούθουν ἡνίοχοι . . . μεθ᾽ οὓς οἱ τῶν ἀθλημάτων ἀγωνισταὶ τῶν τε κούφων καὶ τῶν βαρέων. . . . 7.72.5: ἠκολούθουν δὲ τοῖς ἀγωνισταῖς ὀρχηστῶν χοροὶ πολλοὶ τριχῇ νενεμημένοι . . . οἷς παρηκολούθουν αὐληταί . . . καὶ κιθαρισταὶ. . . . 7.72.10: μετὰ γὰρ τοὺς ἐνοπλίους χοροὺς οἱ τῶν σατυριστῶν ἐπόμπευον. . . . 7.72.13: μετὰ δὲ τοὺς χοροὺς τούτους κιθαρισταί τ᾽ ἀθρόοι καὶ αὐληταὶ πολλοὶ παρεξῄεσαν: καὶ μετ᾽ αὐτοὺς οἵ τε τὰ θυμιατήρια κομίζοντες . . . καὶ οἱ τὰ πομπεῖα παραφέροντες ἀργυρίου καὶ χρυσίου πεποιημένα . . . τελευταῖα

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Jacob A. Latham δὲ πάντων αἱ τῶν θεῶν εἰκόνες ἐπόμπευον . . . οὐ μόνον Διὸς καὶ Ἥρας καὶ Ἀθηνᾶς καὶ Ποσειδῶνος καὶ τῶν ἄλλων, οὓς Ἕλληνες ἐν τοῖς δώδεκα θεοῖς καταριθμοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν προγενεστέρων . . . Κρόνου καὶ Ῥέας καὶ Θέμιδος καὶ Λητοῦς καὶ Μοιρῶν καὶ Μνημοσύνης καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων, ὅσων ἐστὶν ἱερὰ καὶ τεμένη παρ᾽ Ἕλλησι: καὶ τῶν ὕστερον . . . Περσεφόνης Εἰλειθυίας Νυμφῶν Μουσῶν Ὡρῶν Χαρίτων Διονύσου, καὶ ὅσων ἡμιθέων γενομένων . . . Ἡρακλέους Ἀσκληπιοῦ Διοσκούρων Σελήνης Πανὸς ἄλλων μυρίων. (7.72.1–13)

Like Kallixeinos, Fabius, writing in the late third century BCE, offered an elaborate evocation of an early republican procession from ca. 490 BCE, shortly after the battle of lake Regillus, which only survives as a “fragment” in Dionysios’ Augustan-era history. Unlike Kallixeinos, Fabius Pictor likely could not have leaned on the authority of some ritual record and did not claim to have done so. For that reason, Fabius Pictor supposedly tendered a “bogus protocol,” in the words of one commentator (Olgilvie 1965: 149).3 Even so, an archaic terracotta relief from the late sixth century BCE (ca. 530) suggests that Fabius’ production values were in line with early republican imagery, if not also performance. Once gracing the roofline of the temple of Mater Matuta in Rome, this reconstructed pediment revetment plaque shows a solemn procession of chariots: from left to right, a triga (chariot drawn by three horses) with a driver and a second female figure accompanied by an armed attendant; a biga drawn by winged horses and also carrying two figures, a pair on foot, one of whom may be armed; and then a second triga (Figure 2.1; Mura Sommella 1977: esp. 71–82; Adornato 2003: esp.

Figure 2.1 Pediment revetment plaque with chariot procession from the site of S. Omobono, Rome, terracotta, ca. 530 BCE. Rome, Antiquarium Comunale, inv. No. 15800, 15867, 15883. Source: Photograph: Angers, neg. D-DAI-Rom 2001.2172.

The future of the past 27 816–18; Winter 2009: 316–18). Fabius Pictor may have drawn on imagery like this plaque or on other cultural memory resources to imagine his primordial procession. Moreover, his description would likely have hewn closely to what his third-century BCE audience expected, conjuring, it seems, an idealized, perhaps even nostalgic parade—a procession as it could have or even should have been, not necessarily how it actually was. Bracketing issues of historicity, Fabius Pictor’s representation of an early pompa circensis may be productively understood as the “commemorated past,” stories about the past that shape the present and produce and reduce possibilities for the future (Fentress and Wickham 1992: esp. 51–75, 153–70, and 175; Walter 2004: esp. 229–55 on Fabius Pictor). His historical narration was an act of remembrance in text, recalling—or perhaps more accurately inventing—a past worth remembering, at least according to given social norms. Dionysios then adapted Fabius’ (re)description of a pompa circensis—circulating and recirculating the account as part of “the stream of tradition,” to invoke Jan Assmann (2011), an artifact in the archive of cultural memory that might extend hundreds or even thousands of years. The concept of cultural memory, as developed by Jan Assmann, aims to capture the links between the formation of tradition, reference to the past, and present political or collective identity and imagination (J. Assmann 2011: esp. 34–41 on cultural memory and 70–110 on writing and memory; also A. Assmann 2011: 169–205 on writing and memory in modern literature). In many respects, tradition and cultural memory overlap, at least in terms of functional memory, that is, historical-collective memory that maintains an active presence in the present. Cultural memory, however, also includes stored memory, a kind of cultural unconscious that archives, so to speak, textual, visual, and material relics—a pool of possibilities for collective remembrance and social identity formation (J. Assmann 2006: esp. 24–30; A. Assmann 2011: 123–32 on functional/storage memory). Even an eddy in the stream of tradition, a cultural dead end as it were, might join the mainstream someday. Cultural memory can thus be understood as “a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms,” like ritual or writing (J. Assmann 2008: 110). However, in the vast archives of cultural memory, “the stock of memories stored up in the medium of writing quickly transcends the horizons of knowledge of the past that can be put to immediate use” (J. Assmann 2006: 29). Only certain “memories” are actively maintained by a given memory community—like Fabius Pictor’s pompa circensis, whether fictitious or not, which was retrieved and maintained by Dionysios. After all, “what counts for cultural memory is not factual but remembered history” or the commemorated past (J. Assmann 2011: 76). In other words, even if Fabius Pictor, “the most ancient of those who have compiled Roman affairs,” conjured a circus procession “not only from what he heard, but also from what he himself knew” as well as other cultural memory resources such as images—and not from an early fifth-century BCE account— his description was an actively employed cultural memory resource (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.71.1: παλαιότατος γὰρ ἁνὴρ τῶν τὰ Ῥωμαϊκὰ συνταξαμένων, καὶ πίστιν οὐκ ἐξ ὧν ἤκουσε μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐξ ὧν αὐτὸς ἔγνω παρεχόμενος;

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Dillery 2009: 78–90; and Hölkeskamp 2018 on Fabian memory). Indeed, Fabius’ description was an authoritative resource upon which Dionysios of Halikarnassos explicitly traded, insisting that he needed “no other proof at all” for a definitive depiction of an early circus parade (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.71.1: καὶ οὐδεμιᾶς ἔτι δεόμενος πίστεως ἑτέρας). Dionysios had, it seems, read widely in the historiography of Rome, knowledge that he regularly paraded as a means to construct his authority as a historian who could navigate the various aporias of Roman history (Wiater 2017: 231–59 on authority; Schultze 2000: 6–49 on sources). Consequently, to cite only Fabius—whose text Dionysios seemingly faithfully paraphrased at great length, even if he did not quote it “almost word for word” (indeed, it is difficult to identify specific phrases or words directly from Fabius)—attests to the reputation of Fabius and possibly the lack of other sources on the procession (Gabba 1991: 89).4 Whether or not modern historians credit Fabius Pictor’s early republican pompa circensis, Dionysios of Halikarnassos certainly did. Moreover, he expected his audience to do so as well, since Fabius’ history was not just any cultural memory resource; it was part of a select canon that shaped cultural memory and so also collective Roman identity. As I noted earlier, the archive of cultural memory theoretically houses everything produced by a given culture in stored memory, but only a small selection is maintained by functional or working memory, after having “passed rigorous processes of selection.” A further winnowing of the commemorated past results in a canon, “a small number of normative and formative texts, places, persons, artifacts, and myths” (A. Assmann 2008: 110; see also A. Assmann 2011: 327–32 on archives). A culture’s canon of cultural memory then acts like a focusing lens, limiting polyvalence but gaining in cultural power as a result (Grabes 2008: 311–18). In particular, the wider dissemination and enhanced reputation of canonical texts allows them to “shape perception, representation, and action” (Erll 2011: 157 and 160–71 on literature and collective memory; also Erll and Rigney 2006: 111–15). Fabius’ text certainly shaped Dionysios’ historical perception and his representation of the pompa circensis. It could also have shaped action as an exemplar of how to perform the circus procession, as we will see. In addition to Fabius’ authority as a historian, Dionysios also believed that among [the ancient customs, laws, and practices, which the Romans have preserved down to my own time just as they received them from their ancestors] the first and the most authoritative of all are, I am persuaded, the things done by each city concerning the gods and divinities, that is ancestral worship. ἐν αἷς [ἔθη καὶ νόμιμα καὶ ἐπιτηδεύματα παλαιὰ παρεχόμενος αὐτῶν, ἃ μέχρι τοῦ κατ᾽ ἐμὲ φυλάττουσι χρόνου, οἷα παρὰ τῶν προγόνων ἐδέξαντο] πρῶτα καὶ κυριώτατα πάντων εἶναι πείθομαι τὰ γινόμενα καθ᾽ ἑκάστην πόλιν περὶ θεῶν καὶ δαιμόνων πατρίους σεβασμούς. (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.70.2–3)

The future of the past 29 That is, religious rites were supposedly less liable to change, indeed they should not change at all, especially if the community in question had not been conquered—and Rome had not (see Gabba 1991: 134–36). And so Fabius’ canonical description of a pompa circensis was all the more convincingly archaic—or primordial—to Dionysios and, it seems reasonable to suggest, to his readers, even if it fails to convince some modern commentators. In other words, Fabius Pictor may have created a kind of Baudrillardian simulacrum, an ostensible copy, but one without an original, a copy that itself could serve as an authorizing archetype, for Dionysios at least. According to Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum (a simulation) is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality,” what he terms “a hyper-reality.” As he continues, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 1994: 1–2; see also Jameson 1991: 9 and passim; Felluga 2015: 282–84). In the present case, Fabius’ supposedly “bogus protocol” was taken as a definitive description of an archaic pompa circensis—his text, the “commemorated past,” became historical reality. Fabius’ pompa circensis, even though it may not recall any specific historical performance, was understood as “real” and so was in fact “real” in terms of potential impact and affect. His simulated historical reality—or simulacrum— became canon, an authoritative element of cultural memory which, again following Jan Assmann, “provide[s] the criteria for both artistic production [real processions] and aesthetic judgement [the experience and remembrance of real processions]” (J. Assmann 2011: 93). Even if Fabius did not describe an early pompa circensis, nevertheless his portrait (or conjuration) probably drew on both the cultural memory of past performance (“remembered history,” not actual history) and his own experiences of contemporary ones—an image of what an archaic procession could have or ought to have looked like, rather than an autopsy. Even if a Baudrillardian simulacrum, the resultant narrative reconfigured collective memory, emplotting the past in a novel way, which might then have refigured Roman collective memory and Roman social identity (Erll 2011: 152–60). Fabius’ pompa circensis could have become a standard for both organizers and audiences. It could have served as a benchmark for processional performance and a framework by which spectators might experience and remember such productions.

Prospective cultural memory As it turns out, simulation of the past, even the invented past, provides the building blocks for the simulation of the future (Michaelian, Klein, and Szpunar 2016a: 2). In fact, psychologists have even proposed a kind of remembering-imagining system, in which “imagining the future owes much to the ability to remember the past” (Conway, Loveday, and Cole 2016: 256). Moreover, there are “striking similarities in the cognitive and neural processes involved in remembering the past and imagining or simulating possible future experiences,” though there are also important differences (Schacter and Madore 2016: 245; see also Schacter et al.

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2012: esp. 680–83; and Michaelian, Klein, and Szpunar 2016a: 4–7). Retrospective memory and prospective memory are not the same, but both entail the mental projection of oneself into another temporality. More specifically, a recent model has proposed four basic types of futurethinking or prospection: simulation, prediction, intention, and planning. In this context, simulation means a detailed mental representation of the future or construction of hypothetical events. The more a simulation of the future coheres with memories of the past, the more detailed and convincing it will be (Szpunar, Shrikanth, and Schacter 2018: esp. 54–57). Even false or invented memories enable one to simulate future events—in fact, false memories might enhance the possibility of novel future thinking (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016: esp. 23–25). Quite often, autobiographical or episodic memory provides the material for future thinking; however, semantic memory, including knowledge from textual sources such as Fabius Pictor, can also foster semantic or more general abstract simulations of the future (Devitt and Addis 2016: esp. 96–102). Culture and cultural memory both inflect the selection of details from the past and organize those details within a conceptual framework as one conjures a future (Wang 2016: 301–2; see also Schacter and Welker 2016: 241–44). In short, we construct the future, at least in part, out of scenes from the (commemorated) past. Just as remembrance is, in part, collective, so too is imagining the future— collective memory enables collective future thinking. Both memory and prospection are intimately bound up with cultural artifacts, symbols, and sites, out of which collective memory forges a kind of “schematic” that structures the texture of collective future thought; while collective future thinking may also re-construct collective memory of the past (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 376–89; see Orlin, this volume). A shared future is founded on a shared past, and Fabius Pictor’s pompa circensis seems to have been just such a “schematic” or shared past that shaped the shared future of those for whom it was a canonical cultural memory resource (Merck, Topcu, and Hirst 2016: 284–94). To put it another way, Fabius Pictor “primed” Roman audiences to respond to, to process, and to experience the pompa circensis in a certain way. In brief, “[w]ithin cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, priming refers to instances in which an earlier encounter with a given stimulus (e.g., a word, face, or other object) alters (‘primes’) subsequent responses to that same stimulus or to a related stimulus” (Wagner and Koutstaal 2002: 4.27–46; see also Moulin 2006). Past experience, even a simulated and textually mediated one, influences and affects present and future perception, memory, and behavior (Molden 2014: 1–11; Doyen et al. 2014: 3–13 and 14–34). Dionysios’ history demonstrates that Fabius Pictor’s pompa circensis was not just a cultural memory resource, not just part of the commemorated past upon which a memory community constitutes its collective identity in the present. It could also have been an image of historical reality that effected subsequent real processions and their reception. In other words, Fabius’ procession could also have been a prospective cultural memory resource—a resource that affects the future

The future of the past 31 of a given cultural memory community. Cultural memory, it seems, can help to construct prospective cultural memory. There is no evidence that any parade organizer consciously modeled a given pompa circensis after Fabius’ historical simulacrum; indeed there is little evidence of who precisely arranged the procession at all. But Fabius’ pompa circensis could have affected what kind of show parade producers imagined, what kind of processions audiences expected, and, subsequently, audience members’ experience and remembrance (Latham 2016: 25, 159 on parade organizers). Indeed, social memory might well be defined as “an organised body of expectation based on recollection,” in the words of Paul Connerton (Connerton 1989: 6). And so, both producers and spectators might have had their expectations shaped or primed by Fabius’ narrative (or Dionysios’ renarration), an encoded image that then predisposed—but need not have entirely determined—reactions to subsequent pompae circenses. In other words, one generation’s “bogus protocol” may become the next generation’s ritual tradition (a simulacrum becomes “real”), subtly shaping both organizational protocols and also (literate) audience expectations, imaginations, and memories. Fabius’ description was already shaped by Roman cultural memory, but his text also reconfigured collective memory, emplotting a memory of the pompa circensis in a new story, which could, in turn, shape future collective memory (Erll 2011). Though any impact on processional performance must remain conjectural (though probable), the import of Fabius’ pompa, perhaps spurred by and adapted from Dionysios, may be seen in other textual processions. Vergil and Ovid, both near contemporaries of Dionysios, as well as Statius in the late first century CE, seem to have been inspired by the Fabian simulacrum.5 Vergil opened his Georgics with an invocation of a series of gods and also Caesar (that is, Augustus): brightest lights of the world . . . Liber and bountiful Ceres . . . Fauns and Dryads . . . Neptune . . . Tegean Pan . . . Minerva inventress of the olive . . . [Triptolemus] the boy who introduced the curving plough . . . Silvanus holding a green cypress by the roots . . . and Caesar.6 clarissima mundi / lumina . . . / Liber et alma Ceres . . . / Faunique . . . Dryadesque / . . . Neptune / . . . Pan . . . / . . . Tegeaee . . . olaeaeque Minerva / inventrix . . . puer monstrator aratri / . . . teneram ab radice ferens, Silvane, cupressum / . . . Caesar. (Verg. Georg. 1.5–42) Vergil entreated the sun and moon; sung the beneficence of Liber and Ceres; asked Fauns and Dryads to appear; beseeched Neptune and Pan to be present, along with Minerva, Triptolemus, Silvanus, and other gods and goddesses; and ended with a special appeal to Augustus, who would eventually join the gods, to come and hear his prayer. As Damien Nelis and Jocelyne Nelis-Clément have noted: “These deities hav[e] been invited to come forth and be present, [but] questions remain to be asked: present at what? Where is the reader to imagine them going? Where is s/he to

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place them?” At a reading of the poem, of course, but Nelis and Nelis-Clément also convincingly contend that this invocation of the gods, this plea for their presence at the beginning of the Georgics, would have evoked a similar bid for divine presence, namely the pompa circensis, the ritualized escort of the gods that opened the games (Nelis and Nelis-Clément 2011: 3). Just as a procession of gods to the arena inaugurated the chariot races as recounted by Fabius-Dionysios, so a litany of deities likewise opened Vergil’s Georgics. While Vergil only alluded to the circus procession, Ovid explicitly conjured the pompa circensis as an aurea pompa (a golden procession) in a passage of his Amores that praises the Circus Maximus as an apt location for amorous encounters (Henderson 2002; Welch 2012: esp. 109–14). But here’s the procession. Everybody hush. Give them a hand. The golden procession’s here. First comes Victory, wings outstretched. Goddess, grant me victory in love! Neptune next. Salute him, sailors. Not for me the ocean—I’m a landlover. Soldiers, salute Mars. I’m a disarmer, All for peace and amorous plenty. There’s Phoebus for the soothsayers, Phoebe for the hunters, Minerva for the master craftsmen. Farmers can greet Bacchus and Ceres, Boxers pray to Pollux and knights to Castor But I salute the queen of love and the boy with the bow. Venus, smile on my latest venture. Make my new mistress willing—or weak-willed. A lucky sign—the goddess nodded, giving her promise. Sed iam pompa venit: linguis animis que favete! Tempus adest plausus: aurea pompa venit. Prima loco fertur passis Victoria pinnis: Huc ades et meus hic fac, dea, vincat amor! Plaudite Neptuno, nimium qui creditis undis! Nil mihi cum pelago, me mea terra capit. Plaude tuo Marti, miles! nos odimus arma: Pax iuvat et media pace repertus amor. Auguribus Phoebus, Phoebe venantibus adsit, Artifices in te verte, Minerva, manus; Ruricolae Cereri tenero que adsurgite Baccho, Pollucem pugiles, Castora placet eques! Nos tibi, blanda Venus, pueris que potentibus arcu Plaudimus: inceptis adnue, diva, meis

The future of the past 33 Daque novae mentem dominae! patiatur amari! Adnuit et motu signa secunda dedit.

(Ov. Am. 3.2.43–58, trans. Lee 1968: 43)

In Ovid’s procession, Victory entered first, followed by Neptune, Mars, Phoebus and Phoebe, Bacchus and Ceres, Castor and Pollux, and last, of course, Venus, who supposedly condescended to approve the narrator’s “adventures.” Both poems, the Georgics and Amores, conjured the presence of an overlapping (intertextual) list of gods from whom divine favor was sought: Neptune, Minerva, and Liber-Bacchus, invoked specifically as a rustic deity as opposed to a drunken or licentious one, appear in both (Nelis and Nelis-Clément 2011: 4, nn. 32–33 for verbal similarities; see also Lachmann 2016: 301–10 on intertextuality and memory). More importantly for the present argument, since Ovid explicitly evoked a pompa circensis, the strong intertextual connections between Vergil’s prologue and the Amores passage strengthen the argument that the Georgics were also intended to recall a circus procession. Like Ovid, Statius also clearly had a pompa circensis in mind, though he did not name it outright. Statius did, however, describe a green, circus-like valley populated by a nearly numberless crowd, awaiting chariot races. Before the races, the crowd watched a procession, assuredly a species of pompa circensis, opened by sacrificial animals, followed by sculpted likenesses of heroic ancestors: an ancient procession of great-hearted ancestors . . . faces made alive with wonderful figures . . . [including Hercules] throttling the grasping lion . . . Io . . . already prone . . . Tantalus . . . loyal dinner guest of the great Thunderer . . . Pelops . . . victor in his chariot. . . . A thousand images after this. exin magnanimum series antiqua parentum / . . . miris in vultum animata figuris / . . . angens / . . . in ossa leonem / . . . Io . . . iam prona / . . . Tantalus . . . / sed pius et magni uehitur conuiua Tonantis / . . . uictor curru . . . / . . . Pelops. . . . / mille dehinc species. (Stat. Theb. 6.268–94, trans. Lovatt 2007: 73) All three, Vergil, Ovid, and Statius, implicitly or explicitly evoked a pompa circensis. Moreover, all three recall, in certain ways, the Fabian (-Dionysian) simulacrum. Statius’ “a thousand images after this,” in particular, is strikingly reminiscent of a line from Fabius Pictor as paraphrased by Dionysios. After describing the ranks and rows of human participants, Fabius enumerated a long list of gods who appeared in the procession beginning with twelve Olympian gods, headed by the Capitoline triad (in Greek translation of course), with demigods, that is deified humans, bringing up the rear (see translation of Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.72.13 earlier). At the conclusion of this inventory, Fabius Pictor (or Dionysios) ended with “and countless others” or “and thousands of others” (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.72.13: ἄλλων μυρίων), which Statius appears to have later echoed at the close of his procession—“a thousand images.” Of course, a thousand images of ancestors

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are not precisely thousands of other deities, but they are close, and, as the saying goes, close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and perhaps also intertextuality. The similar phrasing—still readable across Greek and Latin—and the position of the phrase at the end of the (textual) procession suggests a kind of reminiscence, perhaps derived from the Latin version of Fabius’ account (on a Latin version see Cornell 2013: 1.163–66). Both Vergil and Ovid, likewise, conjured a procession of deities, as did FabiusDionysios, whose litany of divine participants opened with the comment that “last of all icons of all the gods were processed, borne on men’s shoulders” (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.72.13). Ovid openly traded upon the image of the pompa circensis as a pompa deorum, a procession of gods—and the nod of Venus may well suggest the sway of the goddess as she was carried through the circus on a ferculum (Ov. Am. 3.2.61: pompamque deorum; Latham 2016: 44–46, 50–55, and 62–63). Vergil petitioned the gods to appear but not specifically as icons on fercula. Nonetheless, as Nelis and Nelis-Clément convincingly argue, a Roman audience would have readily perceived the “connections between the prologue of the first book of the Georgics and the pompa circensis,” an efficient explanation for the parallels among the texts of Fabius-Dionysios, Vergil, and also Ovid (Nelis and NelisClément 2011: 9). In addition to intertextual influence, all the authors under consideration here (Fabius-Dionysios, Vergil, Ovid, and Statius) may well have also had actual performances of the pompa circensis in mind. In particular, Nelis and NelisClément suggest that Augustan interventions, for example the regular appearance of the deified Caesar in both processions to the circus and to the theater, may have sparked interest in this procession (Nelis and Nelis-Clément 2011: 5–6; Latham 2016: 110–13 and 118 on Augustan interventions). As Eric Orlin argues in this volume, Augustus’ innovations in ritual and public ceremonial could have a notable impact on the performance and memory of future rituals and ceremonies. Consequently, Augustan parades could have triggered renewed interest in the circus parade. Dionysios may then have turned to Fabius’ description not only because it supported his thesis that Romans were really Greeks but also because it cohered closely to and helped to explain what he himself observed in Augustan Rome. Despite novel honors for Caesar, the proximity of Augustan practice to the Fabian simulacrum might have highlighted how “timeless” the ritual was supposed to be. Perhaps Fabius’ text had already done its work as a prospective cultural memory resource, having already shaped expectations of the pompa circensis for generations by the time Dionysios and Vergil (and then Ovid and Statius) had their interests piqued. Whatever the case, Fabius’ description clearly affected Dionysios’ and seems also to have conditioned Vergil’s, Ovid’s, and Statius’ imagination of the procession, to judge from the intertextual entanglements. The evidence for Augustan and subsequent imperial processions suggests that the pompa circensis remained a procession of gods (a pompa deorum) as conjured by Fabius (see Ov. Am. 3.2.61, discussed previously, Ars Am. 1.147, and Fast.

The future of the past 35 4.391 on the procession of gods; see also Arena 2010: 53–102; Latham 2016: 108–32 and 152–59). The enduring image of the parade as a procession of gods suggests that Fabius’ canonical description could have influenced later processions in a manner akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, which he defines as a set of “principles which generate and organize practices . . . without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends” (Bourdieu 1990b: 53). Bourdieu’s habitus might also be understood as “generative . . . [a set of ] dispositions acquired through experience . . . [or a] ‘feel for the game’” (Bourdieu 1990a: esp. 3–34, quotation at 9). In other words, the habitus, like prospective memory, is oriented toward future social behaviors and actions in which the horizon of possibilities has already been structured by the past. Fabius’ evocation—and perhaps invention—of a ritual procession was certainly shaped by cultural memory, but it was also part of the canon that shaped Roman memory, an authority that authorized later texts. Moreover, as a prospective memory resource, this probable simulacrum, a copy without an original, may then have shaped subsequent iterations: future productions and affective reception could have been structured by the encoded expectations fostered by Fabius’ image of an archaic procession. In this nexus of memory-text-performance, memory of a ritual was made text; text framed expectation or social habit (the grounds for simulations of the future); expectation shaped performance—and so on as the feedback loop spiraled into the future (see also Seider, this volume). Rooted in the past, humans act in the present in order to imagine and to shape the future—a sentiment well expressed by Karl Marx: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Marx 1996: 32)7 Fabius Pictor’s pompa circensis was both a canonical cultural memory resource— a simulacrum that became the real—and also a prospective cultural memory resource: a ritual habitus that allowed ancient Romans to imagine the contours of a pompa circensis—but an imagination shaped, constrained even, by memory of the past inscribed in text, embedded in habit, and embodied in performance. In the end, Fabius Pictor’s invented memory, if that is what it was, may well have had a lasting future.

Notes 1 I would like to thank both Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng not only for Maggie’s kind invitation to participate in the AIA-SCS panel that spurred this project in the first place but also for their penetrating comments on multiple drafts and their pivotal bibliographical suggestions, which greatly strengthened my understanding of prospection.

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2 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.72.1–13, ed. and trans. (lightly adapted) Cornell 2013: 2.86–89; on which see Piganiol 1923: 15–31; Thuillier 1975 and 1989; Beck and Walter 2001: 115–17; and Cornell 2013: 3.31–33. 3 On Fabius Pictor, his history, and his potential sources see, e.g., Cornell 2013: 1.163–78 and Rich 2018. 4 On Dionysios’ method in this passage see Schultze 2004: 93–105 and Buszard 2015: 22–53, esp. 31–34, on the difficulties of identifying Fabius’ own words. 5 On intertextual relations, see Nelis and Nelis-Clément 2011, to whom the next few paragraphs are deeply indebted. 6 Liber . . . Ceres, 11: Ferte, 14: Neptune, 18: adsis . . . favens . . . Minerva, 31: undis, and 40: adnue coeptis (overlaps with Ovid). 7 See Seligman et al. 2016: esp. ix–xiv and 3–29, who argues that the human species is forward looking rather than backward.

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Remembering the future in Tacitus’ Annals Germanicus’ death and contests of commemoration Aaron Seider

This chapter uses ideas from theories of human cognition to analyze how Tacitus’ characters envision the future. More specifically, I focus on how they react to the extraordinary uncertainty surrounding Germanicus’ death in 19 CE. A structurally important vignette from Annals 2 helps to illustrate how prospective thinking plays a major role in circumstances rife with uncertainty. It is the year before Germanicus’ death, and his position in the imperial family is ambiguous. Nephew and adopted son of Tiberius, Germanicus has been granted “authority outranking that of governors” (maius . . . imperium, Tac. Ann. 2.43.1) over Greece and Asia Minor, even as he is rumored to be the subject of the emperor’s animosity (see Davies 2000: 118).1 Germanicus has already gone to Actium and Troy, two sites from his family’s and city’s history (O’Gorman 2000: 63; Kraus 2010: 112; Low 2016: 224). Given the past’s value as a repository for guidance in Roman culture, these visits imply that Germanicus is thinking about the future as well (Roller 2009; Langlands 2018; Roller 2018). Now, as he finishes his tour of the region, Germanicus confirms this temporal orientation by making his final stop the oracle of Apollo at Claros. Both the prince’s journey and the narrative describing it end with uncertainty: And he docked at Colophon to profit from the Apollo oracle at Claros. (This is not a woman, as at Delphi, but a priest from specific families, primarily Milesian. He hears only the questioners’ number and names, then descends into a cave, drinks from a secret spring and, though generally ignorant of literature and poems, gives responses in verse on whatever subjects one has in mind.) The priest was said to have intoned for Germanicus, riddlingly—oracular habit!—imminent departure. adpellitque Colophona, ut Clarii Apollinis oraculo uteretur. non femina illic, ut apud Delphos, sed certis e familiis et ferme Mileto accitus sacerdos numerum modo consultantium et nomina audit; tum in specum degressus, hausta fontis arcani aqua, ignarus plerumque litterarum et carminum edit responsa versibus compositis super rebus, quas quis mente concepit. et ferebatur Germanico per ambages, ut mos oraculis, maturum exitum2cecinisse. (2.54.2–4) DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-3

38 Aaron Seider Even as the epithet “Clarian Apollo” (Clarii Apollinis) invites the idea that the god’s response will be unambiguous or plain (see OLD clarus 4), Tacitus’ description of the process undoes any expectation of a clear answer (see Shannon-Henderson 2019: 103–4 on the ambiguity of this episode). The priest does not listen to anyone’s question but just learns the names and number of those who approach. Then, he answers “riddlingly—oracular habit!” (per ambages, ut mos oraculis), and his actual response “maturum exitum” offers contradictory meanings. Maturum can signify that something occurs at the proper time or is premature (OLD maturus 7 and 9, respectively), while exitum may indicate either a departure from a place or an exit from life (OLD exitus 1 and 3, respectively). For Germanicus, is this a warning of impending death? Or an upcoming voyage by sea? When the Annals’ next words (“Piso, however” [at Cn. Piso, 2.55.1]) shift the focus and make this Germanicus’ last appearance in the Annals’ narrative of 18 CE, Germanicus’ state of irresolution underscores the predictive challenges Tacitus’ characters face. While Tacitus’ Roman readers may feel a sense of superiority due to their knowledge of what is to come, this would evaporate in their own lives: they inhabit the same uncertain world as the Annals’ characters and confront similar unknowns in their futures. This vignette emblematizes the great uncertainty and corresponding predictive challenges that extend throughout the narrative arc of Germanicus’ death in the Annals. Uncertainty dominates Tacitus’ narrative of the early years of Tiberius’ reign. Not only must the Romans navigate the imperial era’s first succession, but the new emperor’s opaque replies and disingenuous actions accentuate the difficulties people face as they ponder what is to come (see Kraus 2010: 102 on the subject of succession in the Annals). Within this context, the story of Germanicus’ death pushes to the fore questions about characters’ internal states and the connection between different times. Indeed, from his introduction at Annals 1.33 to the last echoes of his mourning at Annals 3.19, Germanicus is portrayed as an unusually ambiguous character (Rutland 1987; Pelling 1993; Kelly 2010: 236; Williams 2009; Kraus 2010: 110; Cogitore 2013; Guilhembet 2013: 199; Woodman 2015: 268). Some hope he will restore the Republic’s liberty; Tiberius considers him a threat and hides his true feelings (Shotter 1968; Mellor 2011: 108–9), and a range of Romans wonder what actions he might take. Later, after Germanicus’ death, there are no clear models that dictate how the Romans should mourn him. Throughout these episodes, a string of questions arises for the Annals’ characters: How can they commemorate present deeds, even when they are not complete? Which past memories should be used to judge future actions? In what way is it appropriate to mourn a member of the emperor’s family when the emperor himself stays out of view? In this chapter, I focus on how Tacitus’ characters calculate their behavior within the narrative of Germanicus’ death. I argue that they use predictive processing in the face of uncertainty to calculate their behavior and that Tacitus’ choices of language and structure suggest that he is working through the question of how to respond to uncertainty. In its consideration of how Tacitus’ characters (and perhaps his Roman readers) envision the future, this chapter falls into two main sections.

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In its first section, I establish that there is a marked interdependence between retrospective and prospective thinking. First in Germanicus’ 17 CE triumph and then in Tiberius’ actions following Germanicus’ 19 CE death, Tacitus illustrates how the Romans attempt to navigate doubt by forging a link between remembering the past and thinking about the future. This portrait of the interactions between past and future shows the potential for mapping ideas from cognitive science onto the Annals, and I build on it in my longer section, which considers the more complex mechanism of predictive processing. Here, I offer a reading of a moment when the past does not easily map onto the future and a crowd of mourners are overwhelmed by uncertainty. Considering several factors that attribute to this atmosphere, such as Tiberius’ actions and the contradictory models of grief an earlier example offers, I argue that Germanicus’ death poses a predictive challenge and that the Romans are able to act only after modifying their expectations to reflect new information. Lastly, in my chapter’s conclusion, I explore how, for Tacitus’ readers, the Annals may come to stand as a part of their own past experience and thereby influence their predictions for the future. My analysis of how these characters think draws on ideas offered by scholars working on theories of human cognition, particularly relating to temporal thought. This research in the social and natural sciences focuses on people’s perceptions of time, and it is well suited to provide a framework for analyzing the work of an author concerned with the links between past and future (see Grethlein 2013: 131–79, 2014, 2016: 74–77 on time, teleology, and narrative structure in the Annals and ancient historiography in general; Gowing 2016 on connections between past and present in Tacitus; and Shannon-Henderson 2019 on memory in the Annals). Two interrelated areas of research in particular are useful for elucidating the nuances of how Tacitus’ characters prepare to act in the midst of uncertainty. For considering the connections between retrospective and prospective thinking, recent work explores the links between mental activity that looks to past and future times. In a wide-ranging study of how humans guide their actions by trying to anticipate what the future might hold, Peter Railton argues that this “simulation and evaluation of possible futures—prospection—can take place implicitly as well as explicitly” (Railton 2016: 74). In this future thinking, memory plays a signal role, providing the information—or building blocks—for simulations of future events (Schacter, Addis, and Buckner 2007: 659; see also Railton 2016: 72; Sripada 2016: 91–92; Conway, Loveday, and Cole). A substantial body of recent work claims that allowing us to imagine the future is one of the key evolutionary functions of human memory (Schacter and Welker 2016: 242; see also Suddendorf and Corballis 2007: 30). These ideas from memory studies elucidate how the characters in the Annals connect past and future as they attempt to navigate an uncertain present (Schacter, Addis, and Buckner 2007: 657; see also Sripada 2016: 91–92). The other area of research I draw on concerns the challenge of predicting the future. Psychologists and cognitive scientists illustrate how people modulate their behavior in the present based on their predictions of what they are about to encounter (Bar 2009b; see also Popkin and Ng, this volume). Predictive processing works well when people’s brains are successful in guessing “at the structure and shape

40 Aaron Seider of the incoming sensory array” and their actions correctly meet with their guesses (Clark 2016: 3; see also Seligman et al. 2016: x; Hohwy 2013: 1). Yet, this process fails when the brain incorrectly guesses what it is about to sense; when the brain encounters an unpredicted signal, the result is a prediction error (Clark 2013: 2). To respond to and minimize a prediction error, the brain can change its predictive model or sample external inputs more carefully (Hohwy 2013: 43; see also Clark 2016: 1). In other words, brains can either change the way people make predictions or look for new input that might meet their expectations. This model of predictive processing offers a helpful lens for considering moments after Germanicus’ death when uncertainty makes the Romans’ predictions of what they are about to experience much more challenging and they are faced with prediction errors. While I do not engage here with the more specialized neuroscientific analysis of how brains generate and respond to predictions, I use these ideas of predictive processing to think about how Tacitus’ characters respond to the unprecedented circumstances of the first imperial succession.

Linking past and future Tacitus and his characters think along a continuum of past, present, and future and look to the past as a model for the future. In this section, I argue that this predilection to link past memories with future actions animates characters’ thoughts in two sets of events associated with Germanicus’ commemoration. In the first, Germanicus and Tiberius squabble over whether and when a triumph should occur for the prince’s victories in Germany. Tiberius’ motivation is to curtail Germanicus’ glory, but, when this celebration does occur, the Romans’ memories prompt them to worry that Germanicus’ death may be imminent. The second set of passages focuses on Tiberius’ reaction to Germanicus’ death. Here, although the Annals’ characters evaluate imperial behavior through the same framework of retrospective and prospective thinking, they do so with opposing aims and conclusions. For both sets of passages, recent work in cognitive science and psychology illustrates how humans use memories of the past to imagine the future as different time periods come together and influence each other in reciprocal ways. Writing on this topic, Paolo Jedlowski discusses the concept of the present future, which is not only about ‘images’ on the future, but also a complex set of expectations, partially formulated on the basis of past experiences, which contributes to confer meaning to the present and make choices that will produce the future. (Jedlowski 2016: 122; emphasis in original) Memory, specifically episodic memory or memory of personal experiences (see Popkin and Ng, this volume), plays a crucial role in imagining the future. Such prospective thinking, I argue in this section, guides how the Romans reflect on the past and behave in the present.

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The cluster of passages culminating in Germanicus’ 17 CE triumph showcases how characters attempt to control how events will be remembered (Shannon-Henderson 2019: 56–65). In considering a taxonomy of future thinking, Karl Szpunar, Nathan Spreng, and Daniel Schacter propose that future thinking contains four basic categories: simulation, prediction, intention, and planning (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016; Popkin and Ng, this volume; Popkin, this volume). The overlap, blending, and reciprocal influence among these mental operations helps to analyze how Germanicus’ and Tiberius’ hopes about future commemoration engage with their present actions. In this process, there is a reciprocal influence between imagining the future based on the present and formulating one’s actions in the present based on imaginations of the future. Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson point out how humans’ unique ability of prospection allows them “to ‘preexperience’ the future by simulating it in our minds” (Gilbert and Wilson 2007: 1352). Tiberius and Germanicus imagine what the future might hold, how it might remember the present, and how they should act now in order to achieve their future goals. In other words, they pre-experience their futures. From a perspective in which people move between setting goals and acting in the present to achieve their desired future (on which see also Seligman et al. 2016: 22), Germanicus and Tiberius both approach the question of a triumph by imagining what the future might be and then working backward from their respective long-term goals. For Germanicus, it is helpful to delay the triumph so that he can gain even more fame in the future, while Tiberius wishes to curtail Germanicus’ time as general with an early triumph so that Drusus has more room to succeed in the future. Tiberius and Germanicus squabble over how long his war should last and how it should be commemorated. At the opening of his narrative for 15 CE, Tacitus simply states: “Germanicus was decreed a triumph, but still had a war” (decernitur Germanico triumphus manente bello, 1.55.1). The sentence’s structure emphasizes the paradox of commemorating an incomplete war. The syntax of the phrase decernitur Germanico triumphus (“a triumph is decreed for Germanicus”) leaves this decision’s agency and aim opaque, while the trailing ablative absolute manente bello (“even with the war continuing”) creates friction between structure and meaning: it brings the period to a close even as the war progresses. Tacitus raises questions about who is attempting to memorialize a deed that is not yet complete and how this mnemonic drive relates to future hopes and fears. These questions begin to be answered when Tiberius pushes for this triumph in order to minimize Germanicus’ accomplishments and heighten Drusus’ reputation. As Germanicus continues to fight in 16 CE, missives arrive: Many letters arrived from Tiberius with advice. Come home! A triumph has been decreed: enough results, enough disasters. Successful and significant battles are to your credit, but remember, too, what winds and waves—through no leader[’s] fault—have brought: heavy, painful losses. sed crebris epistulis Tiberius monebat, rediret ad decretum triumphum: satis iam eventuum, satis casuum. prospera illi et magna proelia: eorum quoque

42 Aaron Seider meminisset, quae venti et fluctus, nulla ducis culpa, gravia tamen et saeva damna intulissent. (2.26.2) In an argument that uses future concerns to influence present behavior, Tiberius holds out both a threat and a reward. Karl Szpunar has demonstrated the close relationship between one’s memories of the past and thoughts about episodes from the future (Szpunar 2016). Research on future thinking suggests that “human behavior is guided by anticipated emotions” people hope to experience or avoid in the future (Baumeister 2016b: 219; see also Gilbert and Wilson 2009 and Hoerl and McCormack 2016). Tiberius’ letters ask Germanicus to imagine the regret he should work to avoid. Here, Tiberius leverages Germanicus’ memory of his men’s shipwrecks to compel him to imagine similar future disasters, which, if he pushes a triumph off further, may become part of the larger cultural memory. As an alternative, Tiberius holds out the reward of an imminent triumph, which promises certain positive commemoration. The pair’s subsequent exchange unrolls their competing concerns for the future. Germanicus asks for more time, but Tiberius responds with additional enjoinments: If warfare is still necessary, leave something for your brother Drusus’ renown. There is no other enemy. Only in Germany can he achieve a victorious name and bring home laurels. Germanicus delayed no longer, but understood. Excuses! Envy is the reason—glory all but won—I am being wrenched away. si foret adhuc bellandum, relinqueret materiem Drusi fratris gloriae, qui nullo tum alio hoste non nisi apud Germanias adsequi nomen imperatorium et deportare lauream posset. haud cunctatus est ultra Germanicus, quamquam fingi ea seque per invidiam parto iam decori abstrahi intellegeret. (2.26.4–5) Tiberius’ prospective concern becomes apparent: by commemorating Germanicus’ battles before he can complete them, Tiberius can cap his adopted son’s accomplishments and leave space for his biological son to gain a triumphal commemoration of his own (Shannon-Henderson 2019: 59). For Germanicus, it is a different story. Generally speaking, people benefit from simulating future events; such simulation allows individuals to “engage in emotional regulation and appropriate problem solving activities” (Schacter et al. 2012: 688). Here, Germanicus may partly change his behavior in order to avoid regret in the future, yet, as his thoughts are oriented toward a future he will not be able to enjoy, the simple statement haud cunctatus est ultra Germanicus (literally, “Germanicus delayed no longer”) is followed by a complex imagining of the future glory that is now being torn away. When Germanicus does celebrate his triumph in 17 CE, Tacitus’ narrative stresses its fictitious nature and unintended consequences. This triumph is not what it seems: “Germanicus celebrated a triumph over Cherusci, Chatti, Angrivarii and other nations as far as the Elbe, parading plunder, prisoners and representations

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of mountains, rivers and battles. The war, since finishing it was forbidden, was considered finished” (triumphavit de Cheruscis Cattisque et Angrivariis quaeque aliae nationes usque ad Albim colunt. vecta spolia, captivi, simulacra montium fluminum proeliorum; bellumque, quia conficere prohibitus erat, pro confecto accipiebatur, 2.41.2). The polyptoton of conficere (“finishing”) and confecto (“finished”) highlights the false commemoration of the past Tiberius promoted in order to serve his hopes for the future. Moreover, this syntactical flourish also calls attention to how such a critique would be absent for the triumph’s original audience. In this respect, Tiberius’ charade was treated as reality, and the triumphal procession shapes the memory of a war that has not actually been completed and won (see Goodyear 1981: ad 2.41.2; Popkin 2016). The triumph’s aftermath, though, demonstrates Tiberius’ inability to control this commemoration’s significance. Tiberius hoped to leave space for Drusus’ future glory while ending Germanicus’ chance at greater success, but the audience forms a different link between past and present. Instead, as they admire Germanicus and his children, the onlookers connect different past memories with other future feelings (see McWilliam 2010: 124): But underneath there was hidden alarm, as people reflected. No success attended the crowd’s favour for his father Drusus. And his uncle Marcellus, despite the blaze of popular enthusiasm, was snatched away still young. Brief and unlucky are the Roman people’s love affairs. sed suberat occulta formido, reputantibus haud prosperum in Druso patre eius favorem vulgi, avunculum eiusdem Marcellum flagrantibus plebis studiis intra iuventam ereptum, breves et infaustos populi Romani amores. (2.41.2) When the Romans contemplate Germanicus, their alarm grows. Instead of focusing on the victories this triumph constructs, they think back to how Germanicus’ similarly admired father and uncle enjoyed neither happiness nor long life (Drusus died at the age of 29 in 9 BCE, Marcellus at age 19 in 23 BCE). For three years Tiberius maneuvered to reduce Germanicus’ future renown via a premature triumph, but the triumph, since it characterizes the war as complete and thereby increases Germanicus’ glory, associates him with earlier famous Romans and leaves the crowd with dark forebodings about Germanicus. Moreover, Tacitus’ characterization of this reaction shows the Romans collectively remembering the past and using it to think about the future together (see Orlin, this volume, on collective prospection). Focusing on memories of events that individuals share, Clinton Merck, Meymune Topcu, and William Hirst argue that “remembering the past and imagining the future are intricately related not only at the personal level but also at the collective level” (Merck, Topcu, and Hirst 2016: 289; see also Baumeister 2016a; Szpunar and Szpunar 2016). Since Tiberius cannot control the Romans’ memories of earlier events, he cannot control how they use knowledge to imagine a future. Here, connecting Germanicus’ renown from this false triumph

44 Aaron Seider to their collective memories of earlier young Roman commanders, they imagine a future where the same fate befalls Germanicus. Germanicus’ death in 19 CE occasions another conflict about how retrospective and prospective memory ought to be linked. Here the emperor and his subjects cite different past events as guides for prospective thinking. Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, and Sripada note how memory can be viewed as something that can “make a positive contribution to one’s ability to face the present and future” (Seligman et al. 2016: 14). Both Tiberius and the Roman masses turn to memory to think about what meaning Germanicus’ death should have for the future (see Gowing 2016: 57; Woodman 2015: 262). Watching the internment of Germanicus’ ashes, the Romans remember Drusus’ burial: Some missed a public funeral’s pomp and compared Augustus’ magnificent show of respect for Drusus, Germanicus’ father. Augustus himself at winter’s harshest went all the way to Pavia. Nor did he leave the corpse; they entered Rome together. Surrounding the bier were portraits, Claudii and Julii. Drusus was mourned in the Forum, eulogized from the Rostra. Every tribute the ancestors devised, along with posterity’s inventions, was piled high. For Germanicus? Not even traditional honours, those due any nobleman. True, his body, because of the journey’s length, was cremated anyhow in foreign lands. But more lustre later is only fair, since chance denied it at first. His brother didn’t go more than a day’s journey to him, his uncle not even to the gate. Where are the customs of old? A likeness on the bier, poems recited for virtue’s memory and praises and tears—or performances of grief. Fuere qui publici funeris pompam requirerent compararentque quae in Drusum, patrem Germanici, honora et magnifica Augustus fecisset. ipsum quippe asperrimo hiemis Ticinum usque progressum neque abscedentem a corpore simul urbem intravisse; circumfusas lecto Claudiorum Iuliorumque imagines; defletum in foro, laudatum pro rostris; cuncta a maioribus reperta aut quae posteri invenerint cumulata: at Germanico ne solitos quidem et cuicumque nobili debitos honores contigisse. sane corpus ob longinquitatem itinerum externis terris quoquo modo crematum: sed tanto plura decora mox tribui par fuisse, quanto prima fors negavisset. non fratrem, nisi unius diei via, non patruum saltem porta tenus obvium. ubi illa veterum instituta, propositam toro effigiem, meditata ad memoriam virtutis carmina et laudationes et lacrimas vel doloris imitamenta? (3.5) The Romans remember and compare the funeral of Germanicus’ father Drusus in 9 BCE with their present experience. Augustus ensured Drusus’ commemoration in a variety of ways, and Tiberius falls short in each of them. Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, and Sripada’s observation that memory “must metabolize information into forms that are efficient and effective for the forward guidance of thought and action” (Seligman et al. 2016: 15) fits well with the Romans’ rhetorical question,

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implying that memory is not currently being used as a guide for thought and action but should be. In other words, the crowd’s prediction of what Germanicus’ funeral should be like is not met. As they see it, “Tiberius has tried to deny them Germanicus’ memory,” and they now must reconcile this prediction error (Gowing 2016: 57). Rather than revise their model for what a proper funeral should be (which is what Tiberius will urge them to do), they judge their expectations to have been appropriate and Tiberius’ funeral of Germanicus to have been done incorrectly: the funeral itself, with its poor commemoration of Germanicus, was an error, not their prediction that the funeral should commemorate him appropriately. When the crowd’s memories compel them to critique Tiberius, the emperor leverages his elite status to tell his subjects not to stop connecting past and future but rather to revise the connections they draw between these times. Tiberius asserts that the Romans look to the wrong past memories and therefore draw the wrong conclusions about present and future: This was known to Tiberius. To repress the crowd’s talk, he gave an admonitory edict. Many notable Romans have died on public business, none celebrated with such passionate yearning. This is exemplary in me and everyone else—if—if a limit be applied. For what suits princes and an imperial people is not what suits middling houses or states. Feeling bereavement is appropriate to fresh pain, as is finding solace in mourning. But our character’s firmness must now be restored, as once Caesar, having lost his only daughter, and Augustus, after grandsons were torn away from him, put away sadness. No need for more ancient examples, how often the Roman people endured, steadfast, army disasters, commander deaths, noble families’ complete annihilation. Princes are mortal, the republic, eternal. So return to your normal pursuits. And since the Megalensia Festival is at hand, resume pleasures too. Gnarum id Tiberio fuit; utque premeret vulgi sermones, monuit edicto multos inlustrium Romanorum ob rem publicam obisse, neminem tam flagranti desiderio celebratum. idque et sibi et cunctis egregium, si modus adiceretur. non enim eadem decora principibus viris et imperatori populo quae modicis domibus aut civitatibus. convenisse recenti dolori luctum et ex maerore solacia; sed referendum iam animum ad firmitudinem, ut quondam divus Iulius amissa unica filia, ut divus Augustus ereptis nepotibus abstruserint tristitiam. nil opus vetustioribus exemplis, quotiens populus Romanus clades exercituum, interitum ducum, funditus amissas nobilis familias constanter tulerit. principes mortales, rem publicam aeternam esse. proin repeterent sollemnia et quia ludorum Megalesium spectaculum suberat, etiam voluptates resumerent. (3.6.1–3) Tiberius emphasizes the need to remember past examples that prescribe emotional restraint (see Shannon-Henderson 2019: 126–27 on the emperor’s disingenuity). According to Tiberius, the Romans should fix their prediction error by changing what they predict as appropriate. By prescribing memories that demand the regulation of

46 Aaron Seider grief and the curtailment of mourning, Tiberius directs his subjects to turn their behavior toward the “pleasures” (voluptates) of the approaching games. The force of “resume” (resumerent), emphasized by its final position, offers yet another perspective on the links between past and future. Here, it is not the devoted mourning of Augustus that should be taken up again but the pleasures of the more recent past, as it is these pleasures that will turn the Romans’ thoughts away from Germanicus. In Tacitus’ narrative of these episodes linked with Germanicus’ death, both the historian and his characters conceptualize, evaluate, and respond to events by thinking along a continuum of past, present, and future. Cognitive research that concentrates on the reciprocal influences between those times elucidates how the Romans make decisions in the immediate present while thinking about the past and future. Much work has argued that similar mechanisms govern mental time travel into the past and future (see Suddendorf and Busby 2005: 111 for bibliography), and sets of passages concerning Germanicus’ triumph and his mourning concentrate on questions of how the future will ultimately commemorate the present. Amidst the uncertainty associated with Germanicus’ death, the Romans link memories of the past and thoughts about the future. As some cognitive scientists might put it, they use memories of the past as building blocks for imagining their future (see Popkin and Ng, this volume). The influence between these mental operations goes both ways. Thinking ahead to how the future will remember his adopted and biological sons, Tiberius decrees a triumph for a war that is ongoing. At that triumph Germanicus’ appearance reminds the Romans of the fates of similar young leaders, and they worry over Germanicus’ future. Lastly, after Germanicus’ death, the Romans and Tiberius judge commemorations for the future according to the past, but they differ in terms of the memories they cite as relevant. These episodes illustrate how the Romans think about the past, present, and future, and they set up both the internal characters’ memories of these earlier events and Tacitus’ commemoration of them in the Annals as significant factors in mental operations to come.

Disruptive uncertainty and failures of prediction In the examples in this chapter’s first section, the Annals’ characters connect past and future as a strategy for navigating uncertainty, but it is not always the case that characters can reduce uncertainty or even wish to do so. Having established that past, present, and future are linked on a continuum, in this section I focus on the mental operation of predictive processing in an episode where the characters’ process of predicting the future and planning accordingly is disrupted: the return of Germanicus’ ashes to Brundisium at the start of Annals 3. As discussed in the chapter’s introduction, models of predictive processing explore the idea that people base their behavior on predictions of what they are about to encounter in the present (see Bar 2009a; Clark 2016). Clark brings out how this process blurs the lines between past, present, and future: The line between ‘predicting the present’ and ‘predicting the very-near-future’ is one that simply vanishes once we see the percept (the mental representation

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resulting from the process of perception) itself as a prediction-driven construct that is always rooted in the past (systemic knowledge) and anticipating, at multiple temporal and spatial scales, the future. (Clark 2016: 18) The episode under consideration here illustrates what happens when it becomes quite challenging, indeed almost impossible, to use systemic knowledge to predict the future with any certainty. I first analyze three elements that contribute to the challenges the Romans face at Brundisium: Germanicus’ unique stature, the ambiguous nature of the memories the Romans might recall at his death, and Tiberius’ efforts to promote uncertainty. After considering these factors, this section analyzes the return of Germanicus’ ashes through the lens of predictive processing. I argue that Germanicus’ death poses a predictive challenge, since it is both difficult for the Romans to turn to the appropriate systemic knowledge to think about what is to come and because their predictions do not match the reality they confront. This prediction error leaves the Romans unsure about how to behave, and they only move forward once they understand the cues from their new context and revise their knowledge of how to mourn a public figure. The context of Germanicus’ death forms a significant part of this predictive challenge. Clark notes that people’s uncertainty in the world changes “the shape and flow of all that inner guessing,” (Clark 2016: 3), and several factors impact the Romans’ inner guessing at this moment. One concerns the models the Romans might consider as they ponder how to mourn Germanicus. In the episodes discussed in the chapter’s first section, the Romans’ strategy in such situations is to link the future with the past. As Bar writes, when the brain tries to predict the future, it uses a process that moves from analogy to associations to predictions, where the brain finds an earlier analogy that matches the current situation; reviews the factors associated with that analogous situation; and then makes predictions that prepare people to encounter “the representations of what is most likely to occur and be encountered next” (Bar 2009b: 1235–36). Here, even though neither Tacitus nor the Annals’ characters explicitly recall Augustus’ death when Germanicus dies, this earlier trauma stands as an implied model for the reaction to imperial deaths. The first emperor’s foundational nature makes any actions associated with him stand as examples for future behavior, a connection strengthened by the Romans’ predilection for joining past with present. Two other factors increase the relevance of Augustus’ death. In addition to Germanicus’ connection with Augustus through his imperial status, no other death in Annals 1–3 receives anywhere near the same level of attention as Germanicus’, and Tacitus’ lengthy focus on the aftermath of Germanicus’ passing recalls the importance given to the reactions to Augustus’ death at 1.9–10. Yet, if the Romans do think back to the aftermath of Augustus’ death, this would only add to the difficulties of predicting the future and engaging in behavior appropriate for it. This earlier loss prompted divergent reactions, and memories of it would increase people’s doubt about how to mourn Germanicus. Tacitus emphasizes how Augustus “was variously extolled or criticized” (varie extollebatur

48 Aaron Seider arguebaturve, 1.9.3). Some lauded his justice and restraint, while others pointed out that he offered “a bloody peace” (pacem . . . cruentam, 1.10.4). Even as the reactions to Augustus’ death stand as a model that might fit this moment, their most distinctive characteristic is their irreconcilable divergence. The only guidance this imperial model offers is that there may be varying reactions to Germanicus’ death, thus making it impossible to predict what might happen and to modulate one’s behavior appropriately. To compound the challenges the Romans face in a narrative where the foundational model for a reaction to trauma is one of conflict, Tiberius avoids offering any indication of how he will respond. Clark’s work on predictive processing shows how Tiberius foils people’s ability to perceive the world: “Perception (rich, world-revealing perception) occurs when the probabilistic residue of past experience meets the incoming sensory signal with matching prediction” (Clark 2016: 107). Here, the Romans’ past experience with Augustus’ death might lead them to predict that Tiberius could voice a positive or negative opinion of Germanicus. However, Tiberius offers nothing for evaluation; in other words, the “incoming sensory signal” the Roman masses receive is his absence, while for elites he offers ambiguity. Although these passages occur slightly later than the description of the arrival of Germanicus’ ashes at Brundisium, they may be taken as representative of the emperor’s overall behavior, with the persona he projects and the atmosphere he creates being understood as a backdrop for the period following Germanicus’ death. By being so opaque, Tiberius works against the possibility that the Romans can collectively imagine the future and plan for it (see Damon 1999 on the “obsequiousness and dissimulation” [143] in Annals 3). As Roy Baumeister argues in a study of collective prospection, sharing “a vision about the future” can lead to such benefits as collective planning, learning, and teaching (Baumeister 2016a: 145), but Tiberius prevents the Romans from reaching a collective understanding of what their future mode of commemorating Germanicus should be. On both occasions, first with the masses and then with elites, the emperor foils people’s attempts to think about what his behavior will be so that they can modulate their own. The theory of predictive processing illuminates why the Roman people were at such a loss in terms of formulating their behavior. In Tacitus’ account, which likely leaves out honors the emperor did actually accord Germanicus (González 1999: 140–41), Tiberius’ absence both invites speculation and defies it. In sentences of increasing length and complexity, Tacitus’ treatment of Tiberius’ behavior mirrors the confusion it creates: Tiberius and Livia stayed away from the public. Was it beneath their dignity to mourn openly? Or lest—with everyone’s eyes scrutinizing their faces—their falsity be perceived? What about Germanicus’ mother Antonia? Neither in historians nor in the daily gazette of events do I find that she played any significant role. Yet in addition to Agrippina, Drusus and Claudius, Germanicus’ remaining relatives, too, are recorded by name. Perhaps ill health prevented her. Or else defeated by bereavement, her spirit did not tolerate seeing the magnitude of the loss she suffered. My belief inclines more easily to this,

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that Tiberius and Livia, who were not going out, kept Antonia in to give the appearance of equal sorrow and that the mother’s example detained grandmother, too, and uncle. Tiberius atque Augusta publico abstinuere, inferius maiestate sua rati, si palam lamentarentur, an ne omnium oculis vultum eorum scrutantibus falsi intellegentur. matrem Antoniam non apud auctores rerum, non diurna actorum scriptura reperio ullo insigni officio functam, cum super Agrippinam et Drusum et Claudium ceteri quoque consanguinei nominatim perscripti sint, seu valetudine praepediebatur, seu victus luctu animus magnitudinem mali perferre visu non toleravit. facilius crediderim Tiberio et Augusta, qui domo non excedebant, cohibitam, ut par maeror et matris exemplo avia quoque et patruus attineri viderentur. (3.3.1–3) Beginning with a four-word declarative clause, the period moves to a pair of probing subordinate clauses ascribing motives largely concerned with appearances. Then, after a statement about the absence of Germanicus’ mother, Tacitus offers multiple reasons for this, starting with her illness or extreme grief and progressing toward causes that arise from the emperor’s duplicity. This structure, which overwhelms the absences of Tiberius and Livia with an array of interpretations, evokes the uncertainty among those who can neither view the emperor’s actions nor know what he thinks. With this lack of understanding, it becomes more challenging for the Romans to predict what the future will be and to modulate their behavior accordingly. The same uncertainty springs from Tiberius’ words a bit later. After Germanicus dies, people suspect that Piso poisoned him. Desperate to sway imperial opinion, Piso voyages to Drusus and sends his son to Tiberius. In Tacitus’ rendition, though, the interlaced nature of Piso’s actions leads to a singular obliquity: Piso, after sending his son to Rome with instructions for appeasing Tiberius, headed for Drusus, whose attitude to him, he hoped, was not grim at his brother’s death but, with a rival removed, rather favourable. Tiberius, to show that his verdict was still undecided, received the man affably and with his habitual generosity towards the sons of noble families in gifts. Drusus’ reply to Piso: If the rumours are true, my position is uniquely painful. Better that they be false and empty than that Germanicus’ death bring anyone’s destruction. This was said in public, all privacy avoided. No one doubted that these were Tiberius’ instructions, seeing that a man otherwise unwary and with youth’s easy temper was using an old man’s artifice. At Piso praemisso in urbem filio datisque mandatis per quae principem molliret, ad Drusum pergit, quem haud fratris interitu trucem quam remoto aemulo aequiorem sibi sperabat. Tiberius, quo integrum iudicium ostentaret, exceptum comiter iuvenem sueta erga filios familiarum nobilis liberalitate auget.

50 Aaron Seider Drusus Pisoni, si vera forent quae iacerentur, praecipuum in dolore suum locum respondit, sed malle falsa et inania nec cuiquam mortem Germanici exitiosam esse. haec palam et vitato omni secreto; neque dubitabantur praescripta ei a Tiberio, cum incallidus alioqui et facilis iuventa senilibus tum artibus uteretur. (3.8.1–2) Piso makes a two-pronged effort to save his life by sending his son to Tiberius and approaching the emperor’s son himself. Piso’s uncertainty and consequent inability to predict how Drusus will react to Germanicus’ death are visible in the lengthy relative clause that ends the first sentence: “whose attitude to him, he hoped, was not grim at his brother’s death but, with a rival removed, rather favourable” (quem haud fratris interitu trucem quam remoto aemulo aequiorem sibi sperabat). These opposing alternatives recall the conflicting interpretations of Augustus after his death, and this doubt about the future is brought out even more by “he hoped” (sperabat). This verb looks with uncertainty to the future, as Piso cannot know for sure what Drusus thinks and what his emotional reaction to Germanicus’ death will be. The responses Piso and his son receive are a study in contradiction and ambiguity. The verb “to show” (ostentaret) hints at contrasts between surface and depths, and the challenges in figuring out Drusus’ and Tiberius’ feelings are only highlighted by the contrasting pairs of “true/false (vera/falsa) and “in public/privacy” (palam/secreto). Lastly, Tacitus’ juxtaposition of “youth” (iuventa) and “old man” (senilibus) goes beyond establishing Tiberius’ responsibility to underscore the duplicity of these responses as a whole. This behavior significantly effects predictions of the future. In their work on how memories of the past engage with predictions of the future, Martin Conway, Catherine Loveday, and Scott Cole argue that, when humans interact with the past and future, they focus most intensely on times within several days of the present (Conway, Loveday, and Cole 2016: 258). From this perspective, the uncertainty Tiberius fosters makes forming predictions and regulating one’s own behavior impossible. With Tiberius’ behavior layered on top of the conflicting models offered by the reactions to Augustus’ death and the general uncertainty sparked by Germanicus in life and death, it is not at all surprising that there are challenges of prediction when Germanicus’ ashes return to Italy. At the beginning of Annals 3, Tacitus describes how the Romans wait for Germanicus’ ashes at Brundisium and watch for his widow, Agrippina: At word of her arrival every close friend and many ex-soldiers who had served under Germanicus, and many strangers, too, from nearby towns—some thinking it a service to the Emperor, more following them—rushed to Brundisium. For travellers by sea this was the quickest and safest dock. As soon as the fleet was visible out at sea, all spots were filled—not only port and adjacent waters, but also walls and rooftops and wherever the longest view was possible. The crowd was lamenting and asking whether silence or some utterance should greet her landing, and had not yet reached agreement about what suited.

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interim adventu eius audito intimus quisque amicorum et plerique militares, ut quique sub Germanico stipendia fecerant, multique etiam ignoti vicinis e municipiis, pars officium in principem rati, plures illos secuti, ruere ad oppidum Brundisium, quod naviganti celerrimum fidissimumque adpulsu erat. atque ubi primum ex alto visa classis, complentur non modo portus et proxima mari[s], sed moenia ac tecta, quaque longissime prospectari poterat, maerentium turba et rogitantium inter se, silentione an voce aliqua egredientem exciperent. neque satis constabat quid pro tempore foret. (3.1.2–3) The audience is struck with uncertainty about how they should react. While people understand that they should be present, they do not know what to do once they arrive. Tacitus highlights this when he writes that “The crowd was lamenting and asking whether silence or some utterance should greet her landing, and had not yet reached agreement about what suited” (maerentium turba et rogitantium inter se, silentione an voce aliqua egredientem exciperent. neque satis constabat quid pro tempore foret, 3.1.3). The difficulty they experience in predicting the near future and modulating their behavior to meet those predictions is emphasized by its appearance at the structurally significant location of the beginning of Annals 3. Just like those who search for meaning in Tiberius’ words or appearances, this crowd awaits a cue about what they should do. When the brain meets a prediction challenge, it can revise its prior beliefs in an attempt to understand anew what it sees or it can keep on searching for new input that matches its prediction. At this moment, the Romans do not know what path to take. Instead of being given either no replies at all or conflicting ones, however, the Roman people, at the height of their uncertainty, do receive a signal. There is a complete change that follows once the crowd receives a new indication about how they should behave. Indeed, as Tacitus’ narrative makes clear, after the crowd can judge from Agrippina’s actions how they ought to behave, their behavioral shift is immediate and substantial: The crowd had not yet reached agreement about what suited when the fleet approached gradually, not, as was customary, with the crew brisk, but with all arrayed for sorrow. With two children and holding the funeral urn Agrippina disembarked, eyes down. A single universal groan went up. You could not distinguish relatives and strangers or men’s and women’s wailing. Except that Agrippina’s company, wearied by long sadness, was outdone by those meeting them, fresh to pain. neque satis constabat quid pro tempore foret, cum classis paulatim successit, non alacri, ut adsolet, remigio, sed cunctis ad tristitiam compositis. postquam duobus cum liberis, feralem urnam tenens, egressa navi defixit oculos, idem omnium gemitus, neque discerneres proximos alienos, virorum feminarumve planctus, nisi quod comitatum Agrippinae longo maerore fessum obvii et recentes in dolore anteibant. (3.1.3–4)

52 Aaron Seider As the ships come closer, the Romans remain unsure of what would be proper for the moment. The indirect question “what suited” (quid pro tempore foret) looks to the future and seeks to find out the information that will help the Romans behave in a way that will meet their predictions. Unsure of what to do in this novel situation and unable to predict what their appropriate behavior might be, the Romans watch Agrippina’s sad descent. As Clark illustrates, “unpredicted input” flows back to the brain and then is used to revise future predictions of what will be sensed from the world (see Clark 2016: 30, 29, and 284; also Seligman et al. 2016: 62). That is, when the brain’s prediction is not matched by reality, it takes in this new information to make a new prediction. Here, the unpredicted input of Agrippina’s behavior enables the Romans to revise their knowledge of how to respond to a death of a public figure. They engage in mourning on a universal level. Tacitus emphasizes how this shift blurs all boundaries: “You could not distinguish relatives and strangers or men’s and women’s wailing” (neque discerneres proximos alienos, virorum feminarumve planctus, 3.1.4). Typically in Roman mourning a distinction would be expected in both these categories: namely, those closer to the deceased would lament more than those who were distant, while women would express their grief more openly than men. Here, though, those boundaries are erased in “a single universal groan” (idem omnium gemitus, 3.1.4), with the only difference being in the intensity of those who now mourn for the first time and those who have been mourning on the ship for days. A glance at one of the passages considered in this chapter’s first section illustrates how the shift in the Romans’ behavior precipitated by their intake of knowledge from Agrippina continues. Earlier, this chapter considered how in Annals 3.5 the Romans critique Tiberius, as compared with Augustus, for his lack of commemoration and personal attention to Germanicus’ corpse. We can again see here “the power of top-down predictions . . . to impact perceptual experience” (Clark 2016: 50). Here, the Romans’ focus on how Tiberius’ behavior does not successfully meet the norms that they expect him to uphold, and, due to the power of Agrippina’s actions, instead of revising their own expectations again, they cite the memories of Augustus’ devotion to mourning Drusus as both a way to critique the current emperor and to justify their predictions of what the world should be and how people should be behaving. As the Romans themselves mourn, rather than changing their behavior to fit what the emperor is doing, they critique his behavior instead.

Conclusion Tacitus’ narrative of Germanicus’ death both links retrospective and prospective thinking and examines the challenges of predicting the future in the midst of uncertainty. My arguments have ramifications for our understanding of the Roman readers of Tacitus’ work and the portrait of prospective thinking Tacitus’ narrative creates. Tacitus’ late first- and early second-century readers inhabit a politically turbulent world similar to that of the Annals. In this imperial reality, the level of uncertainty can be so great that predictive processing becomes challenging for

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those forced to interpret events and modulate their behavior in real time. For Tacitus’ readers, their experience of the Annals now becomes another piece of their past and, therefore, another piece of information that will influence their predictive processing for the future. As Latham shows (this volume), literary passages, however fictional(ized), can become very real memory resources. The very shift in the Romans’ behavior in their predictive processing between Annals 3.1 and 3.5 illustrated earlier raises this possibility, as here Tacitus’ characters change how they react based on their newfound experience. As a piece of past experience for the Annals’ Roman readers, their readings of these episodes may simultaneously drive them to caution and boldness. Hesitancy or reluctance to act might arise when no indication of the correct path is presented, such as when situations are utterly opaque (like for those facing Tiberius’ obfuscations) or when situations could move in either of two opposing directions (like for those forced to model their current behavior on the two divergent reactions to Augustus’ loss). In both these cases it becomes impossible to predict what will occur and then model one’s actions to meet that prediction. Yet, at the same time as the experience of reading the Annals may encourage caution, so too might it inspire boldness. For at the beginning of Annals 3, as Germanicus’ ashes are being brought to shore and the crowd is not in agreement “about what suited” (quid pro tempore foret, 3.1.3), there is the greatest possibility to shape behavior in a new way. For the person who, consciously or not, provides a model for behavior that suddenly appears appropriate (such as Agrippina does in her mournful procession), there is the possibility to substantially shape people’s predictions of what is to occur as well as the behavior they will select in order to meet those predictions. In fact, the dramatic changes that Agrippina’s appearance precipitates (complete mourning among the crowd) and its contravention of typical norms of expressing grief hold out the power to introduce new types of behavior at moments when people struggle to make predictions. Thus, bold action in moments of uncertainty can reshape people’s expectations, predictions, and behavior. Viewed along the continuum of past, present, and future, this shaping of predictive processing sets up the current moment as a new past that will soon stand to influence the future. For the Annals’ Roman readers, then, this offers a quintessential Tacitean paradox, as this episode illustrates how it is possible to establish radical new models for behavior in the present, which, thanks to the Romans’ conservative reliance on using the past to plan for their future, will soon stand as established exempla to influence predictive processing in the years to come.

Notes 1 Except where noted the Latin text of the Annals is from Heubner 1994 and the English translation from Damon 2012. Damon 2012, liii uses italics in her translation to indicate “reported speech and thought”, and I follow her practice here. 2 Exitum is a correction of the manuscript reading of exitium; Heubner prints exitium; see Goodyear 1981: ad loc. and Woodman 2015: 256, n.4 on this correction.

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Ad futuram memoriam The Augustan Ludi Saeculares Eric Orlin

This chapter takes the Ludi Saeculares celebrated by Augustus in 17 BCE and the inscription documenting the ritual (CIL 6.32323) as a case study for understanding how cognitive theories of future thinking can illuminate the agency of inscriptions.1 The Secular Games were intended to mark the end of one era and the beginning of the next, and so by their very nature they provide both a backward-looking perspective claiming continuity with the past and a forward-looking perspective looking toward the future. The Secular Games of Augustus are also one of bestdocumented religious ceremonies from the ancient world; we are fortunate to possess a purported copy, preserved in later texts, of the Sibylline oracle that provided the religious motivation for the Games, the Carmen Saeculare composed by Horace for the occasion, and the long inscription that will be the focus of this chapter.2 The celebration thus provides ample material for exploring not only Augustus’ concern with reshaping Roman society but also the role played by inscriptions in generating future thinking. Fragments of the inscription were first discovered in 1890 near the Ponte Sant’Angelo (originally the pons Aelius) on the east bank of the Tiber River; the surviving fragments can be seen today on a large marble cippus in the Museo Nazionale Romano: Terme di Diocleziano in Rome (Figure 4.1). The first 50 lines are extremely fragmentary but clearly mention the quindecemviri sacris faciundis, the Board of Fifteen whose special province was the consultation of the Sibylline Books. Because the religious motivation for the Secular Games had come from the Books, the quindecemviri held the overall supervision of the festival. Following an outline of the dates of the festival came several announcements from the quindecemviri to the city of Rome announcing both the celebration and arrangements for preparations, including the distribution of purificatory materials. The still fragmentary but better-preserved section of the inscription records two decrees of the Senate relating to the celebration and another edict of the quindecemviri, followed by a description of the celebration including the sacrifices and prayers offered at various locations throughout the city. The surviving part of the inscription concludes with another edict of the quindecemviri and a listing of the members of that religious college who participated in the ceremonies. I want to suggest that this inscription played an essential role in this process of shaping future thinking and behavior, that in creating a memory of the Augustan DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-4

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Figure 4.1 Inscription recording the Secular Games of Augustus. 17 BCE. Source: Photograph by Eric Orlin.

celebration the inscription served to shape both the performance of future celebrations and the nature of future Roman society. Because the saeculum was set by Augustus at 110 years, a span of time that exceeds the biological limitations of any individual person, the inscription served as the public remembrance of the event. It is part of the presentation of the inscription that it explicitly calls attention to this fact: the fragmentary prefatory text remarks that “it is not granted to any mortal to view them [i.e., the Secular Games] more than once” (Acta Aug. 54). Further along, the inscription documents a request from the consul Gaius Silanus that a record of the Secular Games be inscribed for the purpose of preserving the memory of so much religio (ad conservandam memoriam tantae religionis) and the decree of the Senate that the consuls, one or both, for the future memory of so much religio (ad futuram memoriam tantae religionis) shall erect in that place a column of bronze and a second of marble on which a record of these games has been inscribed. (Acta Aug. 59–61)3

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These remarkable lines have not received the attention they deserve. Although they do not mention Augustus, we know from other sources that Augustus was the driving force behind the celebration of the Secular Games and therefore likely behind these provisions to commemorate as well. These lines explicitly reveal Augustus’ concern not just with commemorating the past but with how future Romans would remember this event.4 They suggest that for the Romans these two actions might be one and the same: “the preservation of memory” is here used as a gloss for “future memory.” Second, they demonstrate the importance he attached to the memory of this specific event. The provision to carve two inscriptions on different materials for display in the same spot is rare if not unique, and the spot indicated was apparently precisely where many of the celebrations took place in the Campus Martius. Third and perhaps most significantly, the mechanism by which Augustus expected to generate this future memory was the carving of inscriptions, which suggests that he and other Romans recognized the role of permanent written documents as a means of generating a public collective memory for the future (see Jacob A. Latham’s discussion in this volume of Fabius Pictor’s written account of the pompa circensis as a source of cultural memory, both retrospective and prospective). The inscription thus compels us to consider the relationship between the past (previous celebrations on which the Secular Games drew), the present (the Augustan Games), and the future (imagined Games of the next saeculum). The Augustan inscription on the Secular Games thus raises larger questions about the implications of carving an inscription. Ancient historians are so accustomed to working with inscriptions that the act may no longer seem surprising, but we should stop to consider its implications. Inscriptions have primarily been seen as serving a commemorative function, that is, as aids in remembering the past, whether a military victory, the extraordinary service provided by a named individual to the community, or even the life of an ordinary human being (see, e.g., Cooley 2012: esp. 5 and passim; see also Woolf 1996; Flower 2006; Meyer 2012; Keegan 2013). Recent work by cognitive scientists, as outlined by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng in their introduction to this volume, has argued that human beings should be considered as “Homo prospectus” and that our distinctiveness as a species lies in our ability to imagine the future (Seligman et al. 2016). The act of carving any sort of inscription must imagine a future in which there will be people around to read the inscription. More to the point, it imagines a future in which what is written will be meaningful to those future people and might even shape their behavior. Indeed, as the chapters in this volume by Molly Swetnam-Burland and Karen B. Stern demonstrate, even people of lesser means, who could not afford a marble inscription, strove for the same goal (achieving meaning for future audiences) when writing more informal inscriptions. Without imagining a future along those lines, there would be little reason to go to the effort and expense of leaving an inscription in the first place. Inscriptions, particularly the Augustan inscription, thus participate in what Rivka Eisner has termed prospective memory, which she defines as

Ad futuram memoriam 57 a form of remembering that propels, even compels, the past into the present and future. Rather than primarily an act of retrospection, prospective remembering performs forward. Prospective remembering invites memory, as well as its tellers and listeners, to open towards change and new possibility, carrying lives, experiences and knowledges from the past into renewed vitality. (Eisner 2011: 895) Exploring inscriptions through the lens of future thinking forces us to consider not just what part of the past the carver wants people to remember but the present and the future that the carver is imagining. Scholarly work on collective memory has begun to consider the implications of future memory, and these perspectives can help us better to understand the role of inscriptions in the ancient world, since inscriptions fundamentally concern themselves with future thought as well as past thought. We will thus begin with a discussion of theories of future thinking before offering a brief summary of the Secular Games as staged by Augustus in 17 BCE. We will then be in a position to better answer the questions raised by the Augustan inscription and understand how it contributed to shaping both specific future celebrations of the Secular Games and Roman society more broadly.

Collective future thought Bringing analysis of future thinking together with collective memory has opened up new avenues of research on what has been called collective future thought. Piotr Szpunar and Karl Szpunar define collective future thought as “the act of imagining an event that has yet to transpire on behalf of, or by, a group” (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 378). The key element that defines future thought as collective is the nature of the imagining: if an individual imagines the future of the group, they are engaging in collective future thought, but not if they imagine only their own future even in the context of a future group situation (see Popkin and Ng, this volume). Szpunar and Szpunar use the example of technology to illustrate this distinction: if an individual imagines how their own communication might be changed by the release of the latest iPhone, that would not represent collective future thought. But if they consider how their society might be changed, that person would be engaging in collective future thought (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 379). They stress that an individual in engaging with a collective future imagines “on behalf of and for the group”—that an individual’s vision of a collective future provides “one version or iteration of a ‘collected future’” (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 378–79). Collective future thought thus can be a top-down process, as we see in Aaron Seider’s discussion in this volume of Tiberius’ control of or attempts to control public mourning; when Augustus imagined the future of the Roman state, he engaged in collective future thought. At the same time, collective future thought exists beyond the control of any one person, just as collective memory does. Collective future thought functions as part of a discourse and can be contested in the same ways that collective memory can be contested. In the framing of Szpunar and Szpunar, “imagined futures ‘exist’

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beyond the individual and in social/group processes that draw on—and reinforce or challenge—various social narratives and anxieties” (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 379). The formation of collected future thought is not controlled by state authorities even if they contribute to it. In the ancient world where we generally have less access to nonelite responses, it can be difficult to glimpse the discourse around collective memory, let alone collective future thought (for an example of the discourse around collective memory in Athens, see Low 2020; see also Stern, in this volume, on elite and non-elite access to collective memory). While we can more clearly observe the vision of Augustus through the inscription mentioned previously, we may be able to catch some glimpses of the discourse in subsequent iterations of the ceremony. Collective future thought revolves primarily around events, just as collective memory does, though here it is useful to distinguish between episodic memory and semantic memory.5 Episodic memory revolves around specific events, those with specific dates and times and involving details that one might expect to experience, such as an upcoming family event (e.g., a wedding) or a public event (e.g., the Super Bowl or a presidential election). For those who were in Rome in 17 BCE, the Secular Games would clearly fit the definition of a specific event. On the other hand, semantic memory revolves around what has been labeled schematic events, drawing upon the concept of schematic narratives that focus on more generalized concepts (see Wertsch 2004 for a fuller discussion of schematic narratives). Here the details that underlie a specific narrative are less important than the abstract message being conveyed by that narrative, what Szpunar and Szpunar call the “underlying and generalizable patterns that structure the feel of imagined futures” (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 379). To use an example from our contemporary moment, a billboard depicting four black mothers mourning juxtaposed with George Floyd’s final word and an upside-down American flag offers a schematic narrative emphasizing the loss and trauma suffered by the Black community at the hands of the American state rather than a specific history of Black individuals killed by the police (Figure 4.2). For the Romans, the Secular Games inaugurated a new saeculum and so required imagining life during the new era. It is important to note that “while the specific and schematic are conceptually distinct, in almost any future vision, they overlap. Specific imagined future events . . . are placed into schematics that aid in their communication” (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 380). Collective future thought on the specific event, a future celebration of the Secular Games, is inextricably bound up with the schematic event, the characteristics of the new saeculum, similar to how collective future thought about performances of the pompa circensis were entangled with Fabius Pictor’s and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ schematic literary renderings of the procession (see Latham, this volume). Collective future thought is also connected to the formation and maintenance of group identity just as collective memory is connected to these processes (for discussions of collective memory, see Connerton 1989; Zelizer 1995; Olick 1999). The concept of collective continuity can help formulate the connection between collective future thought and social group cohesion. Perceived collective continuity

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Figure 4.2 “Mama” by Melodee Strong, 2020. Source: Photograph used with permission from Northeast Sculpture.

has been shown to be important in the maintenance of group identity: a sense of the future is important to shaping behavior in the present, and if individuals believe that the future group will no longer include them, they are less likely to continue to identify as members of the group (Sani et al. 2007; Bain et al. 2013). The sense that the group will not only continue to exist qua group in the future but also to prosper is a key element in encouraging individuals to continue to connect their own well-being with that of the group (Sani, Bowe, and Herrera 2008). Thinking about the future success of the group in positive terms is therefore critical to the continued existence of the group, and one can well understand why a leader would want to foster this type of collective future thought. At the same time, neither memory nor group identity is static; both are unstable and often changing, and even the relationship between the past and the future is unstable. Paradoxically one may have to imagine the past or the future differently in order to maintain a sense of continuity. It is also important to note that the relationship is not unidirectional. While it might seem self-evident that the recollection of the past shapes how one imagines the future, Szpunar and Szpunar argue that collective future thought can impact how one understands the past: imagining the apocalyptic impact of global climate change might cause one to remember the invention of the automobile as a mistake rather than a triumph that brought increased mobility to billions of people (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 384). These observations highlight the fact that group continuity “depends on its ability to adapt and change rather than simply persevere—in relation to its projections of the future” (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 384). Notions of continuity and change are central to Augustan Rome, where projecting continuity while undertaking change, sometimes radical change, appears as a recurring theme. These concepts of collective future thought are thus useful not merely to understanding inscriptions but to

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understanding the maintenance—or, better, the re-formation— of group identity throughout this crucial formative period to which we now turn.

The Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE The Ludi Saeculares have long been viewed as a key symbolic moment in the reign of Augustus. The previous decade saw significant experimentation in many areas of political, social and cultural life in Rome following Augustus’ victory over Mark Antony. These include the very adoption of the name Augustus, the various attempts at formalizing his power within the forms of previously existing republican government, the massive rebuilding program inaugurated in 28 BCE, and the passage of the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus that attempted to strengthen the institution of marriage in 18 BCE, the year before the Games were held. Many of these innovations were presented as a return to practices of the past that had been weakened or obliterated through the decades of in-fighting among the Roman elite. The Games are usually considered to mark a transition into a period of consolidation. Through them, Augustus announced the beginning of a new saeculum, one that he hoped would be marked by peace, prosperity, and fertility, in stark contrast to the previous hundred years marked by civil war, suffering, and destruction. In putting together the celebration, Augustus explicitly drew connections to an earlier ritual, although he refashioned the ceremony in order to inaugurate a new saeculum, a new era. The celebration of 17 BCE was presented as a renewal of a ceremony that Augustus claimed dated back to 456, making his Games the fifth in the sequence according to the Fasti Capitolini. Most modern scholarship sees this claim as a fabrication and sees the Ludi Saeculares as deriving from the Ludi Tarentini, which were first celebrated in 249 BCE, and again in 149 or 146 (for ancient sources on the origins of the Games, see Livy, Per. 49; Varro, in Cens. 17.8; Zosimus 2.4.1–2; Val. Max. 2.4.5, all collected in Pighi 1965; for modern scholarship see Taylor 1934; Wagenvoort 1956; Weiss 1973; Bernstein 1998; Schnegg 2020). This latter ceremony derived its name from the location where it took place, the Tarentum in the Campus Martius, and honored the underworld deities Dis and Proserpina. In 17 BCE Augustus adopted the notion of inaugurating a new saeculum from the Etruscans and shifted the focus of the celebration to Apollo and Diana as the avatars of his new age. The nocturnal sacrifices continued to be performed in the Campus Martius, but other ceremonies were performed on the Capitoline and Palatine hills, including sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, and Apollo and Diana. It is clear that the Games of Augustus, despite the professions of restoration from the princeps, represented a sharp departure from the earlier ritual (on the shift in focus of the Secular Games, see Beard, North, and Price 1998: 202–3; Zanker 1988: 168–72). At the same time, as discussed earlier, the perception of collective continuity, even when it requires adaptation and change, is important to group identity, a matter of some concern to Augustus after 50 years of civil war. There was thus a need for Augustus to generate a future memory of this event, both a specific future to guide future generations toward the now-proper celebration

Ad futuram memoriam 61 of the ceremony and a schematic future that Romans believed would continue to include them.

Imagining a specific future Exploring the details of the inscription, particularly noting both what was included and what was omitted, allows us to see how it engages in an act of collective future thought about a specific event. In describing the celebration, the inscription outlines the sequence of ceremonies for the ritual. For example, it indicates which divinities were to receive sacrifices on which days and even what time of day: the Moerae (Fates) on May 31 at night, Jupiter and Ilithyiae (Greek goddess of childbirth) on June 1 during the day and at night respectively, Juno and Terra Mater (Mother Earth) on June 2 day and night, and Apollo and Diana on June 3. It records what offerings were to be made to each divinity and includes details about sellisternia, or ritual banquets, to be offered by 110 matrons, as well as a prayer to be offered by matrons as part of the celebration for Juno. It highlights when Latin and Greek ludi were to be staged and indicates that a chorus of 27 young men and women were to sing a hymn on the Palatine hill and then again on the Capitoline hill. All of these details would allow one who was not present at the actual celebration of the event not only to know the outline of what happened but also to imagine how it might occur again; in some ways the inscription reads like a manual for how to repeat the ceremony.6 Individuals would thus be able to imagine the collective effort involved in staging the celebration, from priests to matrons to youth, with a reminder of the preeminent role of the emperor as the central figure in Roman society. Here the specific and the schematic overlap, for the narrative of continuity had to account for the emperor’s dominance over the state, certainly one of the most radical changes of the period. At the same time, each of these individuals was a unique actor, whose imagining of the future, including their reaction to the emperor, was dependent on their own social location and that contributed to the collective thinking about the future. We noted earlier that collective future thought is a discourse, even when we lack evidence to follow the contours of the discourse. As detailed as it is in some places, the inscription is uncommunicative on a number of other points, and the absence of certain details further suggests a focus on the future rather than the past. For example, although Horace’s Carmen Saeculare is well known for its skillful interweaving of the many themes of the Secular Games, the inscription rather laconically states only that “Q. Horatius Flaccus composed the hymn” (Acta Aug. 149, carmen composuit Q Horatius Flaccus). Perhaps more interestingly, relatively few individuals are mentioned by name. A handful of Senators are mentioned in the part of the inscription that records the decrees passed by the Senate prior to the celebration of the Games, and the names of the quindecemviri, the religious college responsible for the oversight of the Games, are listed twice at the end of the surviving document. In the section describing the ceremony itself, however, only Augustus and Marcus Agrippa are mentioned by name, except for one instance where five members of the quindecemviri are listed

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as being present around the sacrificial vessel during the sacrifice to Jupiter on the Capitoline hill.7 Augustus and Agrippa appear repeatedly, and one aspect of the limited recording of other names may have been to focus attention more closely on the figure of Augustus and the person whom, after the death of Marcellus six years earlier, he was clearly designating as his successor. These details suggest that the object of the inscription was not to offer a full record of the past and memorialize an event that had already occurred but instead was directed toward an act of collective future thought. That Augustus and Agrippa performed all the sacrifices was enough to communicate the dominant role of the imperial family in both the specific and schematic future. The individual identities of the 110 matrons in the ceremony for Juno and of the 54 boys and girls who sang the hymn specially composed for the occasion were not needed to convey the sense that the future of the Roman state required the active participation of women and children, a point made by the passage of the lex Julia in the previous year. The choice of details included and omitted were designed to provide a forward-looking memory of the event. The forward-looking aspect of the Augustan inscription becomes more evident when one compares it to the inscription recording the Secular Games of Septimius Severus in 204 CE (CIL 6.32326–35, re-edited by Schnegg 2020). This inscription was found in approximately the same location as the Augustan inscription, and therefore it is assumed it was originally erected near the Augustan inscription in the Campus Martius where the Secular Games were celebrated. As we will see, the Severan inscription was slightly longer than the Augustan inscription, and so the cippus must have been slightly larger originally, though now, like the Augustan inscription, it is in a fragmentary state (Figure 4.3). In contrast to the Augustan inscription, the Severan inscription includes a vast amount of detail that suggests it concerned itself more with commemoration than future memory. For example, the Severan inscription is quite thorough about listing the names of participants in the ceremony. In addition to the emperor Septimius Severus, the inscription makes numerous mentions of his sons Caracalla and Geta. These mentions provide a parallel to the Augustan focus on Augustus and Agrippa, but the Severan inscription includes many additional names. When the inscription records the sacrifice to Juno performed by 110 matrons, it introduces Julia Augusta, “Mother of the Camps and wife of the emperor” and records the names of the Vestal Virgins Numisia Maximilla and Terentia Flavola, who were also present at the sacrifice. After recording the prayer itself, the Severan inscription continues: “The following matrons and wives of the Roman people Quirites gave prayer and supplication.” The 18 lines that follow contained the names of the 110 matrons, although only 10 names can be identified because of the fragmentary nature of this section. By comparison, the extant Augustan inscription does not mention the presence of the Vestal Virgins, nor are the matrons listed by name; it records only that Marcus Agrippa led the matrons in prayer. Similarly, the names of the 27 young men and 27 young women who sang the Secular Hymn are recorded on the Severan stone; even the hymn itself was carved on the stone. While the fragmentary nature of the inscription does not allow a close comparison to Horace’s creation, the important feature is that the Severan inscription chose to

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Figure 4.3 Inscription recording the Secular Games of Septimius Severus. 204 CE. Source: Photograph by Eric Orlin.

include the text of the hymn as well as the performers in order to commemorate the past event, while for the future thinking of the Augustan inscription it was enough to indicate that a hymn had been composed. The Severan inscription includes many other seemingly minor details: the dress of the emperor and his family, the names of banquet sponsors during the festival, the rewards given to victors in the chariot races as well as to the members of the chorus that sang the Secular Hymn. Jussi Rantala suggests that the inclusion of the hymn and these other details was in order “to preserve them in public memoria” (Rantala 2017: 143–44). That is, this inscription was not trying to help individuals imagine an event that had yet to transpire but to preserve a record of this particular celebration of the Ludi Saeculares for future generations. By contrast, the Augustan inscription, just as it claimed, concerned itself with “future memory.” The determination of which details to provide aimed at generating collective future thought about a specific event.

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The Severan Games reveal how well the Augustan vision had become part of the collective ritual landscape of Rome. This celebration was held precisely 220 years after the Augustan Games, marking two saecula on the Augustan reckoning, and the inscription recording the Severan Games is careful to highlight this fact. The inscription begins with a long discursus on the history of the Secular Games, using Augustus’ (fabricated) date of 456 BCE for their foundation and noting that Severus’ celebration was the seventh in the sequence. It then describes a celebration that was exactly the same in its major details as the celebration of 17 BCE (Table 4.1); the same dates for the festival were used, the same purificatory materials were distributed prior to the festival, the same sacrifices were performed to the same divinities in the same sequence at the same locations and at the same times of day, a Secular Hymn was composed for the occasion and sung by 27 boys Table 4.1 Comparison of rituals for Secular Games of Augustus and Septimius Severus. Augustan Celebration 1st night Emperor sacrifices nine ewes to Moerae with Greek rite at Campus Martius Sellisternia with 110 matrons

Severan celebration Fragmentary, but inscription later refers to sacrifice to Moerae on this night Fragmentary reference to sellisternia with 110 matrons

1st day Emperor and successor sacrifice bull on the Capitol to Jupiter

Fragmentary reference to sacrifice to Jupiter

2nd night Emperor sacrifices cakes, popana, and phthoes to Ilithyia

Fragmentary, but inscription later refers to sacrifice to Eilithyia on this night

2nd day Emperor and successor sacrifice a cow to Juno Regina with Greek rite Successor leads 110 maidens in prayer to Juno Sellisternia with 110 matrons

Emperor and successor sacrifice a cow to Juno Regina with Greek rite Emperor, wife, and 2 Vestal Virgins lead 110 matrons in prayer to Juno Sellisternia with 110 matrons

3rd night Emperor sacrifices a pregnant sow to Terra Mater with Greek rite 3rd day Emperor and successor sacrifice cakes, popana, and phthoes to Apollo & Diana on Palatine Carmen saeculare with 27 boys & girls, sung on both Capitoline and Palatine Source: Eric Orlin.

Emperor and successor sacrifice a pregnant sow to Terra Mater with Greek rite Emperor sacrifices cakes, popana, and phthoes to Apollo & Diana on Palatine Carmen saeculare with 27 boys & girls, sung on both Capitoline and Palatine

Ad futuram memoriam 65 and girls on both the Capitoline and Palatine hills on the last day of the festival, followed by the Greek and Latin games that concluded the celebration. Even the language used for the prayers in the ceremony was largely the same as that for the Augustan ceremony. As noted earlier, the Severan inscription includes many details not present in the Augustan inscription, and it also notes several events not mentioned in the earlier text, such as a banquet held after the sacrifice to Juno Regina. It is unclear, however, whether these events were actual additions to the festival or merely details that Severus chose to record for commemorative purposes while Augustus did not. If we view the Severan Games as participating in a discourse about the Secular Games, they share almost entirely in the Augustan vision for this celebration. Comparison to other celebrations can give us a glimpse of the discourse surrounding the collective future thought concerning the Secular Games, including those that did not hew so closely to the Augustan model. In addition to the Severan Games of 204 CE just mentioned, Claudius celebrated Ludi Saeculares in 47 CE, and Domitian held a celebration in 88 CE (Claudius: Tac. Ann. 11.11; Suet. Claud. 21.2; Domitian: Suetonius Dom 4.3). The Games of Claudius were calculated to occur in conjunction with the 800th anniversary of the foundation of Rome; they thus use a saeculum of 100 years rather than 110 and take the founding of Rome as the starting point, and so they do not line up with a saeculum of 110 years that began in 17 BCE (see Dunning 2016: 76–78). Suetonius’ report on these Games indicates that Claudius explicitly claimed that Augustus had calculated wrongly, and so the earlier ceremony anticipated the proper celebration of the Games (Claud. 21.2). We can see here a competing vision, using both a different length for the saeculum and a different date for the beginning of the sequence. Even in his own day, Claudius’ approach was challenged: Suetonius remarked that the herald was ridiculed for announcing games that no person was able to attend more than once, noting that some performers from the Augustan games even performed again in 47. Severus completely ignored the celebration of Claudius and counted Augustus as the fifth, Domitian as the sixth and his own as the seventh. Domitian must also have ignored the Games of Claudius in order to celebrate his Secular Games only 40 years afterward, and his Games appear on the Fasti Capitolini, while those of Claudius do not.8 Second- and third-century emperors apparently shared the Augustan vision; while Antoninus Pius and Philip I held celebrations on the 900th and 1,000th anniversaries of Rome’s founding, respectively, there is no evidence that either emperor declared these to be Ludi Saeculares. These actions all participate in a discourse about what constituted a saeculum and what celebration deserved to bear that name. Perhaps more important than this chronological dispute is the content of the Games, the specific event toward which the collective future thought was devoted, and here there is greater evidence of a shared vision. The similarity of the Severan Games to those of Augustus has already been noted, and the little we know about the first-century CE celebrations confirm this impression. Susan Dunning has noted that the evidence for “the ritual sequence of Domitian’s Games . . . reveal[s] a close adherence to the rites and ceremonies recorded

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in the Augustan Acta” (Dunning 2016: 96), and both Statius (Silvae 1.4.19) and Martial (Ep. 4.1) make references to the Tarentum that suggest its continued connection with the Secular Games. Domitian also issued coinage commemorating his Games that closely imitates Augustan coin types.9 Even Claudius, who offered a different chronology, seems to have shared in the basic vision of the event. He erected an inscription recording the celebration, just as Augustus and Severus did, and the few fragments that have survived indicate sacrifices to Jupiter and Juno in addition to ceremonies at the Tarentum (CIL 6.32325). Although Claudius attempted to provide a new chronology, he apparently shared in Augustus’ vision of what the specifics of the Ludi Saeculares should be. To the extent that we can tell from our knowledge of later Secular Games, the Augustan inscription was successful in propelling its vision of the specific event into the future.

Imagining a schematic future In addition to providing a template for future episodic performances of the Secular Games, the Augustan inscription reveals how the Games contributed to a schematic narrative that offered a semantic future memory for the Romans. We have already touched on the central role played by the emperor and his designated successor in the sacrifices, calling attention to the centrality of the imperial family in the future Roman state. The prayers recorded on the inscription further this emphasis. After recording the preparations for the Secular Games, the inscription describes the first sacrifice performed during the Secular Games. It indicates that on May 31 Augustus sacrificed nine ewes and nine female goats to the Moerae, and it reproduces the words of the prayer uttered by the emperor on that occasion: O Moerae! As for you it has been written in those books and on account of which things may everything become better for the Roman people, the Quirites, let the rite be performed for you with nine ewes and nine female goats. I ask you and pray that, just as you have increased the empire and majesty of the Roman people the Quirites, in war and in peace, so may the Latins ever be obedient; grant everlasting safety, victory, and health to the Roman people the Quirites; protect the Roman people the Quirites, and the legions of the Roman people the Quirites, and keep safe and sound the state of the Roman people the Quirites; be favorable and propitious to the Roman people the Quirites, to the board of fifteen, to me, to my house and my household; and deign to accept this sacrifice of nine ewes and nine female goats, perfect for sacrificing. To these ends be honored by the sacrifice of this ewe, and become favorable and propitious to the Roman people the Quirites, to the board of fifteen, to me, to my house and my household. Moerae uti vobis in illeis libr[eis scriptum est, quarum rerum ergo quodque melius siet p(opulo) R(omano), Quiritibus vobis IX]/ agnis feminis et IX capris femi[nis propriis sacrum fiat vos quaeso precorque uti vos imperium maiestatemque p(opuli) R(omani),]/ Quiritium duelli domique au[xitis utique

Ad futuram memoriam 67 semper Latinus obtemperassit -21- sempiter-]/ nam victoriam, valetudine[m p(opulo) R(omano), Quiritibus duitis faveatisque p(opulo) R(omano), Quiritibus legionibusque p(opuli) R(omani)]/ Quiritium, remque p(ublicam) populi R(omani), [Quiritium salvam servetis maioremque faxitis, uti sitis] volentes pr[opitiae p(opulo) R(omano),]/ Quiritibus XVvir(or)um collegi[o, mihi, domo familiaeque uti huius] sacrifici acceptrices sitis VIIII agnarum/ feminarum et VIIII capraru[m feminarum propri]arum inmolandarum; harum rerum ergo macte hac agna femina/ inmolanda estote fitote [volentes] propitiae p(opulo) R(omano) Quiritibus XVvir(or)um collegio, mihi, domo, familiae. (CIL 6.32323) We might initially note the repeated reference to “me, my house, and my household.” This phrase is known from household prayers: Cato the Elder records a purification prayer to Mars that asks for “good health and well-being for me, my house and our household” (Cato De Agr. 141, bonam salutem valetudinemque mihi domo familiaeque nostrae). Its appearance in a public prayer and in a sequence beginning with the Roman people suggests an equation between the good fortune of the emperor’s household and the good fortune of the state. Whatever the origins and content of the original ceremony, this may be the most dramatic innovation of the Augustan Ludi Saeculares: the inclusion of the person of the emperor in prayers for the well-being of the state, as if the state was his household (on imagery of the family as developed by Augustus, see Severy 2003). Here it is useful to recall the discussion of specific future events and schematic future events. If the specific event called up is a future celebration of the Secular Games, the schematic future is a world in which the emperor has become the state: he has the power to make all decisions affecting lives of Roman citizens and the well-being of the state depends first and foremost on his well-being. It is noteworthy that the prayer does not mention Augustus by name but rather could be recited without change by any future emperor, and indeed the language on the Severan inscription closely tracks the text on the Augustan stone. The schematic future and the specific future overlap here. It is the “office” of emperor that is important here, not the particular occupant. The Secular Games did not merely announce the beginning of a new saeculum, but, as the prayer indicates, they also presented a vision of that future: prosperous, triumphant, and above all centered on the figure of the emperor. The prayer thus offers insight into the collective future thought offered by Augustus: it is not his own future that is being imagined but the future of the Roman people. Another detail of the inscription also reveals overlap between the schematic and specific futures imagined by Augustus. While the entirety of the prayer to the Moerae is carved on the stone, for the subsequent sacrifices during the festival the inscription includes only a portion of the prayer. The text records the name of the deity to whom the sacrifice was made and the animals offered at the sacrifice, such as a bull to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or nine sacrificial cakes, nine popana, and nine phthoes to the Ilithyiae. When it records the prayer offered with each sacrifice, it substitutes the name of the divinity and the sacrificial items in the

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appropriate places, begins the invocation of the prayer with the formula “I ask you and pray,” and then simply notes cetera uti supra, “the rest as above.” On the one hand, one can well understand the desire not to recarve the exact same eight lines an additional five times on the cippus. Since only the divinities changed, recarving the entirety of the prayer might have been considered redundant, and the cippus would have needed to be considerably larger. On the other hand, a well-known feature of Roman religious practice is the importance of precision in the composition and pronouncement of the prayer. In a famous passage written about 90 years after the Secular Games, Pliny the Elder remarked on the elaborate precautions taken by earlier Romans to ensure the proper pronouncement of the exact prayer formula without any interruptions (NH 28.3). Despite this fastidiousness about the performance of rituals, the prayers for the Augustan Secular Games were not included in their entirety on the inscription. On the one hand this decision confirms the observations made earlier; the intent of the inscription was not to leave a full and accurate record of a past event but a template for a specific future event. But on the other hand it also suggests that the efficacy of the ritual did not depend on a full recording of the prayer each time, perhaps because the participation of the imperial family guaranteed their success and so again promoted a schematic narrative concerning the power of the emperor. The prayer also offers insight into how the Secular Games both reached into the past and pointed toward the future to generate a sense of collective continuity. The text contains a number of archaizing elements both in language and in the ideas expressed, which have puzzled scholars (see Cooley 2008: 230–32, with further bibliography). Some archaisms are merely in the spelling of words: the archaic duitis for the subjunctive of do and siet for sit or duellis in place of bellis. Others are in the choice of words, such as atalla for a sacred vessel or macte esto, the formula recited at the end of the prayer whose force is not precisely known but that means something like “be strengthened.” The content of the prayer is perhaps the most puzzling archaism, for it expresses the wish that the Latins should remain forever submissive to the Romans. The submission of the Latins, an accomplishment of the fourth century BCE, can hardly have been a pressing concern in 17 BCE. Some have argued that this language must have been drawn from previous celebrations of the Secular Games and see it as confirmation of at least an earlier date for the origins of the celebration (e.g., Taylor 1934; Poe 1984: 68; cf. Momigliano 1941). But the prayer as it survives on the stone clearly cannot be the exact same prayer from an earlier ceremony, in light of the inclusion of “me, my house and my household” as objects of the god’s good will. It is perhaps better to understand the deliberately archaizing language as intended to further the Augustan fiction that the new ritual was in fact the continuation of an old traditional celebration (see Latham, this volume, on the invention of ritual tradition in Rome). The prayer both in style and content deliberately reaches into the past to call up the memory of past Games, whether or not those Games actually occurred. The prayer thus functions in tandem with the larger celebration to generate a perceived collective continuity with a triumphant past and so encourages individuals to continue to identify as Romans even after the years of conflict. Nor should one be surprised if the continuity was more perceived

Ad futuram memoriam 69 than real; because both memory and group identity are inherently unstable, continuity often depends on the ability of the group to adapt in its expectations for the future. Projecting continuity with the past may also have created stronger incentives for subsequent celebrations to follow the Augustan model. We can again gain some sense of the discourse around this collective future schematic thought by exploring surviving references to saeculum after 17 BCE. Dunning has examined the rhetoric of saeculum and noted that uses of the term—in literary texts, inscriptions, and coinage—cluster around emperors who celebrated Ludi Saeculares up to the point when Christian emperors stopped celebrating the Games (Dunning 2016: 62–74, 98–104). Such a finding is hardly surprising, but the nature of the references is revealing. The Acta of the Augustan Games never use this word on the surviving fragments, but Vergil and Horace both use the term with clear reference to the Secular Games (Verg. Aen. 6.792–94; Hor. Odes 4.6.42). More significantly, an altar erected in Gallia Narbonensis in 12/13 CE notes that sacrifices should be offered to the numen Augusti on September 23, the emperor’s birthday, “on which day the happiness of the saeculum brought him forth as ruler of the world” (CIL 12.4333, qua die eum saeculi felicitas orbi terrarum rectorem edidit). Thirty years after the Secular Games in an imperial colony, the word could be divorced from the specific context of the Secular Games and used to refer to a general sense of happiness that depends on the person of the emperor. Dunning notes that this inscription is a turning point in surviving references to saeculum, as the notion of a saeculum came to be closely connected with the emperor and his authority (Dunning 2016: 73–74; see Hay 2019 for saecular discourse prior to Augustus). Suetonius (Aug. 100) claims that at the death of Augustus it was proposed to name the span of his life as the saeculum Augustum, making a full identification of the age and the person. By the middle of the first century CE, Seneca (Apocolocyntosis 1, 4) can use the concept both to make fun of Claudius—his death rather than his accession marked the initium saeculi—and to promote Nero as someone from whom aurea saecula will descend and who will offer saecula to the weary.10 Perhaps attacking Claudius through the notion of a saecula drew strength from Claudius’ challenge to the chronology of the Secular Games—the specific event—but we noted earlier that the limited information about Claudius’ Games suggests that his vision of a saeculum differed little from Augustus’—or from Seneca’s for that matter. By the middle of the first century CE the elites in Rome already seem to be operating with a shared vision of the schematic future, even if they conceived of prosperity or the particular emperor in different ways. The inscription recording the Secular Games of Augustus thus served not merely to provide a record of the celebration for future generations or to shape future celebrations but to foster a sense of the future Roman state.

Looking forward The impact of the Augustan inscription brings us back to the question of the role of inscriptions in generating future thinking: it suggests that cognition did not take place solely in the mind but was extended or distributed to the environment. A

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growing body of work in cognitive science argues for the theory of the “extended mind,” where objects in the world are not merely passive items but an active part of the cognitive processes: an individual who uses a notebook to navigate the world is not functionally different from someone who navigates the world using only their own mental processes (see Clark and Chalmers 1998: 12–13), as detailed in Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng’s introduction and further elaborated on in Diana Y. Ng’s conclusion to this volume. Starting from the notion that “things mediate, actively shape, and constitute our ways of being in the world and of making sense of the world,” Lambros Malafouris has suggested that this notion of distributed cognition should be extended to the material culture of the ancient world (Malafouris 2013: 44; see Sutton 2008 for a different perspective on the relationship between distributed cognition and archaeology). He uses the example of the Linear B tablets from Knossos to argue that they formed an essential part of the Mycenean memory system, which depended upon both humans and objects of different shapes and sizes with different markings on them. Among other impacts of this technology, Malafouris notes that “information, once inscribed on the clay tablet, transcends the biological limitations of the individual person and becomes available ‘out there’ for other people to use, comment on, transform, or incorporate” (Malafouris 2013: 82). Existing outside of any single individual’s internal memory process, the tablets functioned as agents, setting off cognitive processes in the individuals who handled them. As such, they fundamentally transformed the task of the humans engaged in the system, for instance by requiring visual recognition rather than internal recall. Inscriptions, as another type of document carved onto a semipermanent material, similarly formed an active part of the Roman knowledge system rather than merely serving as passive repositories of knowledge or memory. Mireille Corbier, in her discussion of writing in Roman public space, notes that “[p]ublication means posting up the written word. It gives the contents of the latter an autonomous existence, independent from mankind and speech” (Corbier 2013: 19–21, emphasis mine). Just as with the Linear B tablets, Roman public inscriptions were available “out there” for other Romans and so became part of the Roman memory system.11 The Augustan inscription reveals its awareness of this function: it declares that it was erected for the future memory of a particular religious behavior. As we have seen, Augustus used the ceremony to promote a certain image both of the celebration itself and of Roman society as it moved into the new saeculum, and the means he chose to promote the memory of these images was through inscriptions. Indeed, the inscription was such an integral part of the ceremony that carving an inscription seems to have become part of the celebration. This phenomenon and the epigraphic habit in Rome more broadly suggest that the Romans themselves saw inscriptions as a tool for the Roman memory system, just as a notebook or Linear B tablets formed parts of other memory systems. In turn, this conclusion suggests that we need to be more attuned to the future-oriented aspects of inscriptions and not merely their commemorative aspect (see Barrett 1993). Furthermore, once carved, an inscription itself became part of the discourse surrounding collective future thought. The information provided on the Augustan

Ad futuram memoriam 71 inscription provided each generation of Romans with an opportunity to join in this discourse: to accept, reject or modify the various elements of the celebration and so to re-envision their future every 110 years on their own terms. The Severan Games demonstrate this point clearly: for all that they hewed closely to the Augustan model, they did offer a few modifications. Bacchus and Hercules apparently played more prominent roles in the third century than they had earlier, perhaps as a way to emphasize the continuity of the imperial family. This was an issue of major importance to Severus but was less so in a period where the very concept of the imperial family was still developing (see Rantala 2017: esp. 143–45). Notions of prosperity and of the centrality of the imperial family were thus expressed in an idiom appropriate to the period of each set of Games, even as the central vision of a saeculum as initially promoted by the Augustan Games remained the same. Severus used the inscription of Augustus to craft his own celebration and incorporated significant parts of that inscription into his own document: the Severan inscription would then have become part of the cognitive process for future celebrations of the Secular Games, and the cycle could have continued. As it turned out, however, the Secular Games of Severus were the last to be celebrated. Constantine chose not to celebrate the Games that would have been held in the fourth century. Nor should his choice be surprising: forgetting is as important to identity formation as remembering, and erasing one future memory was essential to his project of creating an entirely new future for Roman society.

Notes 1 I want to express my appreciation to the editors of this volume for their thoughtful suggestions on moving the chapter from oral paper to written version as part of this volume, as well as to my fellow panelists and to the volume’s anonymous reviewers. 2 The Sibylline oracle is preserved by Phlegon of Tralles (Macr. 4 Keller) and also by Zosimus 2.6.1. The inscription is CIL 6.32323–24 = ILS 5050. The most recent edition and commentary is Schnegg 2020, and the line numbers refer to her edition. 3 The materiality of the inscriptions raises questions in their own right for which space does not permit a full discussion here. See Cooley 2012, 298–99; Petrovic, Petrovic and Thomas, 2019. 4 Lowrie 2009, 123–41, calls attention to how the carmen saeculare of Horace performed as part of the ceremony is similarly self-conscious about its attempt to create meaning. 5 See Michaelian and Sutton 2019: 4936–37 for a fuller discussion of the difference between episodic and semantic memory, with further bibliography. 6 It has been assumed, without firm evidence, that commentaries on the Games were kept in the records of the quindecemviri, the priests in charge of the ceremony. Even if such records existed, they were private documents not visible to the Roman public and so functioned in a different fashion from the public inscription. 7 It is possible that other lists of individuals appeared on parts of the inscription that do not survive, although the section describing the celebration of the Games is relatively well preserved. 8 By the Augustan reckoning Domitian should have held his celebration in 92, rather than 88. No satisfactory explanation has yet been offered for the decision to celebrate the Secular Games five years early, but Roman sources do not attack these games as illegitimate despite being generally hostile to Domitian.

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9 Sobocinski 2006. Because of its portability and ubiquity, coinage offers another window into the creation of collective future memory. Although these issues cannot be fully addressed here, coinage may be better suited for schematic memory rather than specific memory due to the symbolic nature of the presentation of sacrifices and even of the cippus on which the inscription was carved. 10 Tacitus (Agric. 3.1; 4.4) similarly uses the word saeculum to describe the reigns of Nerva and Trajan. 11 The difference in materiality need not concern us here. On how the materiality might affect agency of inscriptions, see Olsen 2010; Malafouris 2013; and for specifically ancient examples, Petrovic, Petrovic and Thomas 2019.

5

Staging memories in the home Intention and devotion in Pompeii and Herculaneum Molly Swetnam-Burland

The cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum provide our best material evidence for Roman private religion: veneration of the gods that transpired in houses, at crossroads, and at neighborhood shrines, by individuals, families, and those who shared bonds of friendship, business relations, or propinquity.1 Literary sources suggest that much private religion focused around the Lares and the Penates, the tutelary deities who watched over all members of a household, old and young, enslaved and free alike; these deities and ancestral spirits were fundamental to annual festivals, including the Compitalia and Parentalia, in which families celebrated the living and the dead, as well as to family celebrations, including marriages, birthdays, and rites associated with childbirth and mourning (for corpora of the extant shrines in Pompeii, see Boyce 1937; Orr 1972, 1978; Fröhlich 1991; Giacobello 2008; van Andringa 2009: 217–56; on neighborhood shrines, see van Andringa 2000; for synthetic overview and recent bibliography, see Bodel 2008; Flower 2017; Swetnam-Burland forthcoming; for Roman celebrations of family milestones and their association with the domestic veneration, see Harmon 1978). Ubiquitous though altars and paintings depicting the Lares are, there remains much we do not know of private veneration. As the work of Henri Duday and William van Andringa has shown in funerary settings, there is often a gulf between ritual as described in texts and as practiced in real-world settings, particularly in cases where people engaged with family history and the memories of beloved relatives (Duday and van Andringa 2017). In private religion, too, texts that discuss rituals present idealized models for behavior—informative in the aggregate but providing little purchase on the experiences and motivations of the individuals who offered prayers and joined in communal ceremonies. I here approach private religion from a new vantage point, exploring how futureoriented thinking at once deepened the experiences of individuals during observances and laid the groundwork for the formation of powerful memories. I turn to an underutilized body of evidence for domestic devotion: graffiti, inscribed by individuals to commemorate specific acts of veneration and important life events. These rare testimonia show that ritual permeated the home, with shrines as the focal points of action undertaken by family members. I explore how those who inscribed graffiti employed two distinct cognitive strategies: “intention,” in which an actor forms plans in the present with the express goal of influencing later DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-5

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events (and thus laying the groundwork for establishing meaningful recollections), and “simulation,” in which an actor draws on existing memories to forge a vivid imagination of the future (see Stern in this volume on graffiti and dipinti in the synagogue at Dura Europos). I focus on two case studies, vows undertaken for the welfare of household members and celebrations of rites of passage associated with childhood. In both cases, the act of writing—taking a sharp implement to hand to incise a permanent prayer in the friable surface of the wall or using a piece of charcoal to make an ephemeral, but no less meaningful, record—was a strategy employed to commit life events to mind in ways that would both deepen future ritual action and support established and emerging family relationships. Further, all members of a familia, free and enslaved, could mark their presence in space in this way and thus reify their thoughts, prayers, and hopes for the future.

Setting intentions: Roman private religion and prospective memory Shrines in Roman houses took many forms, from masonry aedicula decorated in imitation marble to freestanding altars to small niches featuring paintings of deities. Paintings associated with shrines illustrated members of a household drawn together by ritual: typical scenes included representations of the gods, with family members making libations, leading sacrificial animals, and playing music (Figure 5.1). These paintings often adopt a social perspective in which the size of figures reflects their status. In this example, the Lares appear in the forefront of the scene at large scale, with the paterfamilias (or a representation of his genius) and family behind. Larger figures represent the free members of the household; smaller ones represent the enslaved (Flower 2017: 55–56). In the grandest houses of Pompeii, which served many people, including the owner, his relatives, and the family’s slaves, there were often many places and ways to celebrate the gods. The “House of the Menander” (I.10.4), for example, had two purpose-built shrines, one in the atrium and one in a corner of the peristyle, as well as a portable altar, allowing for ritual action to be performed anywhere in the home (Figure 5.2 a-b. for the shrine in room b (atrium), see Allison 2006: 298–99; for the remains from room 25 (peristyle) and summary of earlier interpretations, Allison 2006: 309–10. For the portable altar (fill of room 41), Allison 2006: no. 981). Even modest houses, furthermore, often had more than one place and way for residents to worship. A house with an attached shopfront on the “Street of Fortune” (VII.3.8) had a shrine in the public room facing the street but also one in the interior of the home, with a built-in altar, paintings of the Lares, and a niche painted with attributes suggesting that the residents saw Hercules as a patron deity (Giacobello 2008: 244; Boyce 1937: 63). Shrines in Pompeian houses thus symbolized the groups they served: places where family members could both assemble to enact shared beliefs and also see reflections of their ritual roles. As I explore later, some action taken at shrines was memorable, marking important life stages and rites of passage. But most observances were forgettable, lost to the rhythm of daily life. Indeed, few authors comment on daily ritual action.

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Figure 5.1 Shrine painting from an unknown house, showing ritual procession with Lares. MNN 8905. Source: Photograph by author; su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

Cato the Elder, writing in the second century BCE, is a rare exception. He provides directions for what actions a vilica, the wife of the slave in charge of managing the household, should take in performing domestic worship: These are the duties of the vilica: make sure that she performs them. . . . She should neither undertake religious worship herself nor enjoin others who might undertake it on her behalf without the command of the master or mistress. Make sure that she knows that the master undertakes religious worship for the entire family. . . . On the Kalends, Ides, and Nones, and whenever there will be a holiday, let her hang a garland over the hearth, and on those same days let her sacrifice to the household Lar as the opportunity offers. vilicae quae sunt officia, curato faciat. . . . Rem divinam ni faciat neve mandet, qui pro ea faciat, iniussu domini aut dominae. Scito dominum pro tota familia rem divinam facere. . . . Kalendis, Idibus, Nonis, festus dies cum erit, coronam in focum indat, per eosdemque dies lari familiari pro copia supplicet. (Agr. 1.143.1–2; all translations are my own)

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Cato indicates that the agency of the paterfamilias matters most in religious practice within the home, for it is his role to undertake worship (res divina) for the household.2 He also says that the vilica should not engage in similar action without her master’s express consent, though he also insists that she perform other ritual

Figure 5.2a Atrium (a) and peristyle (b) shrines from the “House of the Menander” (I.10.4). Source: Photographs by author; su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo—Parco Archeologico di Pompei.

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Figure 5.2b (Continued)

duties, including preparing the shrine for worship on holidays and at regular intervals by hanging a garland (corona) and giving offerings. Scholars have discussed this passage as a window into the ritual roles of women, using it to support the view that women could indeed make sacrifices and perform rituals. The word Cato uses, supplicare, probably refers to offerings of grain, though it could also refer to

78 Molly Swetnam-Burland speaking prayers (DiLuzio 2015: 45–46; OLD s.v. “supplicare”, 2a). Yet this does not resolve the apparent contradiction in Cato’s injunctions: he bars the vilica from action in certain circumstances but expects it in others. What differentiates the two kinds of ritual action is not their nature—setting out offerings, tending ritual space—but rather the intention behind them. The vilica is expected to engage in routine activity, the kind lost to memory through endless repetition; she is excluded from conduct that might be performed for important holidays, family milestones, or other special occasions, that is, ritual activity performed with an “intention to remember.” Recent work in cognitive studies has shown that there is a fundamental relationship between intentions—understood as the thought processes that govern deliberate action in the present—and memory, understood as the way that action is recalled after the fact (Smith 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017: 81–97). Rebekah Smith has argued that intentions are often implemented within time horizons in which the decided-upon action occurs after a delay, sometimes in response to a particular moment or sometimes in response to the occurrence of an expected event. In such cases, the thought processes underlying volition are complex, requiring the actor to form a plan, contemplate the steps, and then recall both in order to implement them, with the goal of bringing about a certain outcome (Smith 2008). To bridge the delay between intention and action, actors employ memory aids, ranging from the simple, such as tying a string on a finger, to the more complex, such as using a calculated strategy designed to fix something in mind. The mnemonic used by Roman orators is one example, in which the speaker prepared to deliver his speech without notes by placing ideas within a mental floorplan of a Roman house, so that the arguments could be recalled in a specific order during delivery (Cic. De Or., 2.86.353–55; Quintillian Inst., 11.2.18; see Introduction in this volume). This technique, however, also reveals how actors drew on memory and used the imagination to simulate future outcomes (Jedlowski 2016; Devitt and Addis 2016). The orator’s device works well only if he can walk through the mental space automatically, drawing on knowledge and past experiences of the layout and decoration of Roman houses, even as his goal is to lay the groundwork for future performance. Further, the greater the emotional attachment the actor has to the desired outcome, the deeper the relationship between intention and simulation: on some level, by imagining a goal or event, the actor may even feel that he or she is taking steps to ensure that it comes about (see on this point D’Argembeau 2016).3 These ways of thinking about the relationship between intention and action provide us a new lens through which to consider veneration in the home by focusing on the ways that individuals worked to fix their own prayers, wishes, and interactions with the gods in memory, both short and long-term. The wide variety in the form of shrines in Pompeii and Herculaneum shows that homeowners had significant scope for tailoring the spaces of veneration to their own specific interests and needs—in other words, shrines reflect deliberate and considered choices made by families and represent their intentions for future acts of worship. The peristyle shrine in the “House of the Menander,” discussed earlier, is a case in point. The shrine was added to the peristyle at some point late in the house’s history: a

Staging memories in the home 79 masonry platform was built abutting Fourth Style paintings, and a narrow niche was carved into the existing wall to create a space for displaying statuettes. These were made of a perishable material, wax or wood, and, though they were destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius, the excavators were able to take plaster casts of the impressions they made in the lapilli. There is some debate about what these objects were: some see them as representations of the family’s ancestors, “crude effigies,” especially when compared to professionally produced statuettes commonly found in shrines (Orr 1978: 1582); others see them as deities but consider them to be furnishings or decorative objects repurposed to serve as cult images (Allison 2006: 310). They are, however, not unique. Another house in the city (I.8.18) also had a shrine in which excavators were able to make plaster impressions of cult images made of fugitive materials, again likely wax or wood.4 Shrines in other houses contained reused statues and materials, sometimes standing as representations of the gods and often serving as offerings left by individuals (Swetnam-Burland forthcoming). The shrine from the Praedia of Julia Felix (II.4.3–12), for example, included several personal objects, including a piece of worn cloth and a gold fibula (Parslow 2013). Shrines, in other words, were focal points of divine interaction that also reflected autobiographies of those who worshipped there: places where, either through the design of the shrine or through the objects dedicated therein, families and individuals memorialized their relationships with each other—and the gods—over time. Whether the famous objects from the “House of the Menander” are handmade representations of the gods or furnishings repurposed to become cult images, they represent choices made by an individual to customize their own ritual experience and would have been powerful memory aids for whoever worked the wood or wax to fashion a likeness of the gods or ancestors or saw in an ordinary object a reflection of the divine (see Popkin, this volume, on object biographies and the repurposing of objects for votive use). These recollections would be activated in all future veneration, rendering even ordinary observances all the more potent. Indeed, all shrines were potent memoryscapes where one’s memories of, for example, saying a prayer, making a libation, or giving a dedication were called to mind situationally, layering past and present to intensify ritual action and enhance feelings of piety. Though in most cases the intentions of actors are difficult to find in the material record, we know they existed, even if we can only speculate about the specific strategies used to commit them to mind. In the following sections, I turn to a category of evidence that allows us to see the process in greater depth: graffiti that document vows and births. These, I argue, allow us to see how Pompeians used informal writing to make records of their intentions and also reveal the role of imagined futures in their acts of devotion.

Vows: present prayers, future promises Vows were a type of ritual action that were, by design, performed so as to lead to future action (see Stern in this volume on individual commemorations that demanded future actions and outcomes). They began as imprecations, invoking the help of the gods in exchange for a desired outcome, promising a gift if the vow was

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fulfilled. Jörg Rüpke notes that language describing vows is formulaic—perhaps therefore echoing some of the prayers with which they were undertaken, for precision was critical to Roman religious speech (Rüpke 2016: 122–26). Material evidence for vows abounds, primarily in the form of statues, altars, or inscriptions that completed the transaction, also often employing formulaic language, noting that a person “resolved the vow,” votum solvit. Such commemorations appear often in public sanctuaries. In Pompeii, one inscription documenting a vow was found outside the city gates, reused in a wall in an area where there had been a longstanding extramural sanctuary to Neptune (CIL 10.8158); another was found in the sanctuary of Isis, inscribed on a small altar that was given to the goddess by a woman named Manilia Chrysa (Bricault 2005: no. 504/0206); another documented a vow made by two family members, a mother and son, to Jupiter (CIL 10.926).5 In Herculaneum, a woman named Maria, identified as a slave, set up a marble altar to Venus in a temple (AE 1980, no. 251). Monuments like these engaged the memory in a complex way, commemorating multiple events: the initial request of the gods, undertaken with a future outcome in mind; that goal or event coming to pass through divine intervention; and, finally, the resolution of the exchange through the dedication of the promised gift. Those that took functional forms, like altars, were designed to facilitate a decidedly active form of retrospection as sites in communal sacred space where the individual could return, again and again, to remember the vow and also make new requests of the gods by leaving more offerings, making new prayers. Others, too, could use the altars, thus establishing their own future hopes on firm proof that the god had answered another’s prayer. Vows are a useful category of evidence for thinking about prospective memory because they were not tied to specific places—a vow could be made anywhere, on the battlefield (Orlin 2002: 35–74); in a sanctuary, like that of the deity Sulis in Bath (Cousins 2020: 101–3); or in the home. Memorials for vows in private contexts worked much as they did in public. For example, a marble altar was found in the “House of L. Cornelius Diadumenus” (VI 12.26), which reads “Antiochus resolved his vow” (Antiochus v(otum) s(olvit)) (CIL 10.863).6 In this case, the form of the memorial invited Antiochus and other family members to interact with the gods, with the successful outcome of his vow in their minds. Similarly, a painted inscription from a modest house or tavern with residential quarters (II 1.13) records a vow made by a slave, “Felix consecrated a vow to the Lares” (Felix Laribus conse[cravit] votum) (CIL 4.9987). Located in the kitchen, this example was associated with a room in which slaves worked, often for the benefit of the family; incorporated into a scene with Lares and objects of food, the commemoration reminded Felix and his peers of the power of the gods to see to the family’s welfare (see especially Foss 1997).7 In another case, a painting from the “House of Philocalus” (IX.3.15), a small house that may have served as commercial space, was accompanied by a legend that indicated that it had been commissioned in thanks for a fulfilled vow: “Philocalus resolved the vow, willingly, to the god who merited it” (Philo[ca]lus votum sol(vit) libe(n)s merito) (CIL 4.882). The lettering, painted in block letters, emulates inscriptions from the public sphere and suggests a professional hand. The scene depicts Isis-Fortuna holding a cornucopia and a

Staging memories in the home 81 sistrum, her foot upon a globe with a rudder alongside; she is accompanied by a winged Eros holding a candelabrum (Figure 5.3). A second deity also appears in the scene, riding a horse at high speed, cape flying behind, and holding a small axe or fasces. He represents either Helios or Harpocrates and is probably the deity responsible for completing the vow, for the adjective thanking the deity is masculine. The style of the painting is so similar to shrine paintings that some scholars consider it to have served a similar function (Fröhlich 1991: L101; Boyce 1937: no. 415b), though the painting does not appear to have been associated with the shrine in the home.8 As a commemoration of a specific ritual act, the painting had a slightly different function than an altar: to casual observers, it might have seemed simply a part of the decoration; to Philocalus, the painting presented the opportunity to reflect repeatedly on the power of the deity who had responded to his prayer. Evidence from private contexts further enriches our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying vows, because some ritual actors recorded the moment when a vow was undertaken. A graffito from the upper story of the “House of the

Figure 5.3 Votive painting, “House of Philocalus” (IX 3.15). MNN 8836. Source: Photograph by author; su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

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Bicentenary” in Herculaneum (V 15) reads “a vow of Lucius, (slave) of Avianus, (was made)” (L(uci) Aviani votus) (CIL 4.10574).9 Graffiti could be written using any material ready to hand—most were scratched into the surface of the wall by simple tools like the pin of a fibula, although some were written in charcoal or even colored stones, like gypsum. These were ephemeral, easily wiped or washed away. Lucius’ goal therefore was not to memorialize the act of his vow in a way that could be recognized by others but instead to mark the moment in time and space as significant to him. Here, the act of writing served as an aid to fix the vow in mind while also making it concrete, refreshing the prayer each time its author was in the space and the graffito called it to his attention. Thus, past, present, and future were layered together, meaningful in different ways. At the moment of inscription, the act of writing the graffito made firm Lucius’ intention. At points in time thereafter, Lucius might have encountered his graffito while going about his daily life and recalled his imprecation of the gods, a prompt spurring him to continue his planned course of action. Finally, when the vow was complete, seeing the graffito would have reminded him of his successful exchange with the gods, a celebration of the attainment of his goal or prayer, and an instantiation of the gods’ power. Another vow was recorded near the kitchen shrine of a grander house (IX 13.1–3, “House of Julius Polybius”). The graffito is written in all capital letters—perhaps to imitate the style of lapidary inscriptions—and gives more detail about the nature of the vow: “P(ublius) Cornelius Felix and Vitalis, slave of Cuspius, here made [a vow] to the Lares for the safety, return, and victory of Gaius Julius Philippus” (Pro salutem reditum et victoria/C(ai) Iuli Philippi h[ic] fecit Laribus P(ublius) Cornelius Felix et Vitalis Cuspi) (AE 1985: 285; Giordano 1974: no. 6; for discussion of the graffito, Flower 2017: 59–61). The circumstances are not entirely clear but appear to be an appeal to keep a relative of the house’s owner (whose name is documented elsewhere as G. Julius Polybius, hence an agnate relative) safe during a military campaign. Particularly interesting is that neither man making the vow is a family member; they appear to be friends or associates, one a freeborn man and the other a slave of another local family (Giordano 1974: 25). Rebecca Benefiel (2021) has shown that this graffito was part of a cluster, a series of graffiti written in the same space.10 Underneath the vow, in a different hand, is the word vicimus, “we conquered,” which she suggests may refer to the vow’s successful outcome. In this rare case, then, we possess material evidence for how a vow evolved across time, missing only, perhaps, its formal conclusion, in which Vitalis and P. Cornelius Felix gave the Lares a promised gift to release them from their obligation. This act, of course, need not have been recorded—it may have taken any number of forms, from the dedication of a statuette to a sacrifice. The act of writing emerges as a common strategy in these cases, used by ritual actors both to spur future action and to condition their thinking about the meaning of that action. Writing by hand is a physical movement and sensory experience that engages the brain deeply, through which the writer encodes meaning onto a medium such as a paper or, here, the wall. The combined acts of forming the

Staging memories in the home 83 characters and making decisions about how to record the information help fix the moment and meaning in memory.11 Further, though graffiti are informal acts of writing, their inscription may nonetheless have related to a culture-specific understanding that making a record a ritual act instantiated it and elevated its importance. Mary Beard has argued, for example, that the Fratres Arvales recorded their yearly activities not to serve as a practical archive but for symbolic reasons (Beard 1985). Eric Orlin, in this volume, argues that the monumental inscription recording Augustus’ Saecular Games (Ludi Saeculares) was intended not only to commemorate his games but also to shape all future performances. Once written, a graffito makes the actor’s intention visible in lived space. It might be seen primarily by the author, as in the case of Lucius’ vow in the upper story of the home in which he lived and worked, or it might be more public, as in the case of the vow of Vitalis and P. Cornelius Felix, which was deliberately written in a way to draw others’ eyes. But in both cases, the graffiti marked both the moment in which the vow was undertaken and the place of the promise as significant in present and future time. These examples show that any member of a family—enslaved or free, man or woman—could make a vow and record it. It can be difficult to determine the status of graffiti writers; the conventions of the genre mean that authors did not identify as they often did in lapidary inscriptions, with full legal names.12 Yet in several of the instances discussed earlier it is clear that dedicators were slaves: Maria, Felix, Lucius, and Vitalis. Though we know the precise nature of only one of their vows, a wish for the safety and security of a friend (or, perhaps, the friend of a master), this case is a potent reminder that vows reflected relationships, the ties that connected family members to one another. Comparative material suggests that slaves often made vows to the gods wishing for freedom, the attainment of which would fundamentally change their relationship with their master, the household, and the community. Several inscriptions beyond Pompeii and Herculaneum employ a formula that states that the dedicator made the vow while a slave but resolved it when free, suggesting that the change in status itself was central to the vow (CIL 10.1569, 6.30688, 6.30953).13 In one case, a dedicator resolved the vow with a gift that was ritual in function and most likely displayed in a shrine, where it would enhance future worship undertaken by the family: “Gaius Epidius, freedman of Gaius, to the Lares, to whom he, as a slave, vowed golden statues, four scripula in weight. He resolved it as a free man” (C(aius) Epidi[us C(ai) l(ibertus)] Laribus [quas] vovit se[rvus imagines] aureas po[ndo] (scripulis) IIII liber s[olvit]) (CIL 6.30953). Some freedmen continued to make observances with the household after manumission, using the shrine as a stage on which to negotiate and celebrate these new relationships.14 In these cases, the intentions were so deeply personal that simulation surely played a role in fixing them in mind—as the actors used the moment of the vow to travel forward to a time when, goal achieved, they would take up new roles and responsibilities. In the next section, I explore how rituals, especially rites of passage, encouraged family members to reflect on their changing relationships as they moved through the life cycle.

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Rites of passage: looking forward, thinking back Rites of passage, in any culture, celebrate changes in the status of an individual, both within society and within family groups. In his seminal work, the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep argued that such rituals have three stages: “separation,” in which the individual is removed from their previous rank; “liminality,” in which the individual is recognized as occupying neither their previous nor future place in a social group; and “reincorporation,” in which the individual is recognized by self and others as having attained the new position and in which existing and changed relationships are solidified (van Gennep 1960). For Pierre Bourdieu, such experiences were “rites of institution,” which signaled status and rank as defined by society—imposed on individuals through ritualized experiences and celebrations, solidified through performance before the eyes of others (Bourdieu 1991: 117–27). By nature, then, these pivotal experiences ask participants to look forward and think back, reflecting on their identities as defined by their relationships to others. Most evidence for rites of passage in Roman culture comes from literary sources, and we rarely possess enough information to differentiate what transpired during the different phases of action, according to van Gennep’s (or any similar) classification.15 Much of the ritual action took place at shrines—both those in homes and those located at street corners, used by families and their neighbors (see earlier mention; Harmon 1978: 1593–95). Neighborhood shrines in Roman cities stood at street corners or compita. There are 38 such altars attested in Pompeii, which in form were similar to those in houses; they featured altars, often decorated with representations of the Lares (van Andringa 2000). They were overseen by local men, often slaves or former slaves, who served annually as priests (Flower 2017: 206–26; Tarpin 2002). These shrines were important sites of communication, where those who used them inscribed prayers and other messages (Benefiel 2021) and upon which the magistri proclaimed their public identities by keeping the sites maintained, often updating their decoration (Hartnett 2017: 263–67). Both domestic and neighborhood shrines served as stages upon which rites of passage were performed. During the annual festival of the Compitalia, Romans decorated neighborhood shrines with objects that symbolized the status and role of family members. The best evidence for the ritual comes from the second-century CE lexicographer, Festus: Balls and effigies of wool, of men and of women, were hung in neighborhood shrines during the Compitalia. . . . They thought by setting them out—so many balls as there were servants, and so many effigies as there were children—that they [i.e., the gods] would spare the living and would be content with these balls and images. Pilae et effigies viriles et muliebres ex lana Compitalibus suspendebantur in compitis. . . . putarent, quibus tot pilae, quot capita servorum; tot effigies, quot essent liberi, ponebantur, ut vivis parcerent, et essent his pilis simulacris contenti. (Paul. Fest. 273L, s.v. “pilae”)

Staging memories in the home 85 This account implies that slaves were represented as things, sexless and inanimate. The dolls representing freeborn members were also made of wool but were human in form and were sexed as male or female. These might have been made by family members themselves.16 Other sources (e.g., Mac. Sat 1.7.34) connect the hanging of dolls more specifically with individual households, saying that they were hung in the threshold, where they would have been visible to household members and also passersby. Thus, though the Compitalia were not rites of passage per se, annual observance allowed family members to track and celebrate changes in status over time through public acts of veneration, enhanced by memories of the same experience in years past that also simulated future experiences. Harriet Flower argues, for example, that after manumission a slave would take particular pride in seeing themselves represented with a new type of symbol: “The hanging of a doll instead of a ball allowed for public recognition of citizen status beyond the household within the local community of neighbors” (Flower 2017: 169). Other rites of passage, more traditionally understood, also played out at shrines. After marriage, for example, the new wife offered a coin to the Lares of her husband’s home and made observances at her new neighborhood altar to signify her change in status (Macrob. Sat. 1.15.22; Hersch 2010: 176–77). Boys and girls dedicated insignia of childhood to the Lares when they came of age— bullae (or protective amulets) for boys and dolls and other toys for girls (e.g., Prop. 4.1.131–32; Caldwell 2015: 9). The traditional sources used to explore rites of passage in Roman culture, then, show how ritual actors used objects and dedications to express their status to themselves and others. Yet their intentions and strategies for remembering remain elusive. To understand the role that simulation may have played in these and other rites of passage, it is useful to examine the rituals associated with childhood, focusing on the birth and commemoration of young children. There were certainly formal rituals associated with infancy, though recent work has called into doubt the longheld belief that Roman fathers lifted babies off the family hearth to acknowledge their legitimacy (e.g., Suet. Nero. 6.1; Shaw 2001). The dies lustricus was usually held about a week after birth, celebrating the end of what was deemed a time particularly dangerous to newborns (Plut. Quaest Rom 102). During the celebration, the family made a sacrifice and acknowledged the name of the child.17 Several graffiti from Pompeian houses commemorate births and infants’ names. These range in form and have been subject to many interpretations. Only one memorializes the experience of the mother. A graffito from a small room of the atrium of the “House of Trebius Valens” (III 2.1) states, “Ursa gave birth on Thursday, January 23” (X K(alendas) Febr(u)a(rius) Ursa peperit die[m] Iovis) (CIL 4.8820). Because she has only one name, Ursa may have been a slave.18 While some scholars have read the text as celebrating a happy outcome (Varone 1994: 157–58), Lauren Petersen has argued that the graffito is more complicated, conveying information about the act of childbirth and also possibly the place where it occurred. She understands the graffito as an act of commemoration—but as one that might equally apply to an unsuccessful outcome, a small acknowledgment of the importance of the experience to the mother (Petersen 2021: 21–22). Several

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other graffiti focus upon the children. One from the entryway of the “House of the Priest Amandus” (I 7.7) announced the birth of a boy named Cornelius Sabinus, likely freeborn because his name includes a family name, gentilicium. A second graffito in another hand repeats the name, directly underneath (CIL 4.8149; CIL 4.8150). Another graffito from the “House of M. Pupius Rufus” (VI 15.5) records the date and year on which a boy named Asselus was born, possibly a slave given the name, which means “little donkey”—diminutive versions of the name are also attested for other Pompeians (CIL 4.1555).19 Finally, there is a birth announcement for a girl from an unnamed one-room structure near the Stabian gate. The graffito proclaims: “Iuvenilla was born on Saturday August 4th, in the second evening hour” (Iu(v)enilla | nata | die Satu(rni) | (h)ora secu(nda) v(esperina) | IIII non(as) Au(gustas)) (CIL 4.294). The figure of an infant was embedded into the child’s name (Figure 5.4). These graffiti reflect the same cognitive processes as do those documenting vows, and they, too, were largely written for the benefit of their authors, without much expectation that they would be read and responded to. The exception may be the notice from the “House of the Priest Amandus,” which was written in the home’s public entrance where it was clearly seen and echoed, an acknowledgement of its message. For the others, the act of writing helped fix the experience in mind in a concrete way. Several provide dates, important information for the ritual purpose of calculating the right time for the dies lustricus but also for other practical reasons. Some graffiti may have recorded information so that it could be replicated in formal documents. For example, the wax tablets in the “Archive of Venidius Ennychus” from House VI.13/11 in Herculaneum include a birth record, signed in the presence of witnesses, that avers that a daughter was born to Venidius

Figure 5.4 Drawing of a graffito celebrating the birth of a girl named Iuvenilla, with a drawing of the infant embedded in the name. Drawing after Garrucci 1854, Tab VIII, no 1. Source: Public domain.

Staging memories in the home 87 Ennychus, a freedman, on the 24th of July (AE 2006, 306). This document, thus formalized, could later be produced in court in support of his acquisition of citizenship (see Cooley and Cooley 2014: 213–15). Communities also kept documents of births, enrolling newborns in local registers within 30 days of birth and displaying these records in public buildings (Carroll 2018: 64). But there were clearly more personal reasons that motivated the authors to record this information in graffiti. The notice of Iuvenilla’s birth not only presented the typical information recording day and hour of birth, but the drawing of an infant encircled by what may be a womb also alludes to the mother’s role in childbirth, just as did the graffito that memorialized Ursa’s experience. These were “intentions to remember,” records capturing both information and emotion. They testified to the authors’ hopes for the future, anticipating rites of passage and simulating the accompanying joyful emotions—such as celebrating the dedication of a bulla or doll to the Lares—but also tracking vital information parents needed in case of a different kind of rite of passage, should a child meet an untimely death. Birth and early childhood were a period of danger in Roman family life, for both maternal and infant mortality rates were high; children were vulnerable to disease, and many began working young and suffered accidents in the field or home (e.g., Pilkington 2013; Laes 2004) Roughly one-third of all known Roman funerary inscriptions chronicle the deaths of children under the age of ten (Shaw 2001). Funerary inscriptions for children often describe their age at death precisely, mentioning the years, months, days, and hours lived. For example, one such inscription commemorates a child whose parents may have been imperial freedmen: “To the Gods of the Underworld, Certus and Flavia Quietana, the parents, made [the monument] for Titus Flavius Hilarion, who lived thirteen years, twenty days, and six hours” (D(is) M(anibus) T Flavio Hiarioni fecerunt Certus et Flavia Quietana parentes filio qui vixit annis xiii d(iebus) xx hor(is) vi) (AE 2009 172).20 Some studies have suggested that age-related information on Roman epitaphs should not be understood as statistically accurate, reflecting a culture in which many could not read and did not know their ages precisely; the ages in epitaphs, often rounded to multiples of five, give the illusion of precision (Duncan-Jones 1977). Maureen Carroll has argued, in contrast, that the information regarding children may indeed be accurate, relying on the memories of parents, who, of course, knew their children’s lives intimately, down to the time of birth (Carroll 2018: 210).21 The graffiti recording this information may reflect one way that such vital information was recorded—of critical importance to the family members who would have celebrated milestones, from the dies lustricus, to birthdays, to funerals. Funerary monuments that include portraits or representations of children show that parents’ thinking about children was prospective, even in monuments commemorating the end of life. Many monuments for children present them as older than they were at the age of death, a phenomenon most pronounced for memorials of infants but also common for older children (on representations of infants as older children, see Carroll 2018: 216–19; in sarcophagi, see Huskinson 1996: 81; 93–94; Huskinson 2007; Mander 2013: 36–65). The front face of a late first-century CE funerary altar from Rome, commemorating a girl named Iulia

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Victorina, includes a portrait that depicts her as a young girl wearing pearl earrings and a shawl or other garment folded over the shoulder. The accompanying description states that she died at ten years and five months old. The rear of the altar includes a second portrait, in which Iulia Victorina is depicted as a woman of marriageable age, wearing the same earrings and dress (“To the gods of the underworld, C. Iulius Saturninus and Lucila Procula, the parents, made [the monument]

Figure 5.5a Funerary Altar of Iulia Victorina. (a) front face, (b) rear face. Art Resource: ART179237, ART179244. Source: Photography by Hervé Lewandowski.

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Figure 5.5b (Continued)

for their very sweet daughter Iulia Victorina, who lived ten years and five months.” D(is) M(anibus)/Iuliae Victorinae/quae vix(it) ann(os) X mens(es) V/C(aius) Iulius Saturninus et/Lucilia Procula parentes/filiae dulcissimae fecerunt) (CIL 6.20727. Figure 5.5 a-b. On the altar, see Kleiner 1987: no. 15; for discussion of altar, see Rawson 2003: 360; Borg 2019: 266). Other examples also present children as grown and having attained the status of adulthood: boys in the dress of an orator or

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a soldier, girls in the guise of goddesses, just as men or women might be honored (as orator, see CIL 6.33976 = Kleiner 1987: no. 5; CIL 6. 7806 = British Museum inv. 1954,0520.1; as soldier, see CIL 6.17557; Kleiner 1987: no. 6; for girls as goddesses, see Kleiner 1987: nos. 58 and 65). These monuments reveal both the cognitive strategy of simulation and its emotional power: first, they show how those who commissioned the monuments were thinking about children at the time of their deaths, essentially a record that documents the type of future-oriented thinking that shaped the parent–child relationship from birth onward; second, they illustrate the emotional motivations underlying simulation, revealing the ideals (for status, behavior, and appearance) that parents aspired to for their children. Birth graffiti thus can be understood to document the start of a process that was lifelong, anticipation of milestones and rites of passage in infancy, childhood, and early adulthood. Though in some cases these longed-for futures never came to pass, funerary monuments allowed parents to celebrate them nonetheless, honoring the intentions and aspirations set in mind at birth as if they had been achieved.

Conclusion: staging memory, performing identity There has been a tendency to think of domestic shrines as the near-exclusive loci of Roman private religion—that is, to see shrines as the places in the home where veneration took place, whereas other rooms were used for dining, greeting clients, cooking, sleeping, and so on.22 My case studies, however, illustrate the opposite. The records of “intentions to remember” discussed earlier demonstrate that the cognitive processes that initiated ritual activity were not limited to any one space in the home or one moment in time. An individual could conceive a desire for a future outcome wherever he or she might be in the house, at any time. She or he might then utter a prayer and make a record of that intention on the spot—just as Lucius, for example, took to hand a piece of charcoal to formalize his vow in a small room in the upper story of the house where he lived and worked. A parent celebrating the birth of a child might write a record in a relatively public part of the house, such as the doorway, hoping that it would be seen, or they might write a record in a corner of a small room, easily overlooked. Both were equally powerful as memory aids and as celebrations of personal experience. The sentiments that motivated acts of private devotion were tied to shrines but also existed apart from them: shrines were where actors anticipated concluding a vow or celebrating a transition, in the future. Domestic shrines emerge not as exclusive sites of prayer or ritual but rather as focal points for acts of devotion (and the accompanying cognitive processes) that suffused the space of the home and the lives of all who lived and worked there. This awareness may allow us to better appreciate their decoration and function. As noted previously, though there is great variety in the form and decoration of shrines, scenes of family members performing rituals are generic: family members, presented in a hierarchy of scale, stand before altars in stock postures of veneration—making a libation, playing music, leading animals to sacrifice. The aspecificity of these scenes allowed individuals to see themselves reflected in communal

Staging memories in the home 91 sacred space as they moved through the lifecycle, identifying with different figures as they aged. From the day a daughter was celebrated on her dies lustricus, to her first memory of hanging a doll for the Compitalia, to the day she made her last observance in her father’s home as a daughter and her first in her husband’s home as a wife, shrines in and around the home were stages upon which she performed her expected social roles and affirmed her relationships but also projected her personal hopes. Shrines were stages that reified relationships between individuals and the gods, individuals and the household, and individuals and their former and future selves.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng for organizing the stimulating series of panels leading to this volume and Rebecca Benefiel, Karen B. Stern, and the anonymous readers of the volume for many useful comments. All mistakes are my own. 2 The participation of enslaved people in Roman religion, private and public, was limited relative to that of freed and free-born people. In part, this is because slaves were thought not to have a genius of their own and in part it was a tool for social control. See Bradley 1979 and Padilla Peralta 2017. 3 Bettina Bergmann (1994) points out that the orator’s choice of using a house as mnemonic is powerful, in large part because it was such a locus of personal identity. 4 This case is frequently identified as belonging to a different house (I.8.18). See Giacobello 2008: 142, and Foss 1997: 199–201. The Roman practice of making wax ancestor masks, displayed in the home and used at funerals, is attested by Polybius (6.53–54). In addition, there are a handful of extant artifacts made of wax, including a portrait found in a tomb in Cumae, and both Statius and Pliny the Elder describe portraits in that medium. For discussion, see Fejfer 2008: 174–75; Flower 1996. 5 The context of this example is unknown (see Cooley and Cooley 2014: 126), but it may relate to the public temple of Jupiter in the Forum. 6 I follow Cooley and Cooley (2014: 155) in this reconstruction. The findspot within the house is unknown. 7 For the painting, which is poorly preserved, see PPM s.v. “II, 1.13”: 3–4. The handwriting here suggests that Felix or another member of the family may have painted the inscriptions; it does not have the style of formal lettering associated with dipinti or tituli produced professionally. 8 There is debate about the original location of the panel, which was excavated in 1847; little fresco is preserved in the standing remains. It seems not to have been associated with the peristyle shrine. See PPM IX s.v. “IX.3.5”: 328–45. 9 As often in graffiti, this example reflects the grammar and spelling of functional literacy. The editors of the Ancient Graffiti Project suggest that votus was used in place of the accusative, votum. AGP-EDR150399, The Ancient Graffiti Project, http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/graffito/AGP-EDR150399. It should be noted that a cabinet and shelf, also located in the upper levels of the house, have been taken as evidence that the residents were Christians, because the shape of the bracket had the appearance of a cross. On this view, the graffito may have been associated with ritual space. More recent scholarship, however, sees the so-called cross as the remains of brackets for shelving designed for storage. See Cook 2018. 10 Benefiel (2010) also has shown that often graffiti in Roman homes appear in series. The content of the graffiti did not always relate to each other in an obvious way but rather shows where, in structures, people spent most time. When a graffito was noticed, it encouraged others to write, a conglomerative process that led to dialogic clusters.

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12 13 14 15

16

17

Molly Swetnam-Burland At times, clusters appear associated with notable features of homes, including around shrines and paintings. Those from shrines are not solely religious in nature but are similar to other clusters, consisting of greetings, jokes, and so on. See Swetnam-Burland forthcoming; Benefiel 2021. Much research into the phenomenon relates to pedagogy, exploring how students learn when using different media for note-taking (e.g., Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014) and drawing on theories of memory production as reliant on multimodal processing (Craik and Lockhart 1972). Writing is also a physical experience, and choices about the materials used and placement also impact the memory of the writer (Saner 2014). For a discussion of the difficulty of using names to determine status, see Zimmermann Damer 2021, with a particular focus on women’s names. In one case, CIL 6.663, that the vow was for freedom is clear. See the following discussion of compital shrines and CIL 10.860 “To the genius of our Lucius, Felix, libertus.” Genio L(uci) nostri / Felix l(ibertus?) Most discussion of what would be considered rites of passage in Roman society focuses on children and the transition to adulthood or on rituals surrounding marriage. For rites of passage for children of both sexes, see, e.g., Laes and Strubbe 2008: 49–60; for rites of passage for girls, Caldwell 2015: 134–55; for rites of passage for boys, Harrill 2002; on the wedding, Hersch 2010; Panoussi 2019: 17–39. See also the following discussion. Though no such objects were found in Pompeii (where circumstances rarely supported the preservation of wood or fabric), the climate of Roman Egypt has preserved textile dolls, of a type that suggests informal or handmade production. Many are made of scraps of wool, linen, and papyrus, and many indicate female sex with pigment or stitching to represent breasts and genitalia. See Janssen 1996; Johnson 2003, Caldwell 2015: 100–3. Festus ex Paulo 107–8L, s.v. “lustrici”: The Dies Lustrici of infants are so called, the eight day for girls and the ninth for boys, because on these days they are purified and names are given to them. lustrici dies infantium appellantur, puellarum octavus, puerorum nonus, quia his lustrantur atque eis nomina imponuntur.

18 For the difficulty of associating names with status, however, see n. 12. 19 Because of the name, Antonio Varone has read this graffito as a joke and treating the birth of an animal as equivalent to that of a person (e.g. Varone 1990: 33). Yet the name Aselus is well documented as a cognomen in other contexts, as well; see Mazzoleni 2014: 452 n. 43. In addition, there is a well-documented case of a local woman named Asellina (“little donkey”) who worked in a bar on the Via dell’Abbondanza. For discussion see Hartnett 2017: 271–75. 20 The date of the inscription is unclear. Certus appears to be a slave, while Flavia Quietana may be a freedwoman, either a former imperial slave or perhaps descended from imperial freedmen; see Donahue 2009. 21 The graffiti discussed previously support this view. 22 Recent work on Pompeian houses has pushed back on reductive views of the use and meaning of domestic space (which long assumed that rooms served specific functions, based largely on literary evidence), instead arguing that most spaces in Roman houses were multifunctional. See especially Berry 1997; Leach 1997; Allison 2004. Nearly all studies of domestic religion, however, treat shrines exclusively—future work on religion in the home would benefit from an approach that recognizes that ritual activity need not have been tied to any one space.

6

Synagogue inscriptions and the politics of prospective memory Karen B. Stern

Piotr Szpunar and Karl Szpunar define collective future memory as “the act of imagining an event to transpire on behalf of, or by, a group” (2016: 378).1 Yet ancient peoples, like modern ones, imagined idealized futures in which their names and deeds would live on in the memories of individuals, as well as collectives. Indeed, the sheer abundance of epigraphic materials from throughout the Roman world—including hundreds of thousands of texts deposited on walls, ceilings, floors, and architectural features—documents how fervently ancient peoples, including Jews, desired to achieve their wishes by manipulating the responses of future audiences. Using imagination, careful planning, and deliberate action in the form of writing, ancient actors programmed future scenarios in which subsequent generations of passersby might view and vocalize their written messages and thereby memorialize their recorded names and deeds for posterity. This chapter focuses specifically on epigraphic evidence for Jews, who, like others of comparably varied statuses and stations throughout the Roman world, richer and poorer, younger and older, men and women, did their best, according to their means, to ensure that future generations might remember to remember them. This desire means that they performed actions to impel future and imagined events for their own memorialization, adjusted to particular life stages and architectural contexts (Einstein et al. 2008: 867–92). Defining future memory as that which simultaneously entails a type of projection into the future and planning for future action, including the future actions of others (see Popkin and Ng, this volume), this chapter considers how some Jews—regardless of their social station— prospectively fought the gravitational pull of forgetting and the anticipation that their names would be lost to future generations. They did so by writing texts that recorded their names and requests for remembrance inside and around communal buildings, including synagogues. Writings from ancient synagogues that attest to such complex and future-oriented memory practices are diverse and betray their creators’ variable interests, purposes, and degrees of social, political, and economic agency. Some inscriptions, for example, are best classified as dedicatory, formal, and official: conventionally carved and tessellated by artisans, such texts were positioned prominently within surrounding buildings and deployed stylized language to publicly acclaim donors and their gifts to a synagogue community (Lifshitz 1967). Sub-elites, who DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-6

94 Karen B. Stern scratched their names and requests for remembrance directly onto doorways and walls of synagogues, however, created cognate examples of such writings, applied without the precondition of preliminary gifts. The latter category of inscriptions is rarely distinguished from the first, even if, as argued elsewhere, it remains distinct (Stern 2012, 2018). I suggest later, therefore, that attention to the simultaneous dissonance and complementarity of these types of writing offers new and more nuanced insights concerning Jewish memory practices in antiquity. Indeed, closer and synthetic examinations of both monumental and vernacular writings from synagogues, regarded through the lenses of cognitive theories of future memory and agency, reveal how systematically did Jewish elites and sub-elites use imbricated practices of prospection, writing, and self-memorialization to ensure that their names would be remembered inside devotional spaces in future time (see Swetnam-Burland, this volume, on graffiti and non-elite commemoration in Pompeiian domestic spaces).2 Improved study of such texts advances scholarship of practical piety, memory, and future memory among Jews and other numerical minority populations throughout the Roman world.3

Common views of Jews and memory Why do inscriptions from synagogues serve as useful media for examining the role of future memory in ancient Jewish life? Foremost, they constitute rare evidence for the mental worlds and memory strategies of Jewish populations most commonly overlooked in studies of Jews in premodernity. Synagogue inscriptions document features of ancient Jewish life that often took place outside of the rabbinic cultural orbit (Kraemer 2020: 2–8). While during the past several decades scholars have increasingly considered the role of memory among ancient Jews, they have focused their gazes nearly exclusively on materials from rabbinic textual corpora, redacted in the third through seventh centuries CE (e.g., Eliav 2013; Burns 2016; Yerushalmi 1996). More comprehensive studies of memory practices among Jews in antiquity require additional attention to archaeological materials, including inscriptions from synagogues and other places. To be certain, rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmuds of Roman Palestine and Babylonia, offer rich grounds for investigating how their redactors—ancient rabbis—compiled them to promote well-curated notions of a Jewish past as an inevitable precursor to a rabbinic present (Lapin 2012). Their writings are largely esoteric and constitute exceedingly specialized forms of literature that, among other things, embed and reinterpret biblical and Jewish traditions. They include stories about specific rabbis, sages, and others—legendary and otherwise—and document for posterity their sayings, arguments, dialogues, and personalities. Yet associated writings are fiercely atemporal (Yerushalmi 1996: 21). In the textual universe of rabbinic literature, for instance, rabbis who lived centuries apart often appear as interlocutors (Lapin 2013, especially 79–92; also see Cohn 2013: 57)! In memorizing and studying these texts, even modern students, following interpretations

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established by medieval and modern commentators, instantiate notions about an ahistorical Jewish past whose temporal imperfections are corrected in rabbinic memory (see Latham, this volume, on authoritative textual tradition in the Roman Republic and early Empire).4 Mnemonic practices in rabbinic texts, moreover, engage institutions as much as individuals. Scholars have repeatedly noted how rabbinic writings frame discussions of the Jewish Temple, which once stood in Jerusalem, to promote interconnected senses of communal and corporate memory, history, and religious identity among contemporaneous Jews (Eliav 2013: 189–236; Yerushalmi 1996: 22; and Cohn 2013: 39–56; 57–72). Rabbinic texts, compiled long after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, frequently detail the appearance of the Temple precinct and the activities that once took place inside it (Eliav 2013: 189–236; Cohn 2013). Indeed, the level of granularity with which rabbinic texts detail the gleaming attire of the Temple priests as high-level Temple functionaries, the aromas permeating the space (Green 2011: 65), as well as priests’ conduct of critical rituals therein—such as the directions of blood-sprinkling and throwing (e.g., y. Yoma 5:4 and b. Yoma 55a), the dissection of animals, and the allocation of animal parts following sacrifice—allowed generations who had never encountered the institution to imagine experiencing the intricacies of its workings (Klawans 2005: 139–42; see Latham, this volume, on the ability of texts to make an imagined description of religious institutions from the past seem “real” in the present).5 Moreover, textual prescriptions for ritualized experiences of mourning when reflecting upon the Temple’s violent destruction and demise equally conjured in audiences vivid, emotional, and sensory reactions to the loss of an institution that existed—for them—only in a textual, cultural, and religious imaginary (Neis 2013: 60, 63, 111; Yerushalmi 1996: 22–23).6 Most such rabbinic textual portrayals of the Temple, indeed, are as prospective as they are postmemorial: they generate and instantiate specific memories of a historical institution for future generations to internalize, perpetuating well-curated notions of a collective past and future.7 But, while modern Judaism draws from medieval and rabbinic antecedents, the successes of ancient rabbinic movements were not foregone conclusions in antiquity. Rabbis, indeed, were not the only Jews in the ancient world. Many, if not most, ancient Jews lived outside of or marginally intersected with rabbinic cultures (Lapin 2013); such realities predict that the values, practices, and beliefs of many ancient Jews often differed from those of rabbinic orientation and often resembled those of their non-Jewish neighbors.8 Data that document these latter types of Jewish cultures are largely epigraphic and archaeological in nature and, to this point, have evaded most discussions of memory, prospective or otherwise. Synagogue inscriptions, such as those introduced earlier, however, retain significant information about ancient Jewish memory practices, which were equal parts textual, visual, spatial, devotional, and future-oriented. Examinations of their contents and locations therefore encourage new perspectives on the role of memory and future memory among broader spectra of Jews throughout the Roman world.

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Future memory and synagogue inscriptions Discussions of synagogue inscriptions and future memory, however, require preliminary considerations of associated terms. Indeed, how might we know that certain inscriptions are associated with ancient Jews at all? And why might conceptions of memory—or future memory for that matter—offer useful frameworks for their analyses? Inscriptions evaluated later are associated with Jewish populations through their concurrent exhibition of several traits (Stern 2007: 20–56; Noy 1993: no. 9).9 These include but are not limited to: the locations of their deposits inside Jewish places of worship, such as synagogues; their recordings of locally distinctive onomastic patterns, including biblical or second names; their deployments of languages and scripts, such as Hebrew and Aramaic or even Greek, in places where such languages and scripts are less common; their inclusion of biblical or liturgical texts or vocabularies associated with Jewish life and institutions (by identifying named individuals as Ioudaios or Iudaeus or attributing to them honorific titles associated with synagogues), and their adjacency to symbols associated with Jewish institutions and practices.10 This abbreviated list of criteria demonstrates the challenges of associating inscriptions with Jewish creators, particularly when non-Jews, as well as Jews, sometimes visited synagogues and wrote texts inside them (Fine 2005; Daryaee 2010: 29–31). An inscription’s retention of multiple diagnostic features is therefore preferable for more solidly associating particular inscriptions with Jewish writers (Stern 2018: 27–29). Assessments of memory and future memory, moreover, remain relevant for the discussion of synagogue inscriptions, because so many of them explicitly invoke associated terms, as detailed later. Yet these writings also reflect significant variabilities due to their diverse chronologies, places of origin, and spatial locations. These realities, in turn, predict several additional challenges for their evaluations. Considerable linguistic, geographic, and chronological divides separate many of the inscriptions considered here; this discrepancy predicts that notions of memory among their Jewish inscribers and commissioners likely varied in ways that corresponded with their vastly different social and cultural milieux. As detailed elsewhere, there is likely no essentially “Jewish” conception of memory that defies regional or chronological variability (Stern 2019). Some synagogue inscriptions are carved and tessellated in Semitic languages of Aramaic or Hebrew, which include variants of the root dkyr/zkyr to designate “memory”; others appear in Greek or Latin with analogous terms (variants of mnesthe and memoria). Concepts such as “memory” might have retained similar meanings and associations for their Jewish inscribers throughout antiquity, yet an opposite conclusion, one that presumes fundamental dissimilarities in conceptions of memory among Jews of diverse times, places, and languages, might be equally plausible. Indeed, cognitive and neuroscientific literature only underscores the unstable and multifaceted nature of conceptions of memory, which remain as variable in modernity as in antiquity (Stern 2019: 2–17). As sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have cautioned, ontologies of memory—including modes of recollection of past events—invariably differ according to geography, chronology, local tradition and

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conception, personal proclivity, and even language (2002). Memory and future memory thus remain useful categories for evaluating commemorative inscriptions, even if associated concepts likely retained different associations for their Jewish authors and commissioners. The following analysis, therefore, adjusts modern perspectives on memory and future memory to suit a corpus limited by its antiquity. For example, while fields of modern neuroscience (e.g., McDaniel 1995: 214) often use experimental means, including brain imaging, to quantify how individuals project into the future to remind themselves or others to remember something of their choosing without aides-mémoires (Burgess, Gonen-Yaacovi, and Volle 2011: 2246–57), such methods of evaluation remain off-limits for discussions of ancient data. Despite such limitations, however, concepts of future memory, as defined previously, remain useful for the study of Jews and their neighbors in antiquity: they help to highlight how the creation of inscriptions, as well as viewers’ subsequent responses to them, can be both products and causes of future performance, indexing individuals’ efforts to transcend their present to coerce other people into remembering subjects of their choosing (in the manner and locations of their choosing) sometime in the future. Ultimately, in adopting the perspectives of Szpunar and Szpunar, who note that, “[h]uman memory is not a singular capacity, but rather a set of closely interacting capacities that give rise to dissociable forms of memory performance” (2016: 347), this study of future memory resists the imposition of static templates for the study of memory practices among ancient Jews. It advocates, rather, a more cross-disciplinary approach, drawing from fields of sociology, neuroscience, cognitive science, semiotics, landscape theory, and memory studies to permit more nuanced senses of the concept, which respond to geographic, chronological, and linguistic variabilities in the data (see Hirsch 2012; Landsberg 2004). Actions associated with future memory, as considered later, include the commissioning, writing, and display of inscriptions, which called upon subsequent viewers to remember the individuals named, because writers, like their neighbors, deeply feared being forgotten (Flower 2011: 1–3). But efforts to effect one’s remembrance in the future required a series of nested actions. Indeed, while reflecting upon the contents and positioning of their messages, ancient writers likely undertook a preliminary type of future-oriented mental time travel, which Szpunar and his colleagues argue is constituted of simulation, prediction, intention, and planning (see Michaelian 2016; Merck, Topcu, and Hirst 2016: 284; see also Popkin and Ng this volume). Writers imagined and planned future scenarios in which synagogue visitors would remember them by viewing their messages on prominent architectural surfaces, then, perhaps, reading their contents out loud before human and Divine audiences; they therefore executed those plans by creating their inscriptions and graffiti accordingly. The end result of the perspective advocated here includes an effort to dissect this system of inscription writing to better illuminate the futureoriented agency of texts and objects and of their creators. A final aspect of this discussion relates to the agency of individuals who produced the writing examined later. For instance, only wealthier people who possessed greater social or political prestige and resources were capable of donating

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surplus funds to edify a communal synagogue; that act was rewarded with the commission of inscriptions of benefaction that somewhat tautologically confirm the status and agency of those they commemorate. By contrast, the precise degrees of economic agency and social and political status of writers of graffiti, as a separate category of inscription, proves more challenging to reconstruct. Graffiti, indeed, is an anachronistic and capacious term, which serves here as a type of shorthand to describe unofficial writings whose applications were secondary to the architectural completion of surrounding spaces (see Swetnam-Burland, in this volume, on how graffiti could create meaning in already-completed architectural spaces). While dipinti (painted inscriptions) and graffiti (carved writings) differently designate inscriptions of disparate media, I combine them in the same category for the purposes of this analysis; the priority here is to categorize them according to register of writing rather than medium.11 Individuals without vast financial resources likely wrote many of the nondedicatory inscriptions, as discussed later, even if it remains entirely possible that non-Jewish visitors to synagogues, as well as elites within a Jewish community, also wrote synagogue graffiti (e.g., Milnor 2014; Stern 2018: 16). Regardless of the precise social statuses of the creators of graffiti, the existence and contents of such writings betray their authors’ desires to use every possible means at their disposal to compete for viewers’ attention and to project their agency into future time. This is so even if the purposes and locations of such writings differ from more official and dedicatory examples. Defining politics loosely as an effort to vie for power (McAffee 2008), even posthumously, this approach therefore endeavors to consider how ancient Jews—rich or poor, elites or sub-elites, men or women, or perhaps even children—followed specific procedures of using writing, in different ways, to prospectively ensure their remembrance by future generations inside synagogues.

Future memory, Jews, and commemorative inscriptions The sheer abundance of inscriptions discovered inside synagogues reminds us of just how many ancient Jews—particularly the wealthiest among them—designed public or semipublic spaces to memorialize their personal achievements for the viewing of future generations (Lifshitz 1967; Levine 2005). Donors to ancient synagogues, for instance, commonly commissioned monumental inscriptions to be displayed inside the floors, ceilings, and revetments of buildings in stone, paint, and mosaic (Satlow 2005).12 They did so in prominent architectural spaces, thus simultaneously documenting their names and those of their families and recording their generous acts for the review of passersby. These behaviors, of course, reflected those of their pagan and Christian neighbors in broader civic contexts around the Mediterranean (deLange 2013),13 even if examples from synagogues sometimes differ slightly in content and location, as discussed additionally later. Many examples of synagogue inscriptions were found inside buildings constructed between the third through sixth centuries CE, throughout areas of Roman

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Palestine, North Africa, Syria, Greece, and Asia Minor.14 Some of these omit vocabulary of remembrance but explicitly commemorate donors, their families, and their generous deeds. One inscription from Asia Minor, for instance, documents a certain “Aurelios (Sy)meonios . . . citizen of Sardis, Councillor” (Kroll 2001: no. 67), boasting that he and his wife donated funds to their synagogue following their taking of a vow (on graffiti marking the fulfillment of vows in Pompeiian domestic contexts, see Swetnam-Burland, this volume).15 Several floor mosaics from Syrian Apamea follow similar patterns, as one mosaic inscription announces, “Eupithis, having made a vow, for the welfare of herself and her husband and her children and all her household, made the place” (Syr71).16 The latter text does not request viewers’ remembrance but clearly announces the roles of the named woman donor (Eupithis), her unnamed husband, children, and household members in funding the edification of the synagogue (“the place”), at least in part. As Eupithis’ inscription demonstrates, women frequently served as synagogue benefactors (Brooten 1982). Their donor inscriptions, however, record diverse motivations for their euergetism. One Latin inscription, from a floor mosaic in Naro in North Africa, for example, commemorated the donations of a certain “Julia [of ] Nar[o]” who, “at her own expense, tessellated the holy synagogue of Naro (with mosaic), for her salvation, from her own coffers” (Stern 2007: 240). Much like the preceding inscriptions, Julia’s text offers a rationale for her donation: here, this is her attainment of “salvation” (Stern 2021: 333). And while inscriptions, such as those mentioned earlier, omit explicit vocabulary of memorial or memory, they implicate an established method of achieving public recognition and commemoration for their past benefactions. Associated inscriptions were recorded in prominent places in synagogues because donors and communities imagined and planned for a future time in which passersby could view the texts easily, would read them if they were capable, and, in doing so, might remember the donor and her good deeds. Positioned inside wall revetments and floor mosaics, in monumental form, these texts were nearly unavoidable to visitors; they constituted visible and durable memorials of donors’ good works inside spaces of ongoing use. Other types of donor inscriptions, however, both explicitly and implicitly called for viewers to remember the euergetism of past individuals. For instance, an inscription painted carefully in Greek onto a tile displayed on the ceiling of the synagogue in Dura Europos in Syria acclaimed the donor: “Samuel BarSaphara, may he be remembered, founded these things thus” (Syr87) (Figure 6.1). Monumental inscriptions of similar syntax, written in Aramaic, also appear in mosaic floors of synagogues of Roman Palestine nearby. One of several Aramaic remembrance inscriptions from the fifth-century Sepphoris synagogue, for example, includes one from the nave, which declares: “[Remembered be for good . . .] son of Aninah son of . . . and his sons who made this [panel]. Amen” (transcription and translation from Weiss 2005: 208). The latter text adorns the donated portion of a mosaic and demands that future viewers remember its donors while appreciating the result of their generosity (the surrounding mosaic). Similar examples appear in the ancient synagogue of Susiya and elsewhere (Figure 6.2). Whether in the example from Dura, in Sepphoris, or Susiya, therefore, the records of good works

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Figure 6.1 Donor inscription painted onto terracotta tile originally displayed in Dura Europos Synagogue Ceiling. Accession number 1933.257. Source: Photograph: Yale University Art Gallery Dura-Europos Collection.

Figure 6.2 Donor inscription from mosaic floor of Susiya synagogue. Source: Photograph by Ezra Gabbay.

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of benefactors thus become inextricable from the fruits of their donations. Donors and communities that benefited from a donor’s largesse erected these inscriptions for common purposes, planning for their protracted viewing; they imagined a time, far into the future, when visitors to the space would continue to behold the beauty of mosaics or decorated architectural features and retrospectively appreciate the sponsorship of their original benefactors.17 These inscriptions, much like other types discovered inside and around synagogues throughout the Mediterranean, reflect and reinforce donors’ demands that future viewers remember them. But future memory “worked” on multiple additional levels in these inscriptions. Whether in Sardis, as listed earlier, or elsewhere in Asia Minor, Syria, Roman Palestine, or North Africa, they publicly identified the names of male and female benefactors, often alongside those of their husbands, wives, and children, extoling their piety while occasionally listing positions they held in synagogue hierarchies. They sometimes recorded vows donors had taken, named the gifts they had given, or adorned those gifts (Satlow 2005). At other times, they describe their donations as a means to achieve the donor’s salvation (Moralee 2004; Stern 2021: 334). The writings that documented these acts were displayed carefully for public viewing; associated inscriptions, as such, simultaneously constituted a means of adornment for the surrounding space (Leatherbury 2019). While some inscriptions deployed terminologies of memory, whether in Greek or in Aramaic, all such writings, de facto, memorialized the individuals who had donated monies, in some way, to edify and beautify the surrounding buildings. Part of what made this system of commemoration so significant, however, related to the fact that synagogues were, themselves, special places. Inside of them, people conducted acts of assembly, prayer, and supplication; recited scripture and liturgical poetry; and participated in other types of activities associated with Divine presence and worship. This reality anticipates the possibility of Divine as well as human audiences for the messages expressed in these inscriptions. The latter dimension of donor inscriptions from synagogues closely resembles those found inside neighboring temples and churches, as discussed additionally later. Beyond expectations that passersby would act as donors imagined—reading their inscriptions inside the synagogue space and, perhaps, before the Divine—the memorial functions of inscriptions quite possibly worked in an additional and complementary way: to inspire viewers to act in the same ways as had donors. Alain Gowing usefully demonstrates how the concept of memoria in the Roman world, specifically in the writings of Tacitus, Sallust, and Livy, could simultaneously signify both a monument (a memorial) and an “ethical” incentive for readers (Gowing 2016: 47). Gowing’s approach is particularly helpful for theorizing about the functionality of donor inscriptions from perspectives of future memory: synagogue inscriptions might simultaneously, in the eyes of donors and associated communities: 1) serve as written memorials that anticipate the viewing and reading of future generations, who would consequently remember donors and their past actions; 2) create opportunities for donors’ names to be remembered before future human and Divine audiences; and 3) constitute incentives for viewers to behave in ways similar to those of listed donors (see Seider, this volume, for discussion

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of how Tacitus’ text could serve as a model for the future behavior of Romans). Displayed texts could thus benefit both the donor and her entire synagogue community, by modeling her dedicatory practices for future generations. In all cases, donor inscriptions, including the previous examples, constituted permanent and active memorials, designed for an imagined future, in which subsequent generations of viewers, as well as the Divine, could witness and remember the names of the individuals their inscriptions contained. Yet other types of writing inside ancient synagogues signify complementary ways in which synagogue visitors— who were not necessarily wealthy benefactors—could also engage a different mode of commemoration and memorialization inside the synagogue space.

Future memory, Jews, and graffiti Most studies of Jewish inscriptions focus on official commemorative texts, such as those considered earlier, which request that readers remember donors’ names and deeds. But what about other types of inscriptions and other types of ancient Jews, who also might have wished to be remembered in the future? Some, after all, might have found themselves bereft of the economic means or desire to make preliminary donations of funds that merited documentation through official synagogue inscriptions. While we do not possess extensive evidence for the activities the latter types of people performed inside of synagogue spaces, we do retain some in the form of graffiti whose creations entail distinct sets of writing and future memory-making practices, conducted without a preliminary investment.18 While scholars have rarely noted the phenomenon of graffiti-writing inside synagogues, Jews once wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of messages in the form of graffiti, throughout regions surrounding the Mediterranean and throughout Mesopotamia and Arabia. They did so around synagogues in Syria and Asia Minor, inside burial caves of the Levant and Italy, and inside and around pagan shrines and open spaces in Arabia, Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula (Stern 2018). They carved their messages for multiple reasons that varied according to their diverse contexts and circumstances. Many such writings include names and incorporate terminologies of memory and memorial, commanding future audiences to recall their writers and their historical presences in surrounding spaces (for more extensive definitions of graffiti, for these purposes, see Stern 2018: 21–30; Chaniotis 2011: 193–95). Categories of future memory and future-oriented time travel have not been used to examine these writings, but these concepts usefully illuminate writers’ efforts to use these texts as a means of ensuring that viewers in the future might remember their original writers, regardless of whether their authors were among the hoi polloi or the elites. And they likely achieved this objective at little personal cost. To demonstrate this point, the remainder of the discussion focuses on one group of graffiti preserved inside a synagogue in ancient Dura Europos in Syria, which was renovated and destroyed in the third century CE, in periods that preceded the creation of most of the inscriptions from other synagogues considered above. While additional types of graffiti and dipinti have been found inside synagogues from Asia Minor (Kroll 2001) and, to limited degrees, in

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Roman Palestine, those in Dura Europos constitute the most comprehensive corpus available that attest to the writing of nondedicatory inscriptions inside an ancient synagogue. These types of writings demonstrate distinct ways that sub-elite (as well as elite) Jews could carve or paint stylized and nondedicatory texts inside synagogues to direct the future actions of viewers. The story of the Dura Europos synagogue and its destruction and unusual preservation is so striking and famous that it requires little elaboration here (e.g., Kraeling 1979: 1–4; for a useful and recent summary of the topic see Baird 2018). Most relevant for this discussion is that, unlike most synagogues from Roman Palestine or elsewhere in the ancient world found before or since, the Dura Europos synagogue was discovered with the elaborately decorated walls and ceiling tiles of its assembly hall largely intact. Only because so many of the original surfaces from the structure were improbably preserved did some of the graffiti and pictures once drawn upon them survive until their discovery in the 1930s (Kraeling 1979; Baird 2018). Examples of these types of markings from the synagogue, classified here as graffiti, include more than 70 messages and drawings that visitors carved and painted onto surfaces of the building when they visited it (Kraeling 1979: 269–320). Jewish and non-Jewish writers contributed to this number; texts were written in various languages and scripts including Aramaic, Greek, middle Persian, and even Pahlavi. Most of the Persian messages were painted in ink, following conventions of Persian scribal practice (Syr111–126; Daryaee 2010: 30); messages more clearly associated with Jewish populations were carved or painted in various colors. The latter group of texts dominates the following discussion. Today, of course, if one wrote one’s name on the wall of a modern synagogue, church, or mosque, patrons would immediately pursue punitive action (e.g., Narizhnaya and Balsamini 2020). But in ancient towns, such as Dura, normative behaviors were quite different; in Dura and surrounding regions, people frequently wrote all over the walls of their temples and shrines. Graffiti appear with particular density inside spaces associated with prayer and devotion in Dura, such as inside the Baptistry of its Christian building, the so-called Temple of the Aphlad, and the so-called Temple of Azzanathkona nearby (Stern 2012; Baird 2014).19 These types of graffiti, however, also cluster around shrines in domestic contexts (Baird 2014, 2018). Such graffiti likewise appear inside the local synagogue. As indicated later, most of the graffiti recovered from the synagogue included the same semantic patterns as those discovered in other buildings; it was the names they included, often of biblical association; the languages and scripts they deployed, including a disproportionate use of Aramaic, rather than Greek, the written language attested most frequently in Dura; and the precise locations of their deposit that remained most distinctive.20 Indeed, Jews in Dura largely followed local conventions when they wrote graffiti inside the devotional space of the synagogue. Some of these writings were terse and consisted only of signatures that list personal names and patronyms. For instance, a certain Ḥiya seems to have written his name multiple times around doorways inside the structure, announcing “I am Ḥiya (’ana Ḥiya)” in Aramaic (Syr94a; Figure 6.3).21 Comparable examples include personal names and patronyms, such

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Figure 6.3 Graffito of Ḥiya (top); graffito of Ḥananī son of Samuel (bottom) from Dura Europos Synagogue. Source: Drawing: du Mesnil du Buisson (1939: 162).

as a message carved beside one of Ḥiya’s, nominating “Phineas son of Jeremiah” (Syr95) or one declaring “I am Ḥananī son of Samuel” (Aramaic, include “May Minyamin be remembere Syr94b; Figure 6.3). Writers carefully carved their signatures to be seen easily; their dimensions are sizable, with letters that range from 1–6 cm, and appear in spaces in full view of visitors, who traversed places like doorways and passageways en route to the main assembly hall of the building.22 Still other writers used their messages to explicitly command viewers to remember their names. One example, in Greek, calls for a certain Amathbel to “be remembered (mnesthe) and (also) his brother and” (Syr90). Analogous expressions, rendered in Aramaic, include “May Minyamin be remembered, the apothecarius” (Syr83). This basic type of graffito is so common throughout Dura that the word for memory is often abbreviated. In multiple Durene buildings, for instance, the Greek word mnesthe is supplanted by the initial letters mu (“m”) or mu + nu (“m-n-”).23 This abbreviation was not preserved in the synagogue, where equivalent sentiments are more abundant in Semitic scripts than in Greek. Another type of remembrance inscription also recurs. One such message, found just to the south of the synagogue, acclaims in Aramaic: “Isaac son of Aaron. A good memorial for the good” (Syr92). The text is followed by the names Solomon and Jacob in Greek. In this last case, the invocation is not merely for individuals to be remembered, but, following a modified regional formula, the text declares that they should be remembered for good (Healey 1996; Gudme 2017: 77–81). Other texts include more developed syntax, such as an Aramaic text written by or for a certain Aḥiah, painted in green on a plaster fragment from the synagogue building and found during excavations around the exterior of the building walls. It beseeches the reader to remember: “Aḥiah son of . . . the sons of Levi. May he be remembered for good [before the Lord in Heaven] Amen. This is a memorial for good” (Syr91). Here the request is for the reader to remember for good Aḥiah, a descendent of Levi—or a Levite—and also before a specific witness, restored as the “Lord in Heaven” (Figure 6.4). This message thus contains even more explicit directives for future action, as discussed additionally later.

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Figure 6.4 Graffito of Aḥiah, Dura Europos synagogue. Source: Drawing: du Mesnil du Buisson (1937: 170).

Scholars traditionally regarded the preceding type of texts as truncated and poorly executed donor inscriptions (IJO III: 156). Indeed, phrases in some of these graffiti are nearly identical to their more monumental counterparts, also discovered inside the same synagogue and elsewhere, even if their appearances are generally more

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rough-hewn. But these writings seem to operate slightly differently than their monumental counterparts, which document individuals who had made donations of some sort.24 Unlike donor inscriptions carefully painted onto tiles inside the ceiling of the same building (such as, “Samuel BarYedaya, elder of the Jews, founded” (Syr86) and “Samuel BarSaphara, may he be remembered, founded these things thus” (Syr87; Figure 6.1) [my italics]), these other writings include no explicit rationale for commemoration.25 They appear, moreover, in different architectural locations than do donor inscriptions. Graffiti cluster on walls and doorways. Their density on adjacent surfaces, in turn, makes it unlikely that each scratched or painted message represents a donor to that same architectural feature. These graffiti, like their monumental counterparts, might command their readers to remember their writers, but they do so in slightly different ways, under different conditions, and seemingly for different purposes. Worth noting, also, are the distinctions between the locations of these types of graffiti in the synagogue and those in other buildings in Dura. As considered elsewhere, many comparable examples of these memorial graffiti appeared in local devotional buildings and spaces (Stern 2012: 184–87). The differences in their presentations in the synagogue, however, relate not only to their linguistic and onomastic patterns but also to their spatial ones: in pagan temples, signatures and remembrance requests are most commonly rendered in Greek and are clustered particularly around shrines and areas of cultic significance. Only in the synagogue did recorded examples primarily cluster around doorways of the assembly hall of the building (Stern 2012). Given these differences, one might still wonder what graffiti “did” for their writers, in the synagogue or elsewhere, that official dedicatory inscriptions did not. What was the point of someone’s writing her name or requesting remembrance for good on synagogue walls or doorways, particularly without recording an associated donation or another clear rationale? It seems, at first glance, that the point was that their authors wanted a specific result, solicited through writing. Just like other writers of graffiti in public, devotional, and ritual spaces throughout Dura (Baird 2014: 175–76, 273), those in the synagogue also wanted their names to be seen (and thereby remembered) by future generations. They projected into the future and wished that passersby, at that time, might see their texts, read them, and thereby remember their names for good. They used this distinctive register of writing to actualize these wishes, even if they could not afford or were averse to donating monies, or merely chose to undertake acts that differed from lavish giftgiving. Individuals who wrote Greek and Aramaic inside the synagogue need not have been wealthy, but their imperatives to compel people in the future to remember their names reflect desires—similar to those of donors—to attract the attention of viewers. Graffiti inside the synagogue as well as elsewhere thus performed the work of carrying the memory of their authors into the future: writers created their messages after predicting how people would respond to seeing their names and remembrance requests. They did so through multiple steps: they set the intention of their being remembered and planned accordingly to realize that goal, first by choosing a location and then by inscribing their graffiti there. Cognitive theories of prospection help to break down the process whereby these graffiti could serve as

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effective and durable tools for writers to be remembered long after their demises, regardless of their economic station. Yet comparisons of these synagogue graffiti to other regional analogues outside of Dura allow us to push this analysis further. For instance, the more extensive message of Aḥiah, as reviewed earlier, suggests a more developed function: unlike more monumental inscriptions and some terser graffiti, it explicitly requests that passersby remember for good the specific writer by name (Aḥiah), distinguished by his particular lineage (“of Levi”). But the message also, de facto, compels readers to remember Aḥiah in a particular location—in the precise spot on which his message appeared inside the synagogue—and before a specific named deity (the “Lord in Heaven”). And other Aramaic graffiti, found throughout the region and outside of Jewish contexts, offer important insights for interpreting these latter features of this message. Aramaic had been a lingua franca throughout the region for centuries following Achaemenid rule, which explains why so many analogous inscriptions outside of Jewish contexts in Syria, as well as in places further south and east, extending from Persia through the Levant and Arabia, follow comparable syntactical prototypes (Folmer 2011: 287–98; cf. Beyer 1998). This is the case, indeed, in Hatra—situated in the outer eastern reaches of the Roman world—where multiple examples of similar graffiti were also found in Aramaic (e.g., Moriggi and Bucci 2019: H1085, H1087). Hatrene culture betrayed many continuities with Syrian regions farther west, including its inhabitants’ cultic and epigraphic habits (e.g., Butcher 2003: 356). Scratched in clusters into walls and iwans,26 several Hatrene graffiti exhibit similarities to those in Dura with respect to semantic contents: they also nominated individuals—that is, their authors, and their patrilines—and requested their remembrance, often “for good” (e.g., Moriggi and Bucci 2019: H1036b-c). Sometimes they also, like Aḥiah’s restored message, name particular gods, whom writers called upon to witness writers’ requests for memorialization (for additional examples, see Beyer 1984, 1998). Their composition, application, and expectations about their reception ultimately illuminate how their writers might have regarded the mechanisms of their messages’ efficacy. One such example of an Aramaic inscription, found on an iwan from Hatra, breaks down the activities associated with these memorial graffiti. This text declares: Remember before Maran and Martan and Barmaren be . . . | everyone who has entered the wall of the city. . . . The curse of [Maran] against anyone who reads this inscription [and does not say ‘Remembered’] for good and excellence before Maran be” (translation al-Jadir 2006: 306; 305–11; cf. Moriggi and Bucci 2019: H1036c; H1066: 3) The portion of this text containing the personal name of the writer did not survive (line 7), but it explicitly proclaims that, if a passerby reads the graffito containing the writers’ name but does not remember the named individual by reading his

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message out loud before the specific and named deities, he or she—the obstinate passerby—would be cursed by the gods invoked in the message (al-Jadir 2006: 306; Figure 6.5). The writer thus solicits and manipulates viewers’ future responses by threatening the passerby to vocalize his message—or else! Processes of prospection and future-oriented mental time travel are therefore embodied in this graffito as well as similar examples (see Popkin and Ng, this volume and Ng, this volume): here, it is the act of writing and, ultimately, the physicality and the materiality of the letters, that explicitly carry the demand of the writer into the future and make them

Figure 6.5 Aramaic remembrance graffito from Hatra. Photo: al-Jadir 2006: 310, Fig. 1. Source: reproduced with generous permission of Dr. Abil al-Jadir.

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efficacious beyond the here-and-now of the moment of the texts’ application onto the iwan.27 Why coerce the reader, upon penalty of divine punishment, to remember the writer by reading his name out loud? Would it not be enough for a viewer to just read it silently, if he were sufficiently literate to do that much? Apparently not. As scholars who study writings and objects of ritual power consider extensively, the importance of reading texts out loud relates to the awareness that vocalization was a powerful tool of activation in antiquity (Cox-Miller 1986). Studies of ancient law, covenant, and treaty-making in the region offer complementary demonstrations of the significance of performance, verbal or otherwise, for concretizing legal agreements through verbal and bodily action (Levtow 2012). Perhaps, by vocalizing the messages and names of individuals written on Durene shrines and doorways, just as along Hatrene iwans, passersby could thereby activate them, thus manifesting the memory of individuals named before their peers but also before the deities conjured or understood to be present. Writers of these graffiti thus muscled future viewers to do just what they had planned for and imagined in the future; their messages, whether composed in Hatra or Dura, coerced readers to activate the memory of individuals named inside the texts. They did so by demanding that subsequent readers verbalize their messages, remembering and calling blessings upon their writers before human and Divine audiences. Perhaps the appropriate performance of such acts could also call blessings upon readers; this would serve as a positive incentive to counterbalance the threat of disobedience to writers’ directives. The latter possibilities, indeed, might not be so far-fetched; it would follow the logic of regional blessing and curse formulations in treaties and laws throughout the Near East and Mesopotamia, which survived Arsacid and Roman rule. Treaty formulas throughout these areas assured that proper adherence to stipulated terms would be rewarded with blessings from gods listed as witnesses, while the flouting of agreed terms was punished with their curses (Kitz 2014). The now-anonymous writer of the Hatrene graffito wished for his name to be read, for good remembrance, before local gods, including Maran, Barmaren, and Martan. But even so, the writer of that graffito, like the Jews who visited the synagogue in Dura Europos, might have been fairly sober-minded about human behaviors: people can be lazy, and they rarely do what you want them to. The writer of the Hatrene message, therefore, might have spelled out a more complete vision of how and where he wished to be remembered in the future. He imagined a future in which a passerby might neglect his inscription. As a result he hedged his bets to avoid such a fate, which would entail his being forgotten: he used his message to coerce passersby to verbally engage with the graffito and, thereby, to enter into a contract witnessed by specific gods. The passersby would remember to remember the writer, by reading his name out loud sometime in the future, in order to evade extremely dire consequences and the writers’ deep fear of being neglected and forgotten. Now, perhaps, we can return to the synagogue graffiti with renewed insights from regional analogues. Aḥiah’s graffito, along with more truncated graffiti from

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the Dura Europos synagogue, might have functioned in ways similar to the Hatrene example. Aḥiah wanted the reader of his message to remember him for good in the future and in a particular place: inside a doorway of a synagogue in Dura, presided over by the “Lord in Heaven.” By writing his message, Aḥiah then made material his relationship to the Divine and future viewers. But, perhaps, like the Hatrene graffito, Aḥiah’s message was not an anodyne missive to an imagined future audience. It was a text that coerced a passerby to read the writer’s name out loud, remembering him, for good, in a way that forged a nearly contractual relationship between the reader and the writer, witnessed by his peers and also by the Divine. Graffiti-writers’ scratches and paintings on the wall, indeed, constituted acts of prospective memory that demanded memorialization without preliminary purchase. Regardless of their rough-hewn appearances, the contents and locations of their carved and painted messages were neither accidental nor incidental. Writers created them deliberately, purposefully, and strategically to mitigate their fears of being forgotten, compelling future readers to remember their names for good in perpetuity before a Divine and human audiences. When considering the relationships between future memory and writing practices inside synagogues, both the dedicatory inscriptions and graffiti reviewed earlier share several features. Both types include names and requests for remembrance that are simultaneously declarative and directive. They entail the display of individuals’ names inside special buildings, where sacred objects were stored and holy activities took place, including prayer, assembly, worship, and appeals to the Divine. Moreover, the possibilities that memories of donors and inscribers might be carried into the future in these places equally relied on performances of series of actions, including the viewing and verbalization of texts by surrounding communities. Thus, it was readers’ responses to inscribed messages, as much as the facts of their appearances, that profoundly mattered to the individuals they named. Donors and inscribers therefore were future-oriented, using acts of simulation, prediction, intention and planning (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016; see Popkin and Ng, this volume) to inspire their acts of writing, whether directly or through commission. In the case of graffiti, in particular, this planning might have entailed implicit or explicit efforts to coerce future readers to pay attention and behave as writers wished. Indeed, the placement and syntax of these messages implied that the community and the Divine should serve as inscribers’ arbiters and witnesses. Regardless of whether writers materialized their texts in mosaic, paint, or stone or whether their works resulted or did not result from a preliminary donation, they used the tools they had available to assure that their names lived on well into the future.

Conclusion What are the advantages of reviewing synagogue inscriptions in the context of broader discussions of future memory? Theories of future thinking offer new insights for examining well-known inscriptions, revealing ways in which their texts embody ancient writers’ demands on future viewers. Indeed, while studies

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of Jewish history commonly consider the semantic contents of synagogue inscriptions, the approaches adopted here yield very different results: they encourage the examination of writing as a spatially and architecturally engaged and dialogical medium that facilitates diachronic human and Divine communication. Such perspectives underscore how contingent were relationships between registers of writing, economic agency, and memorial and devotional behaviors among Jews in antiquity. Writers, according to their station and means, used awe, invective, threat, fear, or piety to direct future audiences to remember their names and those of their families. Earlier in the chapter, I described politics, rather loosely, as an effort to vie for power. Defined as such, individual Jews of lesser means could use different forms of writing to compete in the same type of political and mnemonic game as wealthier synagogue donors. These individuals thus used whatever tools they had at their disposal, whether money or mosaic, a stylus, paint, or a nail, to emblazon their names and deeds into the memories of future audiences. History, in the end, ultimately stymied ancient writers’ lofty goals. Many synagogues, including those in Apamea and Dura, were destroyed soon after people painted and carved inscriptions onto their surfaces. Some inscriptions disintegrated; others were buried, covered over, or disinterred from their original locations.28 These sequences of events prevented writers’ messages from functioning as the types of prospective memorials that their creators had once envisioned. But these texts ultimately persisted in memorializing their authors in future time, if in entirely unanticipated ways. This is because, as Laurent Olivier has argued, texts and objects retain memory in their very matter, even while they remain undiscovered or unseen (2004: 53–55). Excavation and modern study, such as that conducted earlier, ultimately (re-) activate these texts and objects by “inscribing them in the present” (Olivier 2004: 60). Analyses of memorial inscriptions from synagogues, when regarded in this light, thus advance aspects of authors’ original goals: to carry the remembrances of their names and deeds into a distant future. Yet that future is not one localized in Dura, Hatra, or Sepphoris as they might have originally imagined but one that is sustained—however improbably—by scholarly audiences around the world.29

Notes 1 I thank the editors of this volume and the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for their careful and exceptionally useful comments. 2 This emphasizes one aspect of Angelos Chaniotis’ definition of graffiti (2011: 126). 3 For discussions of practical piety and early Judaism see Satlow (2005: 81–91) and ongoing research. 4 Rabbinic texts remain essential for ancient historiography, but they cannot be understood as historiographical (Yerushalmi 1996). 5 The latter types of memory-making reflect those of post-memory as discussed in Hirsch (2012: 5–6, 11) and “cosmopolitan memory” (Levy and Sznaider 2002: 87–106). 6 These memorial strategies were also deployed in visual and archaeological contexts Stern (2019: 53–85); compare Hirsch (2012: 5–6) and (Landsberg 2004). 7 Merck, Topcu, and Hirst argue for connections between “remembering a nation’s past and imagining its future” (2016: 287) in ways that additionally inflect this interpretation of rabbinic and institutional memory.

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8 Historical perspectives on the triumphant rabbinic enterprise of memory creation in Lapin (2012). 9 Noy 1993 henceforth abbreviated JIWE I. 10 More extensive discussions of these criteria in Stern 2018: 26–30. 11 Contrast the approach in Benefiel (2010) and Baird and Taylor (2011). 12 Collections of such inscriptions include those in Naveh (1978); Lifshitz (1967); RothGerson (2001); and Brooten (1982). 13 Euergetism in Asia Minor and regional patterns in women’s patronage in Balty (1991) and Meyers (2012: 141–59). 14 Synagogue inscriptions in Lifshitz (1967); more recent discoveries are largely published according to site and region. 15 See comparable texts from Apamea in Noy and Bloedhorn (2004), 84–116 [henceforth abbreviated as IJO III]. 16 Translation follows that of IJO III, 113. 17 Concerning euergetism and commemoration throughout the Hellenistic and Roman East and farther west, see Dignas (2006: 71–84); and Ng (2015: 101–23). 18 The archaeological and epigraphic record, of course, skews toward the documentation of elites among Jews and others in antiquity (Kraemer 2020); this is true also in mortuary contexts, e.g., JIWE I nos. 63 and 9). 19 Introductions to the cultural and religious diversity in Dura Europos in Kaizer (2016: 1–15) and Baird (2014: 209–70). 20 Most Durene inscriptions are in Greek, even if Aramaic was likely spoken in Dura (Dirven 1999). 21 Subsequent inscriptions from Syrian synagogues follow the transcriptions and transliterations in IJO III, following the internal notation of “Syr”, e.g., Syr96 (=IJO III, Syr96). 22 Different phases of the structure mapped in Kraeling (1979: Plans III–VIII); measurements of inscriptions in IJO III, 159. 23 Examples of this abbreviation appear in private houses and shrines, in temples of Azzanathkona and Aphlad, and elsewhere (e.g., M.I. Rostovtzeff 1934; nos. 423–27). 24 See more extended discussion of this argument and consensus in IJO III, 158. 25 Positioning of the donor inscriptions in the Dura Europos synagogue ceiling considered in Stern (2010). 26 Iwans are three-sided, rectangular, and often vaulted spaces that date back to antiquity and were particularly popular in Parthian and Sassanian Persia. They are still used today in Persian/Iranian religious architecture. See Keall 1974. 27 These and other types of Hatrene graffiti in Caquot (1964: 251–72) and Moriggi and Bucci (2019). 28 Concerning this point, see the reconstructions of Adam Blitz in his digital Apamea project (2019). 29 I thank an anonymous reviewer for this reference and perspective.

7

The Vicarello milestone beakers and future-oriented mental time travel in the Roman Empire Maggie L. Popkin

The Roman Empire’s network of roads was vast: a complex infrastructure that had massive economic, cultural, and social implications.1 Rome’s roads have long interested scholars, who have in turn produced a huge body of work, much of it quite recent, examining the technologies, archaeologies, geographies, topographies, and imperializing and globalizing aspects of this road network. A wide body of literary and material evidence survives that supports research into Roman roads and travel in antiquity: written itineraries such as the Antonine Itinerary, travelogues such as Pausanias’ Periegesis or the papyri recording Theophanes’ business trip in the fourth century CE from Egypt to Syria, remnants of the roads themselves, milestones, and maps such as the well-known Peutinger Tablet.2 Among the objects often discussed in the context of Roman roads are four cylindrical silver beakers, found at the site of modern Vicarello, Italy and today on view in the Museo Nazionale Romano in the Palazzo Massimo in Rome (Figure 7.1).3 Engraved on the outer surface of each beaker is a list of stops along a route extending overland from ancient Gades (Cádiz, Spain) to Rome (Figure 7.2). The inscribed itineraries and the cylindrical form of the beakers evoke Roman milestones, which famously marked the Roman Empire’s extent, symbolically as well as more literally. Although frequently adduced as evidence for the road network connecting Italy and Spain in the Roman period, the milestone beakers offer much more than a documentary vision of the route from Gades to Rome. Whether the beakers represent a historical monument or real itinerary (a question discussed later), their inscriptions list specific sites and thus evoke associations with places in the Roman Empire. Perhaps because of this tangible connection to real places, scholars have sometimes interpreted the milestone beakers as souvenirs of Gades, purchased in Spain by travelers en route to Italy to remember their Iberian hometown (Künzl and Koeppel 2002: 18–19; Künzl and Künzl 1992: 282). The beakers, however, invert the traditional paradigm of the travel souvenir as an object acquired away from home and subsequently brought home to call to mind a place, event, or experience. Instead, they seem to have been acquired at home (Gades) and then taken away from home along a lengthy voyage to a distant locale (Italy). They may indeed have reminded beholders of Gades along the voyage to Rome, but once in Italy their owner or owners deposited them in the waters of Aquae Apollinares. DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-7

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Figure 7.1 Four silver milestone beakers from Aquae Apollinares (Vicarello). Museo Nazionale Romano, Medagliere, inv. nos. 67497–67500. Source: Photograph: Su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo— Museo Nazionale Romano—Medagliere.

Figure 7.2 Drawing of the engraved itinerary on one of the Vicarello milestone beakers (Museo Nazionale Romano inv. no. 67497; CIL 11.3281). Source: Marchi 1852, plate 4 (public domain).

The Vicarello milestone beakers 115 Rather than keepsakes, that is, things kept as mementoes, the beakers were given away to the gods of the sanctuary at Vicarello, serving then as souvenirs neither of Gades nor Rome nor Aquae Apollinares. Considering the milestone beakers as retrospective souvenirs—that is, as mementoes of one’s past life in or visit to the city of Gades—offers one side of the story of how these vessels stimulated processes of remembering in their owners and beholders, whether in Gades, Rome, or Vicarello or en route between these sites. Focusing exclusively on the retrospective function of these beakers, however, obfuscates their prospective functions as they moved from manufacture and purchase in Gades to ultimate dedication at Aquae Apollinares. How might these beakers have shaped people’s future thinking about travel, time, and space, at scales ranging from the granular and personal to the broader and imperial? Examining the milestone beakers through the intertwined lenses of future-oriented mental time travel and embodied cognition illuminates aspects of these remarkable vessels that we otherwise tend to overlook. Future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) describes the cognitive processes by which people “see” the future: simulation, in which we construct detailed mental representations of future scenarios; prediction, in which we estimate the likelihood of a future outcome and/or our potential reactions to it; intention, in which we mentally set a goal; and planning, in which we identify and organize steps to achieve that goal (Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016; see Popkin and Ng, this volume, for further discussion of FMTT). Some scholars describe such future thinking as episodic foresight or episodic future thinking (see Bulley 2018: 80; Popkin and Ng, this volume, on the different terminologies), thus emphasizing the episodic or autobiographical nature of prospection (“I imagine that something will happen to me personally in the future”). I prefer to use the term future-oriented mental time travel because future thinking is not necessarily—or always—about one’s personal future; it can also be semantic or having to do with general knowledge (“I imagine that something will happen to society generally in the future”) (see Orlin, this volume, on collective future thought in Rome). While research into FMTT and mental simulation has illuminated how humans imagine and plan for the future, theories of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition, or so-called 4E cognition, underscore how our material world impacts human cognition (on 4E cognition, see Newen, Bruin, and Gallagher 2018). While the 4Es each posit somewhat different relationships between the brain, the body, and the external world (see Popkin and Ng, this volume), they each implicate each other (Schlosser 2018: 2091). As Diana Y. Ng has persuasively argued, a view in which cognition unfolds in interactions between an organism and its environment fits best with our knowledge of the material and visual cultures of the Roman world (Ng 2019b: 361). I am less concerned in this chapter with the distinctions between embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognition (on which see, helpfully, Anderson, Cairns, and Sprevak 2019: 2–9; Popkin and Ng, this volume) than with how embodied cognition, broadly construed to include its imbrication with the other “E”s, relates to prospection and forces us to think about how the material world and physical objects might affect FMTT.

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Cognitive research into FMTT and 4E cognition reveals the extent to which objects such as the Vicarello milestone beakers, prior to being dedicated as votives in sanctuaries, shaped people’s imaginations, expectations, and experiences of place, travel, and ritual in the Roman world. After introducing the beakers, the chapter considers the biographies of the milestone beakers—that is, their shifting contexts of use in which they could have generated meaning and future thinking— before turning explicitly to the ways in which they stimulated mental time travel, not only retrospective but also, especially, prospective. Such an approach moves us beyond interpretations of the beakers that focus heavily on their location of manufacture, dating, and validity as itineraries and offers insight into how Romans conceived of itineraries, milestones, and maps as tools of prospection. More broadly, as I will discuss in the chapter’s concluding section, such an approach pushes us to expand our consideration not just of itineraries and maps but also of Roman votive objects beyond their production, aesthetic values, and religious functions to achieve an understanding of them as, also and equally importantly, technologies of embodied prospection.

The four milestone beakers The sacred springs of Aquae Apollinares were located at the site of modern Vicarello, on the northwest shore of Lake Bracciano (the ancient lacus Sabatinus) (Figure 7.3). Epigraphic evidence indicates that the spring sanctuary was sacred to Apollo and the Nymphs, as well as to Aesculapius and Silvanus (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 14). Aquae Apollinares was active as a healing and cultic site from at least the fifth century BCE and was elaborated in the Roman period with bathing facilities, a gymnasium, and other structures. Under Domitian, a large imperial villa was also built near the sacred springs (on which see Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 58–61; Cordiano 2011). A votive deposit discovered at Vicarello in the nineteenth century contained thousands of republican and imperial coins (Colini 1967–1968) and 34 metal vessels of gold, silver, and bronze (Künzl and Künzl 1992). Most were drinking vessels. Some are too small to have functioned as drinking, serving, or storage vessels and appear to have been purpose-made votives (Künzl and Künzl 1992: 284; Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 194). Others, however, are an appropriate size and shape to have functioned as vessels, and they lack votive inscriptions, suggesting that their dedicators used them as functional vessels before choosing to consecrate them in the spring at Aquae Apollinares. Among the objects found at Vicarello are the four silver beakers in the form of milestones (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 195–213, with further bibliography). The beakers range in height from 9.8 cm (Beaker IV) to 15.5 cm (Beaker 1) and in diameter from 6 cm (Beaker III) to 8 cm (Beaker I). The outer surface of each beaker is engraved with an itinerary extending overland from ancient Gades to Rome (CIL 11.3281–84). A list of stops along the route runs in four columns separated by attenuated Corinthian columns; Roman numerals indicate the distance between each stop. Each itinerary begins AD PORTV(M) and ends with ROMA (or ROMAE or ROMAM) (see Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 199–204 for tables

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Figure 7.3 Map showing the approximate route of the itineraries inscribed on the Vicarello milestone beakers. Source: Drawing by Evan Levine.

showing each itinerary). The itineraries coincide, at least generally, with the Via Augusta, the system of roads stretching from Gades to Rome that included the route through Iberia outlined by Strabo (3.4.9; Heurgon 1952: 40; Sillières 1977: 39). The beakers’ cylindrical form recalls the shapes of the milestones that punctuated the viae (or major roads) of the Roman Empire (on which see Kolb 2019, with further bibliography; Figure 7.4). Some scholars have seen a resemblance to the cippi that Roman officials sometimes dedicated to commemorate restorations of roads, such as those that appear on coins minted by L. Vinicius in 16 BCE to celebrate the restoration of the Via Flaminia under Augustus (Heurgon 1952: 41; Herrmann 2007: 148; for the coin of Vinicius see RIC 1, 68, no. 361; Figure 7.5). Like the beakers, these milestones and cippi bore inscriptions on their cylindrical bodies; the beakers’ combination of word and physical form therefore would likely have called to mind the empire’s omnipresent milestones for an ancient beholder. Although the four beakers clearly outline the same general route from Gades to Rome, their inscriptions are not identical. Beakers I–III, as they are conventionally numbered, are very similar, though not entirely so. Beakers II and III include, respectively, one or two more stops than Beaker I. Beakers I–III each include the same major stops in Hispania and Italy, such as Cordoba, Valencia, and Tarragona in Spain and Turin, Bologna, and Rimini in Italy, but in Gaul, Beaker II, unlike

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Figure 7.4 Milestone from the Via Augusta from Itálica to Emérita, ca. 117–137 CE. Seville Archaeological Museum. Source: Photograph by Carole Raddato.

Figure 7.5 Denarius issued by L. Vinicius, reverse showing an inscribed cippus. 16 BCE. Source: Photograph courtesy of the American Numismatic Society.

The Vicarello milestone beakers 119 Beaker I or III, omits Arles. There is also some variation in the stops between these major cities. The itinerary of Beaker IV covers a longer distance and names more and different stops. The discrepancies in itineraries might have resulted from the artists’ following different models (e.g., written itineraries) or following the same model with varying degrees of care (Chioffi 1997). The discrepancies have fueled debate about the beakers’ dating. Jacques Heurgon, in a seminal essay (Heurgon 1952), argues that Beakers I–III represent the route from Gades to Rome as it existed in the early years of Augustus’ reign, before the king and then prefect of the Ligurian tribes, Marcus Julius Cottius, rebuilt the Via Augusta over the Montgenèvre pass in 8 BCE (Amm. Marc. 15.10.2–11). For example, whereas Beaker III lists a station, SVMMASALPES, between Brigantium and Segusio (Briançon, France and Susa, Italy), Beaker IV lists instead INALPECOTTIA, indicating its production at a time when this region of the Alps had come to be known, as it still is today, by the name of Cottius; Heurgon suggests a Tiberian date (Heurgon 1952: 45). Luis Benítez de Lugo Enrich and colleagues have argued recently for a third- or fourth-century CE date for the beakers (Enrich et al. 2012), but such a late date is unlikely given that the vessels with which the beakers were discovered at Vicarello date primarily to the earlier imperial period and given Aquae Apollinares’ apparent fluorescence under Domitian. The beakers’ precise dating remains uncertain (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 207–8), but to my mind a date in the first half of the first century CE is most plausible (see Sillières 2016: 321–22). The beakers’ itineraries also raise questions about their location of manufacture. Pierre Herrmann, who sees in the beakers’ form a reference to round altars, has argued that the beakers were manufactured in Italy, where such altars were common (Herrmann 2007: 160–61). Manfred Schmidt, noting the attenuated Corinthian columns on each beaker, suggests that the round Corinthian temple to Hercules Victor in the Forum Boarium in Rome served as the model for the beakers (Schmidt 2011: 86). Yet the most outstanding, visually prominent features of the beakers are their cylindrical form and, most of all, their inscribed lists of places. This latter feature clearly evokes milestones and cippi, not round altars and certainly not the round temple on the Tiber. It is equally unlikely that somebody commissioned the beakers in Rome, given that the itineraries move from Gades to Rome and not from Rome to Gades. Gades is the most likely point of manufacture, as it is the starting point of each itinerary (Chioffi 1997). Hispania was well known in antiquity for its silver mines (Strabo 3.2.8; Diod. Sic. 5.35.1; Kay 2014: 43–54), so the beakers’ material might have linked them further to Gades. Possibly, the beakers reproduced a historical monument in Gades (Heurgon 1952: 41; Elsner 2000: 184–85), a sort of equivalent of Rome’s miliarium aureum or Golden Milestone, the gilded bronze monument in the form of a milestone that Augustus erected in the Forum to mark the point where all the empire’s road symbolically converged (Mari 1997). Benet Salway has argued that the beakers reproduce a tabellarium—or monumental inscribed list of stages along a road—in Gades (Salway 2001: 55). His argument is circular, however, as the only evidence for such a tabellarium in Gades is the beakers

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themselves. Ultimately, there is no archaeological evidence of a milestone, cippus, or tabellarium in Gades, and such a monument, even if it did exist, would have had to have been regularly updated to explain the discrepancies in the beakers’ itineraries (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 210). Such a monument may indeed have stood in Gades, in which case the beakers might have evoked it for some beholders. More plausibly, however, the beakers and their itineraries recalled the gist of Roman milestones—inscribed cylindrical markers—rather than faithfully reproducing a particular example (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 195).

Biographies of the milestone beakers In an influential essay, Igor Kopytoff advocated for a biographical approach to things, drawing attention to the rich interpretive potential of considering changes in status, movements through time and space, and shifting uses of objects—in short, of asking the questions of things that we would ask of people when writing a human, rather than an object, biography (Kopytoff 1986). As Kopytoff demonstrated, things vacillate between commoditization—becoming something with use value that can be exchanged for something else of equivalent value—and singularization—becoming something that is “priceless,” sacred, or otherwise removed from spheres of commodity exchange. The Vicarello milestone beakers are often discussed in terms of when they were made and when they were dedicated at Aquae Apollinares, but considering them in biographical terms helps flesh out their potential uses, statuses, and interactions with people before they were cast into the waters of Vicarello. Most specifics of any biography of the milestone beakers must remain speculative; as with many ancient objects, we simply do not know with certainty answers to basic questions such as who purchased and owned them, how their owners used them, and so on. However, we can suggest, generally, that the beakers’ lives in antiquity likely encompassed the following stages: manufacture in Spain, perhaps on commission; delivery to patron or purchase by an individual; use as part of a table service; journey to Italy, including potential use as drinking vessels en route; and ultimate dedication at Aquae Apollinares. These suggestions are conjectural but grounded in the history and economy of Spain and histories of travel and religious practice in the Roman Empire. Imbricated with these differing uses would have been changes in the social and cultural status of the beakers, statuses that could have ranged from elite display pieces to souvenirs and foreshadowers of travel to votive dedications. Adopting a biographical approach to the milestone beakers encourages us to consider how people might have interacted with them physically and imaginatively before their moment of dedication at Vicarello— interactions that could have stimulated FMTT and embodied various cognitive acts, as this chapter’s introduction intimated. The uniqueness, the material, the expense, and the particularity of the inscriptions of the beakers suggest that an individual or individuals might have commissioned them specially in Gades. Scholars have suggested that the vessels’ owner or owners were merchants from Gades who transported garam, salted fish, olive

The Vicarello milestone beakers 121 oil, or wine overland to Italy (Künzl and Künzl 1992: 282; Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 195–97, 206). Yet they are expensive, luxury objects, and their patron(s) or purchaser(s) must have commanded considerable means. Middling merchants are perhaps not the most plausible patrons. One thinks instead of a Roman official in Hispania Baetica or a member of the local elite who participated in local governance or in local metal-mining operations. The Roman Empire’s viae publicae— the major roads of highest quality—acted as an extraordinary stimulus for the Roman economy (Kolb 2019), and, indeed, the construction of the Via Augusta was likely motivated by Augustus’ desire to facilitate the transit of metal ores and thus increase the profit to be pulled from the mines of the Spanish provinces (Sillières 1977: 41). Mining silver in Roman Spain entailed huge operations, overseen by officials who usually hailed from imperial freedmen, the equestrian class, or military officers (Hirt 2010: 108; also Kay 2014: 45–53). We might imagine the milestone beakers commissioned by an individual who benefited economically from the improved road connection between Gades and Rome, perhaps an official responsible for a silver mine whose profits the Via Augusta had boosted and who would have had reason to travel occasionally to Rome for business.4 For such an individual, the material, form, and inscriptions of the beakers together could have celebrated the symbiotic relationship between the empire’s road network and its silver mines that motivated and sustained the empire’s dominion as far west as Gades. It is plausible that the beakers were commissioned as part of an elite table service (Chioffi 1997), such as those found at Boscoreale and in the House of Menander at Pompeii (Leader-Newby 2004: 73–74) or depicted in the wall painting of a silver service from the tomb of Gaius Vestorius Priscus at Pompeii (Avisseau-Broustet, Colonna, and Lapatin 2014: 44–45, fig. 25). Drinking vessels such as the elaborate silver canthari from the Berthouville treasure were designed for use at banquets but also for display on other occasions. The engraved itineraries of the Vicarello beakers differ from the mythological or sacro-idyllic iconography of many surviving Roman silver drinking vessels, but, like such iconography (on which see Avisseau-Broustet, Colonna, and Lapatin 2014: 41–45), they would have redounded on their owner’s wealth and culture and, in this case, connections to Rome. The milestone beakers may have been used in Gades or a nearby town or villa during social occasions, acting simultaneously as displays of their owner’s status and as conversation starters during meals. If Beaker IV is indeed later in date than its companions, it might have been commissioned as a replacement for an earlier, damaged beaker. It is also possible, given the variations between the beakers, that they were produced individually—perhaps based on a shared model—and only later acquired by a single owner. In either scenario, if used at banquets, the beakers would have likely undergone the processes of singularization that Kopytoff describes, transforming from commodities that had been purchased in exchange for money into items subject to more personal valuations determined by social dynamics and performances of identities—though also, somewhat paradoxically, by their high exchange value as commodities (on these “seeming paradoxes of value” see Kopytoff 1986: 82).

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At some point, the beakers’ owner, whether that be the original patron or somebody to whom the beakers had been bequeathed, decided to undertake a journey to Italy and to bring the beakers with him. I think it likely that the same individual brought all four beakers to Italy and dedicated them at Vicarello; it seems implausible that different individuals would separately bring such distinctive beakers on different occasions to Aquae Apollinares. I also doubt that Aquae Apollinares was the intended destination when the beakers’ owner set forth from Spain. Rome was probably the goal, and only after arriving at Rome did the owner decide to travel to Vicarello and dedicate his vessels. The distance from Gades, the empire’s westernmost extremity, to Rome was great (see Figure 7.3). The itineraries covered on the milestone beakers cover a distance of 1,829 Roman miles (Künzl and Künzl 1992: 282). According to a riddle preserved in the Greek Anthology (14.121), the journey was approximately 30,000 stades, or 5,400 kilometers, although this seems a clear exaggeration. Depending on whether one opted for a leisurely or more bruising pace, such a journey by land would have taken anywhere from six weeks to four months (see Laurence 1999: 81–82 on the speed of travel). The act of choosing to bring the beakers on such a long journey speaks, in and of itself, to the personal value the vessels had accrued by this point in their biographies. The beakers’ owner would have had ample time to use and admire them en route to Italy, if desired. Presumably, the beakers were packed with care before commencing their journey, but one can imagine the beakers’ owner then unpacking the vessels periodically at stops listed on the itineraries, imbibing from them, conversing about their engraved routes, perhaps even pointing out on the lists the way station at which the owner found himself in the moment. Once in Rome, the beakers’ owner chose to visit Aquae Apollinares. Some scholars have suggested that the sanctuary at Vicarello came under Domitian’s control (Colini 1967–1968: 50; Künzl and Künzl 1992: 280);5 perhaps, depending on the owner’s status and connections, he stayed at Vicarello as a guest of the emperor himself. In such a scenario, the milestone beakers could have functioned as status symbols, as it were, fulfilling rhetorical and social and therefore political uses to which luxury goods are often put (see Appadurai 1986a: 38). Ultimately, the owner chose to dedicate the beakers, in thanks or in anticipation of an occurrence lost to history, thereby transforming the function of the vessels once more, to that of votive dedications. In depositing the beakers in the sacred spring at Aquae Apollinares, the beakers’ owner removed them from the sphere of exchange among humans—in which we generally think commodities exist—but simultaneously entered them into the sphere of exchange between gods and mortals, leaving open expectations for the gods to grant future requests and favors (on which see Swetnam-Burland, this volume).

Mental time travel While many of the uses of and interactions with the beakers described in the preceding section must remain speculative, in all instances the vessels—through their form and inscribed lists—evoked milestones and travel, past, present, and

The Vicarello milestone beakers 123 future. Thinking about these beakers with cognitive theories of mental time travel, especially future-oriented mental time travel, allows us to recognize and scrutinize the beakers’ prospective impact before their ultimate dedication in the waters of Aquae Apollinares. In particular, the beakers’ inscriptions would have implicated modes of future thinking. As scholars have noted since the beakers’ discovery, the inscribed lists emulate Roman itineraria. Itineraria were written accounts of terrestrial routes often constituted by a list of places with the distance between them, though sometimes including more colorful descriptions of attractions along the routes in question (Elsner 2000: 184; Brodersen 2001; Salway 2001). The itinerarium and its maritime counterpart, the periplus, were familiar genres in the Roman Empire, and itineraria were readily available that gave routes along the cursus publicus, indicating the locations of inns and hostels (Casson 1994: 186). While written itineraries were likely the most common, pictorial itineraries such as the Peutinger Tablet also existed. Like the Antonine Itinerary, the inscriptions on the milestone beakers list the names of stations along a route, as well as the distance between each station. There is little disagreement that the milestone beakers’ inscriptions emulate itineraria, but just what the itineraries represent is debated. Some have interpreted the inscriptions as relating to pilgrimage to Vicarello (Marchi 1852). The beakers do not list Aquae Apollinares, however, and it is unlikely that they represented a route terminating at a site left unnamed by their itineraries. Others have suggested that an individual commissioned the beakers in Rome and dedicated them at Vicarello to ensure a safe return to Spain. Yet it is equally unlikely that somebody would have commissioned them to ensure safe travels from Rome to Gades when the itineraries proceed from Gades to Rome. For the same reason, it is unlikely that the beakers commemorate a pilgrimage journey to Gades and its famous temple to Hercules (on which see Fear 2005). Another Herculean suggestion is that the beakers represent not a historical Roman road but rather the mythological hodos Herakleia or via Herculis, the route along which Hercules drove the cattle of Geryon from Iberia to Rome. In this reading, the beakers represent a proverbial symbol of a lengthy journey, an individual’s attempt “to grasp the immense mythical distance [between Gades and Rome] by means of exact measurement” (Schmidt 2011: quotation at 86). It is difficult to explain why an individual would have commissioned or otherwise acquired four beakers all referring to the via Herculis but with varying itineraries. While the beakers might have evoked for some beholders the labors of Hercules, the itineraries on the beakers appear to correspond to a real Roman road, in fact one of the most significant roads in Roman Spain (see Enrich et al. 2012). Their similarity to other surviving itineraria from the Roman Empire suggests that they most overtly reference that genre of travel writing rather than the tenth labor of Hercules. A more attractive interpretation is that a Spanish workshop manufactured the beakers, either on spec or on commission, to capitalize on feelings of enthusiasm aroused by the building or restoration of the road system linking Rome to Gades (Heurgon 1952), perhaps somebody who benefited economically from that road

124 Maggie L. Popkin network, as I suggested earlier. Richard Talbert has argued that Roman portable sundials reflect an individual owner’s fascination with this time-telling technology (Talbert 2017: 153), and it is possible that the silver milestone beakers reflect an individual’s similar fascination with and admiration of the empire’s viae. Such fascination may not, in fact, have been limited to one individual; if the beakers were displayed at banquets and other occasions, they might have spoken to a shared appreciation of Rome’s roads among their owner’s socioeconomic peers. If a monument in Gades marked this restoration, for some beholders the beakers could have evoked that monument. For others, the beakers would have readily called to mind Roman roads and the itineraries that allowed people to navigate them. This scenario also best explains the itineraries’ terminus—Rome—to which the imperial road system ultimately led from the Iberian peninsula. Because the beakers’ inscriptions appear so closely linked to Roman itineraries, many have postulated that their owner or owners actually used them as practical wayfinding devices as they traveled from Gades to Rome (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 194). I find this interpretation too literal. An itinerarium written on a tablet, papyrus, or parchment would have been more easily consulted than the expensive silver vessels, which were likely packed with care to protect them from damage during a journey. The cost of the beakers—much greater than a tablet, parchment, or papyrus—also speaks against viewing them as merely practical; these were special objects meant to imbue a certain aura of prestige to their owner or owners. Rather than representing or commemorating places for purposes of wayfinding, the beakers embody the very idea of travel. Even at the time of their purchase, the beakers’ owner or owners may have had travel in mind, physically marking a desire or intention to travel to Italy in the future. The act of purchasing, in such an instance, would have embodied intention or desire, potentially quite flexible, in a manner similar to inscribing a graffito of a birthdate in the open-ended hope of a long and successful life for your child, as Molly Swetnam-Burland argues in this volume. During their subsequent potential uses as drinking vessels first in Gades and then on the long trip from Spain to Italy, the beakers would have had multiple opportunities to stimulate thinking about travel, not only by their owner but also potentially by other people who beheld and conversed about them. When used for imbibing at stations along the road from Gades to Rome, the beakers would then have called to mind passage along both the physical route as well as the engraved itinerary. On one hand, the beakers’ itineraries would have come to commemorate past travel. Once the beakers left Gades, they could commemorate their owner’s retrospective experiences in and of that city. And as their owner progressed along the route to Rome, each way station achieved then became a place the owner had experienced in his past. As milestones themselves marked travel along the empire’s roads, so too the beakers and their itineraries could mark their owner’s movement through time and space, along a route that became increasingly subsumed into the owner’s retrospective memory as he moved farther from Gades and closer to Rome. There is a certain self-reflexive aspect to the beakers as objects that, in the form of milestones, passed by actual milestones along the Via Augusta and

The Vicarello milestone beakers 125 transformed into markers of the act of travel itself. The beakers also, of course, embodied their owner’s movement in the present, along the journey to Italy. On the other hand, the milestone beakers also embodied future progress and movement. As a genre, itineraria were, for many Romans, oriented to the future. This future-thinking valence is suggested by a passage in Vegetius’ De re militari, in which he writes that a successful general should have detailed itineraries of the area in which he is campaigning, so that he may learn the distances between places in terms of the number of miles and the quality of roads, and examine short-cuts, by-ways, mountains and rivers, accurately described. Indeed, the more conscientious generals reportedly had itineraries of the provinces in which the emergency occurred not just annotated but illustrated as well, so that they could choose their route when setting out by the visual aspect as well as by mental calculation. (3.6; translation by Milner 1993: 73) In this military context, an itinerary is a vital tool for envisioning routes to be taken and strategies to be employed in the future; it helps the general mentally simulate future scenarios, predict future outcomes of his campaign, set intentions of desired outcomes, and plan steps to achieve those goals. Vegetius further suggests the visual aspect of mental renderings as critical to planning future action. In his account, an itinerary is explicitly a technology of imaginative prospection—of mentally rendering future experience and action—that engaged all four modes of future thinking described by Szpunar and colleagues. Perhaps the best-known Roman itinerarium, the Antonine Itinerary, similarly could help its users envision future scenarios—not necessarily military exploits, but travels undertaken for business or leisure. The Antonine Itinerary consists of a series of shorter itineraries generally thought to have been compiled sometime in the third century. As Shawn Graham has argued, the compiled itineraries “are not simple lists: they are records of journeys, both real and potential, across the vast landscape of the Roman Empire” (Graham 2006: 47, emphasis added). The Antonine Itinerary conceives of both the empire as a broad entity and smaller regions within it as places connected via each other. To reach point D from point A, one had to transit through points B and C. This method of travel or, more accurately, of conceptualizing travel, required a person embarking on a journey to contemplate any potential roadblocks that would make point B impassable and thus jeopardize the entire journey. Graham characterizes as “fragmentation” “anything which could create the perception (whether accurate or not) that a particular route was blocked, that a link in the chain was broken” (Graham 2006: 51; emphasis in original). His notion of fragmentation, however—indeed, the very conception of travel implied by the listing of settlements as links in a chain of potential travel—relies on future thinking. One must have been able to simulate one’s route and then to simulate potential disruptions. As one mentally moved along an itinerary, one would have traveled, again mentally, along the route one planned to travel in person in the future. Romans viewed “large-scale geographical space . . . as a list, of what-comes-next” (Graham

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2006: 46). The Antonine Itinerary and other Roman itineraria were inherently future-oriented, focused, in Graham’s words, on what came next. Many Romans would, therefore, have been culturally conditioned to view written itineraries as tools of prospection. In a seminal article, Andy Clarke and David Chalmers supported their argument that the mind extends beyond the brain and body with the example of Otto’s notebook (Clark and Chalmers 1998; see Popkin and Ng, this volume). Otto, a man with Alzheimer’s disease, writes down in a notebook the information a person without the disease would store in their memory; writing in the notebook is the cognitive equivalent for Otto of remembering. As memory is part of our minds, Otto’s mind thus extends beyond his body to include the notebook, which enables him to recall information and thus perform various actions in the world. One could argue that the act of writing down a route in antiquity was an instance of cognitive “off-loading”—a metacognitive tool that removes some of the burden of cognition from the human brain to the environment—that is by definition prospective and imaginative (Bulley 2018: 85). The presence of such an itinerary on the Vicarello milestone beakers could then have elicited future-oriented time travel, in which a beholder mentally simulated his or her future travels. Talbert has observed that owners of portable sundials inscribed with geographical names or latitude figures expected or hoped to travel. Even if the owner never actually traveled, “a geographical portable sundial could still be a cherished personal possession, a handy manifestation of plans and dreams” (Talbert 2017: 160). The milestone beakers too could have manifested plans for future travel. I would suggest that the beakers, with their detailed and quasi-practical itineraries, might have embodied intentions for more targeted, geographically specific travel. Whereas geographical portable sundials most commonly name provinces—that is, large regional blocks positioned in relation to Italy—the beakers list detailed stops and distances and thus provide a more concrete scaffold, as it were, for future thinking about travel yet to occur. At the same time, however, they too might have evoked visions of travel that would have remained desired but unfulfilled. They might have incited anticipation—a more affective aspect of simulation—and elicited emotional longings for future travel. As the Vicarello beakers moved through time-space, they enmeshed retrospective memory and future thinking, accumulating memories of travel accomplished and stimulating new visions of future travel. And as the beakers’ owner acquired new memories of past experience, they would have been able to imagine the future in new ways. As cognitive research and neural imaging studies demonstrate, episodic or autobiographical memory, imagination, and prospection are intimately connected. Our ability to imagine the future—to create mental simulations of future scenarios and events and to predict, set intentions, and plan based on those simulations—is, neurologically speaking, intimately intertwined with our ability to remember the past (Schacter and Addis 2007; Perrin and Michaelian 2017; Addis 2020). While the idea that episodic memory is linked to future thinking has become widely accepted over the past 15 years, Donna Rose Addis has recently gone even further, arguing that memory, imagination, and even perception are

The Vicarello milestone beakers 127 part of a single neurocognitive system, which she terms the “simulation system.” Remembering and imagining the future both draw on elements of experience that we glean from sensory perception and generate internally from information and schemas that we acquire as social(ized) beings (Addis 2018; Addis 2020). Thus, just as the milestone beakers shifted in status between commoditized and singularized objects, they also oscillated in terms of the directionality of memory. They could drift from retrospective mementoes commemorating places already visited and travel already undertaken to vessels generating conceptions of future travel and embodying their owner’s intent to travel. As Ray Laurence has argued, Roman itineraries do not map space so much as they conceive of journeying through it (Laurence 1999: 86). The beakers capitalized on the cultural valences of milestones and itineraria to embody both past progress and future movement, encouraging their beholders to imagine or mentally simulate upcoming travels and experiences, whether along the route delineated in the itineraries or generically. In evoking future travel through the distinctive cultural inflections of Roman milestones and itineraria, however, the Vicarello beakers did not simply evoke future travel generally, whether one imagined travel through the list of inscribed towns or elsewhere. They more specifically invited their beholders to imagine their travels along a Roman itinerary, that is, one made possible by the road network of the Roman Empire. Geographical knowledge and imperial dominion went hand in hand in ancient Rome, where itineraries and maps enabled a “satisfying sense of possession and control” (Talbert 2017: 157–58).6 The itineraries might have evoked Hercules’ tenth labor, but if they did so, they transposed that mythical voyage onto a very modern network of imperial roads that stretched from the Iberian peninsula to the capital city. The beakers, therefore, might have incited imaginings of poetic wandering but more likely evoked visions of ordered, regulated, protected travel: an imaginative scenario made possible by the emperor and imperial bureaucracy of Rome. The coin of Vinicius mentioned earlier (Figure 7.5), which depicts a cippus on the reverse and a portrait of Augustus on the obverse, lays bare the connection between the emperor as head of the Roman state and the construction and maintenance of roads. At their moment of manufacture and purchase and at subsequent moments of display and use, the Vicarello beakers connected Gades to Rome. They materialized the transformation of the Phoenician city of Gaddir and its temple to the Phoenician god Melquart into Roman Gades, whose temple (now to Hercules) gave the via Herculis its name (Fear 2005). They placed the Iberian city and its province in Rome’s orbit and thus implicated their beholders in imaginatively enacting the power of the Roman Empire and its bureaucracy and infrastructure.

Embodied prospection, embodied possession If, as observed earlier, geographical knowledge and imperial power were intertwined in the Roman world, the Vicarello milestone beakers and other geographically oriented objects such as portable sundials brought that power, literally, within the grasp of individual owners. Large-scale public maps and similar monuments,

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such as the so-called map of Agrippa erected in the Porticus Vipsania in Rome, enabled Roman citizens to participate vicariously in Rome’s imperial project; they were, as Andy Merrills has argued, “works for public consumption, not private contemplation” (Merrills 2017: 67). The milestone beakers, however, personalized such geographic possession. Merrills has recently argued that objects with itineraries such as the Vicarello beakers and a series of small copper-alloy pans schematically depicting Hadrian’s Wall and listing forts along the Wall were “less symbolically resonant” than public geographical monuments (Merrills 2017: 202; on the Hadrian’s Wall pans, see Breeze 2012b). Their symbolism may have been less sweeping and certainly less top-down or propagandistic, but it was more personal and more directly, physically interactive. They elicited mental renderings of past and future experience in a manner that was, in fact, not purely mental or representational but also embodied and enactive. Possessing—holding—the beakers helped them perform certain cognitive work. Put another way, the meanings that the milestone beakers could make (or that their owners could make with them) resulted in part from the body and sensory receptors of the vessels’ beholders and in part from interactions between person and thing. As Clark has put it, “The human mind, viewed through this special lens [of embodiment, action, and cognitive extension], emerges at the productive interface of brain, body, and social and material world” (Clark 2008: 218–19; see Popkin and Ng, this volume). The milestone beakers invited, even demanded, physical interaction that impacted their status as cognitive aids and their ability to evoke mental renderings of remembered past experience or imagined future experience. As functional beakers, they were designed to be held in a person’s hands. In order to appreciate the full extent of the inscribed itineraries, however, that same person would have had to turn the vessel around in his or her hands.7 From a single, stationary viewpoint, such as the viewpoint to which one is relegated when viewing the beakers today in a museum, the itinerary on one of the milestone beakers would have appeared only partially. To get all the way from Gades to Rome, one must rotate the beaker. The beakers, therefore, required their beholder to manipulate them physically; the beholder had to activate his or her body, and bodily movement as well as mental rendering was essential to their beholder’s cognition. Not incidentally, the same physical manipulation was necessary to read the full lists of forts on the Hadrian’s Wall pans (Figure 7.6), which were inscribed around the pans’ shoulder (Popkin forthcoming). Such objects took advantage of their circular shape to force their beholders to move—both the beholders’ body and the vessel—in order to see, feel, and possess the sites listed. As the Vicarello milestone beakers invited this physical manipulation, they would have stimulated further sensorial interaction. If used to consume wine, for example, the milestone beakers would have appealed to senses of smell and taste. The route in the inscribed itineraries would have come beneath one’s eyes and fingers whenever a person grasped the beakers. One could trace with one’s fingers the stops along the route, feeling the shallow but still tangible three-dimensionality of the inscribed letters and numbers. A journey—whether one ongoing, imminent, or simply imagined—emerged not only visually but also tactilely. A native of Roman Spain traveling

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Figure 7.6 Replica of the Rudge Cup, Roman Britain, second century CE. Source: Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

to Italy might even have retraced the route back from Rome to Gades, imagining his future return home. Such tactile engagement also would have emphasized the status of each beaker as a material, physical thing that could become a tangible offering to a god, thus potentially stimulating thinking and intention-setting about a future act of dedication, an intention that was, we know, ultimately fulfilled.

Conclusion Scholarship has tended to focus on the afterlives of ancient dedications—that is, everything that follows the moment of dedication—whether reused as spolia or appropriated into new cultural contexts.8 The objects of such studies are works that remained visible after their dedication, and whose power scholars therefore frame as residing in visible modifications to their appearance or changes in their context and use. Even studies that examine objects deposited out of sight in sanctuaries most often consider their impact after dedication. In an interesting recent essay, for example, Katharina Rieger (Rieger 2016) has argued that pottery used in cultic meals or deposited as votive offerings in sanctuaries continued to function as agents after being buried or otherwise removed from sight, constructing places as sacred. Jessica Hughes focuses on how repurposed dedications allowed individuals to create rich “personal narratives of healing and transformation” through and after the moment of dedication (Hughes 2017). But what of the lives of these objects before acts of dedication transformed them into votives? As this chapter has demonstrated, the Vicarello milestone beakers, although they ultimately became votive objects, lived rich lives and exerted an extraordinary impact on imagination and prospection before their owner dedicated them in the waters of Aquae Apollinares. The milestone beakers are but one case

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study, yet they are hardly the only votive objects in antiquity that served various functions before being dedicated in sanctuaries. Numerous epigrams from the Greek Anthology, for example, describe people dedicating personal belongings to the gods, whether it be a courtesan dedicating her mirror to Aphrodite or tradesmen dedicating their tools to Athena or Poseidon upon their retirement (Anth. Pal. 6.1, 6.23, 6.24, 6.35, 6.64; Hughes 2017: 187–88). They were what Snodgrass (1989–1990) has called “raw” votives or what others have described as repurposed dedications (Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 194). Still other objects, related to one’s profession or not, could transform into votive objects. The so-called Bath Pan, for example, is a small copper-alloy trulla, or pan with handle, found at Aquae Sulis (modern Bath, England), where it had been dedicated in the Sacred Spring (Breeze 2012a: 6–7). The Bath Pan belongs to the series of trullae manufactured in Roman Britain that bear a mural motif representing Hadrian’s Wall, mentioned earlier. These pans appear to have been sold as souvenirs of Hadrian’s Wall, mementoes that could recall one’s military service on the Wall or one’s visit to this massive fortification marking the limit of the Roman Empire. Yet, at a certain point, the Bath Pan’s owner embodied his intent to transform his souvenir into a votive offering by punching a dedicatory inscription on the pan’s handle (Figure 7.7). The Bath Pan thus commemorated a

Figure 7.7 Copper-alloy pan from the Sacred Spring at Aquae Sulis (Bath), Roman Britain, second century CE. The Roman Baths, Bath. Source: Photograph courtesy of Bath and North East Somerset Council.

The Vicarello milestone beakers 131 place visited in the past, generated a conception of ritual activity to take place in the future, and, once inscribed, embodied its owner’s intent to deposit it at Aquae Sulis. Other ancient souvenirs, such as the glass flasks engraved with scenes of the Campanian resort towns of Baiae and Puteoli, could likewise transform into votive offerings; one example has been found in a deposit of materials at the Capitolium of ancient Brixia (Brescia, Italy) (Roffia 2002; Popkin 2018). The elaborate silver canthari from the Berthouville Treasure were designed for use at banquets and for display at other occasions, but, beyond their functional uses as drinking vessels, they seemingly became heirlooms, eventually brought from Italy, where they were produced, to Gaul, where a certain Quintius Domitius Tutus dedicated them in the Gallo-Roman sanctuary at Berthouville (Lapatin 2014). Similarly, the splendid silver goblet from the same deposit at Vicarello as the milestone beakers, today in Cleveland, likewise was probably used as part of a luxurious table service before its owner dedicated it at Aquae Apollinares (Cooney 1967; Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 245–50). Repurposed votives, whether humble tools of trade or luxurious table silver, lived long lives before their dedication. By the time Heliodorus dedicated his fishing net to the Syrian Goddess (Anth. Pal. 6.24), it was “worn out”; the net’s transformation into a religious offering was but one station in the object’s biography. As Hughes (2017: 194) has noted, repurposed votives could be objects that the dedicator had owned for a long time and that could have formed part of the dedicator’s individual identity beyond their visit to and actions within a sanctuary. The same might hold true for objects not connected closely to one’s profession. The time an owner spent with any of these objects would likely have created more intimate connections between person and thing, thereby increasing the objects’ personal value. As the items became more treasured by their owner, it would have become a greater personal sacrifice to relinquish them, making them arguably more valuable offerings to the gods than more monetarily expensive objects that carried less personal significance. The approach adopted here toward the Vicarello milestone beakers would, I believe, yield fruitful results if applied to any of these other objects, revealing their ability to stimulate mental time travel over the course of their object biographies. Considering such objects through the lens of theories of future thinking reveals how they acted as participants in cognitive processes, enabling people to think with and through them about travel, ritual action, and personal experience—past, present, and future. As they elicited mental time travel, not just retrospective but prospective as well, en route to their ultimate dedication, these objects in turn shaped how Romans imagined and remembered travel and ritual beyond the geographic and temporal bounds of individual journeys and visits to sanctuaries.

Notes 1 I presented initial aspects of this research at a joint Archaeological Institute of America-Society for Classical Studies colloquium I organized in January 2019. My fellow speakers—Susan Ludi Blevins, Jacob A. Latham, Diana Y. Ng, Eric Orlin, and Aaron

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Seider—as well as many audience members, offered stimulating feedback. At a later stage, Tom Carpenter, Matthew Ellis, Dillon Gisch, Lynne Lancaster, Rebecca Levitan, Avinoam Shalem, and Lindsay Sheedy all read an initial draft of this chapter; their incisive and thoughtful comments led to a radical and (in retrospect!) necessary transformation of the chapter. I am additionally grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Routledge for their careful suggestions. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Diana Y. Ng, coeditor extraordinaire, whose generous and deep engagement with my ideas has improved them infinitely. See, e.g., Matthews 2006 on Theophanes and Talbert 2010 on the Peutinger Tablet. Museo Nazionale Romano, inventory numbers 67497–67500. See Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 195–213 for a detailed overview of the beakers themselves as well as of previous scholarship. This chapter was completed before Kimberly Cassibry’s book, Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire’s Souvenirs (Oxford University Press, 2021), was published. I regret that I have therefore been unable to reference her discussion of the Vicarello milestone beakers. Chioffi (1997) has suggested the owners of the milestone beakers might have been linked to the imperial house. Yet she also believes the beakers were manufactured in Gades, and she does not quite reconcile how they were produced at Gades and ended up as part of the imperial house’s property at Vicarello. See also Falkenstein-Wirth 2011: 61, who notes that a paved street offered a direct connection, a sort of private way, between the villa and the sanctuary. A desire to emphasize the Roman character of travel along the empire’s roads may have inspired the beakers’ makers or patrons to emulate land itineraria, which appear to have been a Roman phenomenon, rather than maritime periploi, which had a long Greek pedigree. For a similar point regarding glass vessels engraved with scenes of the Campanian cities of Puteoli and Baiae, see Popkin 2018: 455. See, e.g., Swetnam-Burland 2015a; Kousser 2017; Ng and Swetnam-Burland 2018. These studies owe a debt to Appadurai 1986b. They are undeniably provocative and fruitful but leave open questions about what objects did before their dedication.

8

Ancestors, martyrs, and fourth-century gold glass A case of metaintentions Susan Ludi Blevins

Introduction For approximately 40 years in Rome, in the second half of the fourth century CE, various individuals repurposed the bases of gold glass vessels by embedding them in the cement or plaster sealing loculi (or niches for burial) in the city’s catacombs.1 Such instances of reuse were not isolated incidents; hundreds of people engaged in this practice, to the extent that, in much scholarship today, gold glass is synonymous with Roman catacombs. Fragments of hundreds of cut and incised sandwich gold glass vessels survive in the material record, most found—or at least presumed to have been found—in the catacombs of Rome that were most active in the second through fourth centuries CE.2 The vessels still in situ and those that were excavated with proper documentation show that the original gold glass vessels were shorn of their glass walls, leaving only the circular base to be inserted into the loculi. These examples also show that the broken edges around the base were usually left jagged, indicating the break, rather than smooth. Family members of the deceased then pressed these broken-off bases into the plaster or cement that sealed the thousands of loculi stacked one over another throughout catacomb corridors. Scholars have proposed a range of plausible interpretations for this reuse, or redeployment, of the vessel bases in the catacombs. Some have argued that gold glasses acted as tomb markers, beacons to help devout family members identify the tomb of a loved one among the dark corridors of the subterranean catacombs (see, for example, Harden 1987). Others have suggested that the gold glasses were apotropaic, protecting the deceased from evil (Eisen 1919). Hallie Meredith (2015) has persuasively argued that gold glasses shaped ritual space in the catacombs, using marital and Christian iconography to create a space in which the bereaved could honor family bonds within the greater Christian community. Yet such interpretations do not adequately explain the sustained practice of repurposing gold glass vessel bases in the catacombs rather than adorning loculi with purpose-made objects displaying similar iconography or choosing objects such as coins and shells as a matter of happenstance (see Bisconti 2002: 79–80 on the range of objects found embedded in catacombs). An object newly commissioned or purchased to decorate a burial place ostensibly could have fulfilled a function as beacon, DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-8

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apotropaion, or iconographic referent to marriage or Christianity as successfully as a reused gold glass base, without having to damage an already-existing vessel.3 I argue in this chapter that theories of prospective memory and metaintentions help us understand why so many Romans in the second half of the fourth century chose to break and repurpose gold glass vessels as adornment in the city’s catacombs. This framework enables us to see the connection between the object’s use prior to its insertion into the catacombs and its use once embedded in the loculus. Specifically, I argue that early Christian Romans intentionally sought to guide how people would behave and remember an individual in future times, through the use and reuse of gold glass vessels. People purchased, used, and displayed gold glass vessels in their lives with the intention of reusing them in the catacombs as mnemonic cues that would condition modes of remembrance. After briefly introducing my theoretical cognitive framework, I advance two main claims: 1) that members of Rome’s Christian population repurposed gold glass vessels to create a material link between the pious life of the deceased and how the deceased would be remembered in the future by visitors through interactions afforded by the repurposed gold glass and 2) during a time of blurred boundaries between ancestor worship for the ordinary dead and veneration of martyrs at the saints’ tombs and shrines, Rome’s Christian population used the visual properties of gold glasses, which evoked nascent martyr cults, intentionally to set the stage for ancestor worship in the future as conditioned by martyr veneration. Thinking through the practice of repurposing gold glasses in terms of prospection and intentionality helps explain their reuse in the catacombs, for it helps us understand how the earlier use of the objects gave them the power to signify and shape experience in the catacombs in ways that would have eluded purpose-made objects.

Intentions, goals, and future thinking As Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng lay out in this volume’s Introduction, cognitive scientists define prospective memory as the intention to perform a planned action or to recall a planned intention in the future. Prospective memory—or remembering to remember—intrinsically involves metacognitive practices, that is, thinking about thinking. The theory of metaintentions concerns both how we consciously think about and reflect on an intention that we must later remember and how we recall or are aware of our original intention at the time we perform the planned action. After all, we often formulate intentions to remember something in the future but then experience an interim period in which that intention leaves our consciousness (referred to as the “delay interval”). We thus require a mechanism at the time of retrieval (the “performance interval”) for remembering that we set an intention in the first place (Smith 2016: 223–24). Prospective memory processes straddle temporalities to include both the forward-looking conscious awareness at the time an intention is formed that an action is to be performed in the future and the awareness at the time of performance of the past intention and its content (Smith 2016: 220; Cohen and Hicks 2017: 84–88). The longer the time period between the formulation of the prospective intention and the fulfillment of that

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intention, the more critical environmental cues or mnemonic supports become to remembering successfully to perform the intended action (Smith 2016: 220; Cohen and Hicks 2017: 7). Intentions perform many cognitive functions, the most important of which may be that they allow us to become planning, future-oriented agents. Once formed, intentions commit us to future action (and to remembering to perform that future action). Thus, they make the future more predictable, in addition to making it possible to coordinate our activities over time and with the activities of others. Of particular relevance for this chapter, intentions not only function pragmatically— for example, they allow us more efficiently to coordinate joint actions with others and act collaboratively to accomplish desired goals—but also epistemically—that is, they embody a form of self-knowledge and can contribute to the production of shared knowledge (Pacheri 2016: 1174). Put another way, collective knowledge results from the sharing and alignment of numerous individual mental representations of a future goal that is required to form coordinated intentions with others (see chapters by Orlin and Seider, this volume, on collective knowledge shaping perceptions of the future). In her work on metaintentions, Rebekah Smith ties mnemonic cues such as those located in our environments to the coordination of joint action among individuals and to the production of shared knowledge. Smith has demonstrated that the creation of mnemonic cues for the future forces us to think about the future intended action, requiring a mental representation of the future goal, in order to ensure its successful completion (Smith 2016: 225). Metaintentions, referring to this thinking about intentions, along with various other prospective memory processes, are therefore controlled cognitive processes, as opposed to automatic; that is, an individual intentionally controls and is consciously aware of his or her prospective intentions. However, controlled cognitive processes require effort and are constrained by the capacity of attentional resources available in a given moment. Because they require additional cognitive resources, they are more likely to fail than automatic cognitive processes, such as recognizing a face, which occur involuntarily. To focus the discussion on prospective memory, we would say that an individual is more likely to fail to remember the original intention and correctly perform the intended action during the performance interval due to high cognitive loads. One way to increase the probability of successful prospective memory performance is to implement mnemonic cues triggered during the performance interval and resulting from the reflection on intentions in the future. As a simple example of a mnemonic cue, in the morning someone might form an intention to call their mother for her birthday later in the day and tie a string around their finger to remember. The string triggers a memory to do something, but there is still a necessity to remember retrospectively the original intention: to make the call. If one looks at the string and cannot remember what it signifies, then there is a prospective memory failure. Thus when the intention is formed it is encoded—or registered in memory—and it is to that intention that people must return when executing the action in the future to ensure a successful prospective memory.

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Mnemonic cues increase the success of prospective processes in two ways: by offloading cognitive tasks to external scaffolds and lightening the cognitive load and, more important for purposes of this chapter, by forcing us to think about the action as intended (Smith 2016: 225; see also Brewer et al. 2011; Cohen and Hicks 2017: 8). Moreover, mnemonic cues in the environment are crucial to controlling future uncertainty by creating a cognitive environment in which the inputs or prompts crucial to fulfilling one’s intention are available when most needed and effective (Clark 2016: 7).

Connecting life and death As mentioned previously, early Christians who reused cut and incised gold glass vessels in their catacomb burials usually left the broken edges of the discs jagged, visibly signifying clearly to any viewer that the disc had been broken from a larger vessel, that is, that it came from an object that had a before-life. Some gold glass bases have smoothed and trimmed edges, which might suggest that they were not used as part of vessels prior to decorating the catacombs. However, these smooth-edged discs are in the minority, and it is possible that some families who embedded them in the catacombs desired a medallion-like appearance or that gold glass bases were smoothed and trimmed after rediscovery in the Early Modern period.4 Examples of gold glass bases with clearly visible parts of vessel walls survive in numerous museum collections, as do large wall fragments of cut and incised diminutive medallion studded bowls, such as the St. Severin bowl in the British Museum.5 It appears that, like the Vicarello milestone beakers that Popkin discusses in this volume, the gold glass discs in the catacombs had been used before their present circumstances, and their physical appearance often made this prior use visible to any visitors to the catacombs. Even in cases in which the edges were smoothed before affixing to the tomb, visitors to the tomb such as family members would have been acutely aware of the objects’ prior associations. While I do not claim that individuals of every religious identity behaved in a ritually prescribed manner or according to a defined set of actions with respect to gold glass bases, there does seem to have been a significant phenomenon of reuse of gold glass vessels by Rome’s Christian community. Yet it is precisely this broad phenomenon, even if it did not obtain for gold glasses of all religious iconography and from all findspot contexts, that requires further investigation: we need to think more about why people in Rome chose to make visible—arguably even to emphasize—the earlier life of gold glass discs as part of complete vessels (Howells 2015: 25). To create these wide, shallow vessels, artisans affixed a thin layer of gold, in which they incised the final design, to a circular, flat, base pad between 5–12 cm in diameter. Glassblowers then crafted the vessel walls from a domed, blown-glass bubble attached to and sealing the gold-adorned base pad (see Howells 2015: 41–52 on the manufacturing technique of cut and incised gold glasses). Once cooled the artist removed the moil (or excess glass attached to the blowpipe) leaving intact the walls of a wide, shallow vessel.

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It is also important to note that the objects discussed herein are all cut and incised sandwich gold glasses, many of which had a ring-foot and derive their name from the gold leaf design sandwiched between multiple layers of glass to form the base. Such vessels may be distinguished by technique and chronology from diminutive medallion-studded vessels, gilded plaques that were very clearly never part of a vessel, and brushed gold glasses with their stunningly naturalistic portraits of individuals and iridescent sheen.6 And while limited numbers of cut and incised gold glasses have been found outside of Rome, it is very likely, based on geographic distribution, uniformity of materials, shared methods of production, and overwhelming stylistic similarities among them, that cut and incised gold glasses were produced in workshops in and around Rome during a limited period in the second half of the fourth century (Howells 2015: 53–58).7 The gold glass discs, then, were originally part of vessels that may have been used in a variety of ways before they were broken to extract the discs. Some scholars believe that, before their redeployment in the catacombs, the vessels had either a broadly commemorative function or commemorated specific events such as Christian feast days or weddings (Howells 2015; Smith 2000; Harden 1987; Deichmann 1993). Others suggest that the objects entailed church- or clergysponsored promotion of key saints or that they acted as liturgical implements or objects of personal devotion (Grig 2004; Harden 1987: 286). There is in fact no evidence of official church involvement in the vessels’ production and so likely no single programmatic motivation. Admittedly it remains difficult to determine how patrons used the vessels during life. Their wide, shallow shape does not appear ideal for drinking, but standard inscriptions incorporating symposiastic language such as “PIE ZESES” (“drink that you may live”), “VIVATIS” (“live”), and “BIBATIS” (“drink”) suggest their potential use for consuming liquids, perhaps during celebrations or rituals. Even if the vessels served a broadly commemorative function of certain saints, people, or biblical narratives, they appear also to have been used and displayed and thus would have become associated with specific households and, possibly, specific individuals to whom they belonged or who used or displayed them regularly. Indeed, if cut and incised gold glasses were to become associated with individuals, it was most likely through use rather than iconography or naturalistic portrait renderings, for individualized images of ordinary people appear only rarely on cut and incised gold glasses. More prevalent motifs included saints, martyrs, and other biblical or religious figures.8 Unlike the brushed gold glass discs, cut and incised gold glasses were clearly not designed to encourage personal remembrance through portrait representations. The associative link of the object to a specific individual—even after death—more likely developed through his or her interaction with the object during life in the course of religious and familial gatherings that reinforced their roles within family and community. As a person today might recall their spouse at their wedding when drinking from the special toasting glasses that played a memorable role at the wedding party, so too might gold glasses have evoked this sort of milestone and the rituals that marked them. The family and peers of a deceased individual, when standing in the catacombs,

138 Susan Ludi Blevins would have been prompted by the gold glass to remember retrospectively specific episodes involving the deceased. In addition, recall of the deceased’s fulfillment of his or her familial and religious duties during life must have contributed to a semantic understanding or general knowledge of the deceased as pious and dutiful (see Popkin and Ng, this volume, on semantic memory). Moreover, memories in which the gold glasses became embedded not only involved the deceased but also strengthened mnemonic connections by linking family and community members to the deceased through their own autobiographical narratives looking back to encounters during life with the object and the person to whom it was connected (Fivush and Merrill 2016: 312). While gold glasses evoked memories of the deceased in particular ritual, ceremonial, or familial contexts, it is also possible that gold glasses played a role in directed forgetting. If the object was intended to focus retrospective remembrance of the deceased on moments of ritual and communal piety, then it may have done so to the exclusion of other semantic ideas of that person. In other words, if the deceased was remembered as a pious member of the community engaging in meritorious action that enforced communal norms, in part due to the emphasis of a gold glass vessel base, that semantic idea of them might have overwhelmed and crowded out the myriad other potential semantic and/or autobiographical ideas of the deceased, such as cruel husband or avaricious businessman (on the ability of visual representations to shape how we remember and forget, see Popkin 2019: 389; see Ng 2019b: 368 on the shaping and reinforcement of public personas through public portraiture).

Shaping ancestor veneration in the image of martyrs Popkin argues in this volume that taking a biographical approach to certain Roman objects (in her case, silver drinking vessels that ended up as votive offerings) can help us understand how an object related to prospection and retrospection functions differently at different points in its life. If we trace an object biography, in some ways speculative but also rooted in late-antique funerary practice, for a gold glass vessel in fourth-century Rome, we can similarly tease out the many ways such vessels elicited mental simulations (see Kopytoff 1986 on object biographies). Let us take a hypothetical late fourth-century patron who acquires a cut and incised gold glass vessel at a shop producing such objects in Rome. With this acquisition—perhaps even earlier, with the intention to go acquire the vessel—the first mental voyage forward in time to the catacomb occurs. Imagination takes hold to envision the intended fate of the object, perhaps conjuring a vision of one’s close relatives carrying the treasured object to the catacombs shortly after death to engage in funerary banqueting, followed by a descent from this world into the world of the dead via one of the long staircases installed in the late fourth century to facilitate visits to the graves of martyrs in the catacombs (see Rebillard 2009 on the family responsibility for burial in the third and fourth century). The patron might simulate the breaking of the gold glass base from the vessel’s body, and, after a winding pilgrimage through dimly lit catacombs, past grander arcosolia

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and cubiculum tombs of the elite Christians and martyrs that occupied privileged spaces, he or she might imagine a solemn moment among family collectively affixing the vessel base into the loculus. Such moments in front of the loculus and later annual pilgrimages either to the loculus itself or to spaces for funerary banqueting inevitably involved remembering the deceased through conversation, which is one of the most powerful means for generating and sharing memories among individuals and thus experiencing communal remembering (see MacMullen 2009: 73 on burial practices in early Christian Rome; Hirst and Echterhoff 2008, 2012 for the relevant cognitive science; Ng, this volume, on socially extended cognition).9 The gold glasses, then, from their purchase through to their use in banqueting or other functions to their ultimate depositing in the catacombs, stimulated futureoriented mental time travel (on which see Michaelian, Klein, and Szpunar 2016b; Popkin and Ng, this volume; Popkin, this volume). Visual and material considerations particular to fourth-century Rome played into these mental projections, I argue. Specifically, cut and incised gold glasses—through their uniform portrait types, luminous materials, and architectural associations—evoked the visual and ritual landscape of Rome’s nascent martyr cults and thereby offered sensory inputs for people using the whole glass vessels that enabled them to imagine the future meaning and context of the broken-off vessel discs after a person’s death. While the fourth century in Rome was a period of profound transformation, it was not one of wholesale Christianization. In an incisive reevaluation of the relevant textual and archaeological evidence for the “corporeal turn” in late antique Roman Christianity, Nicola Denzey Lewis (2020) articulates a nuanced and complicated understanding of fourth-century Rome that breaks down the opaque boundaries established in scholarship between Christian and pagan Roman religion, practice, space, and identities in the city. Although Denzey Lewis debunks the long-standing notion of a cult of saints in late antique Rome centered on the bodily remains of martyrs, she affirms a growing interest in the cult of martyrs and saints derived from a belief in their extrabodily divine presence. This early Christian belief in the noncorporeal divinity of martyrs and saints—which Denzey Lewis observes was remarkably similar to notions of divinity in pagan Roman religion, with its endlessly reproducible manifestations of the divine and to Roman ancestor cult—suggests that Roman Christians were adapting to evolving religious practices while also drawing on deeply embedded cultural norms. In addition to the growing popularity of saints, the proliferation of martyr cults was marked by modest yet significant architectural elaboration of martyrs’ tombs and shrines as well as above-ground memorial chapels (see Mackie 2003: 12–17 for an overview of the material and textual evidence for the proliferation of martyr cults focused on their grave sites in Rome during the fourth and early fifth centuries). The visual properties of gold glass discs, such as uniform portrait types, evoke this context of martyr veneration in Rome. As Chiara Croci (2013) has noted, the human figures portrayed on gold glass discs, whether saints or other individuals, lack physiognomic specificity. Artists reduced faces to a system of basic features including a single arc for eyebrows, a line for noses, and double arcs for eyes and mouths. Significantly, the use of generic facial features for saints and “ordinary”

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people in gold glass imagery suggests a certain comfort with visual ambiguity among the saints and the ordinary dead. For instance, the portrait type of a man with slightly elongated face; tapering chin; short, closely cropped hair; and large eyes from a gold glass in the British Museum (Figure 8.1)10 are remarkably similar to depictions of saints; compare, for example, gold glasses bearing images of Saints Peter and Paul and Peregrina (Figure 8.2).11 Personalization of the figure represented on gold glasses, if any, was conveyed either through an inscription giving the figure’s name or through elaborate clothes or jewelry emphasizing wealth and status. Furthermore, in the context of the catacombs, where the passages were dark and gold glass discs were embedded at variously legible heights, it would have been particularly difficult to discern individuality among figures. Formal similarities in physiognomy among saints and the ordinary dead lent to representations of both an icon-like quality, imbuing even portraits of “ordinary” people with the ability to evoke an encounter with the sacred.

Figure 8.1 Vessel base with male bust, British Museum, inv. no. 1870,0606.12, c. 360– 400 CE. Source: Photograph: © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 8.2 Vessel base with Saints Peter, Paul, and Peregrina, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 18.145.2, mid-300s CE. Source: Photograph: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

If portrait types on gold glasses created visual ambiguity between ordinary Christians and martyred saints, so too did the materials of these objects. Luminous gold leaf and prismatic glass enhanced the epiphanic quality of these images, marking them out as special. Incorporating the reflective materials more often deployed to ornament martyrs’ tombs and shrines similarly reinforced this perceptual connection between loculus burials and martyrs’ tombs and shrines. As often noted, the images must have reflected the flickering lamp light in dark catacomb corridors, drawing the attention of visitors and encouraging remembrance; cognition, in this scenario, became enacted between the human and his or her external environment, as Diana Y. Ng discusses in this volume. As ecclesiastical authorities increasingly accentuated martyrial tombs and shrines with skylights to illuminate the architecture and distinguish them from those of the ordinary dead, by the second half of the fourth century light came to be associated with martyr

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veneration (Fiocchi Nicolai, Bisconti, and Mazzoleni 1999: 72–76). Reflecting off the polished marble revetment with which martyr’s tombs and chapels were embellished in the late fourth century, natural light admitted through skylights created a sense of radiance. Embedding gold glasses into ordinary loculi allowed Romans to signify the sacred by capturing the emotional arousal of light in martyrial tombs and emulating the sacred itineraries of martyrial tombs for which light served as a beacon of the divine (see Ng 2019b: 368). Perhaps most striking are the overt and subtle architectural elements in vessel-base images and decorative borders. Architectural motifs in gold glass take a number of forms. The clearest references to saints in architectural settings contain columns, tabula ansata, and curtains or garlands. In one vessel base with Christ and saints, the image field is divided in two horizontally, with torso-length busts of three saints below a ground line and above it four saints framed by a draped colonnade of strigillated columns delineated by diagonal lines across the column shafts (Figure 8.3).12 In another configuration that survives in several variations, a

Figure 8.3 Vessel base with Christ and saints, British Museum, inv. no. 1863,0727.9, c. 360–400 CE. Source: Photograph: © Trustees of the British Museum.

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central medallion, which might contain an image of Christ or of a married couple, is encircled by six saints wearing the tunic and pallium.13 Identified by tabulae ansatae, rectangular tablets bearing inscriptions with names, the saints appear in a frontal stance positioned between columns. The image of one or more saints positioned between columns and accompanied by epigraphic elaboration carried overt associations with the growing prominence of the saints in the Roman visual landscape. Although Damasus I, bishop of Rome from 366–384, was by no means the only religious leader interested in facilitating a growing interest in martyrs and capitalizing on their untapped symbolic potential, his interventions are indicative of a larger trend in Rome in the second half of the fourth century. We should, then, look beyond mere coincidence that in the same decades that Damasus was actively embellishing shrines in many of the most important catacombs in Rome, the production and consumption of cut and incised gold glass vessels that emulated those shrines was similarly at its height (see Howells 2015: 58–60, on a date range of c. 360–400 for cut and incised gold glass production). And while Damasus may not have engaged in a systematic plan to Christianize Rome’s sacred topography (as Denzey Lewis observes many sites were by and large already given over to Christianity), whether because of inadequate influence or resources, his material and epigraphic interventions in the catacombs clearly aimed at monumentalizing martyrial shrines (see Denzey Lewis 2020: 90–120 for a recent reevaluation of the extent of Damasus’ interventions). Typical of such interventions was Damasus’ modifications to the so-called Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of San Callisto (see Fiocchi Nicolai, Bisconti, and Mazzoleni 1999; Fiocchi Nicolai and Guyon 2006). There Damasus transformed the modest loculi of nine popes and three martyred bishops into a chapel by heightening and widening the door, opening two light shafts to illuminate the room, and embellishing the area immediately in front of Sixtus’ tomb with two strigillated columns flanking an altar (Figure 8.4). Even if the Crypt of the Popes was originally a family hypogeum later re-envisioned by Damasus to highlight the extraordinary dead (Denzey Lewis 2020: 230–43), its form and impetus to monumentalize remains emblematic. Among many examples, Damasus similarly modified more modest single and double burials, such as the tomb of Saints Peter and Marcellinus in their eponymous catacomb and the tomb of the martyr Januarius in the catacomb of S. Pretestato, each with an arched feature surmounting two columns flanking the saints’ remains. More subtle motifs, such as borders around the figural fields of gold glasses, also capitalized on the visual language of martyrs and saints. It would be a mistake to dismiss these borders as simply decorative. Indeed, Cynthia Hahn has observed that ornamental and architectural elements were so effective in the fourth and fifth centuries in signifying sacred space in connection with the veneration of saints that they eventually supplanted iconic images on ampullae and other souvenirs to affirm the specificity and sanctity of place (Hahn 1997: 1092). The figures, text, and architectural imagery on each cut and incised gold glass base are enclosed within borders taking a range of forms that all find parallels in the compositional strategies designed to highlight the sacred within mural paintings in the catacombs.

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Figure 8.4 Artist’s rendering of the so-called Crypt of the Popes, Catacomb of San Callisto. Source: Drawing from de Rossi 1864. Public domain.

Even the simplest of the forms, single round or square borders, frame images located in the most privileged visual fields within the tight spaces of cubicula such as the center of the ceiling. Examples abound, including the central tondo of the Good Shepherd fresco in the Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter with the image contained within a clearly delineated circular frame (Deckers, Seelinger, and Mietke 1987). Square borders find a precedent in the Cubiculum Leonis of the Catacomb of Commodilla in which a depiction of Christ flanked by an alpha and omega dominates the space from its square field centrally located on the ceiling (Gannaway 2019; Deckers, Mietke, and Wieland 1994: 89–104). With increasing compositional complexity of gold glass borders, the correspondences between them and architectural elaboration of saints’ tombs and the catacombs becomes more evident. Exemplifying this trend is a gold glass bearing a bust of Christ enclosed within a square border surrounding a diamond that divides the field into a central lozenge and three surviving (though likely originally four) inverted triangles radiating from the outer border (Figure 8.5).14

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Figure 8.5 Vessel base with Christ and saints, British Museum, inv. no. 1863,0727.6, c. 360–400 CE. Source: Photograph: © Trustees of the British Museum.

Even more elaborate, a biblical scene of Daniel and the dragon of Babylon is embellished by a square reciprocal border of half circles that is further articulated by four pyramidal forms.15 As in an early fourth-century diminutive glass roundel of Lazarus emerging from an aedicula formed by two columns supporting a pediment—and in many other examples—the triangular forms may emulate the pediment of sacred structures, including shrines or the funerary basilicas that sprang up over saints’ remains such as the fourth-century Basilicas of San Sebastian or Sant’Agnese on the Via Nomentana (see Hellström 2015 on circiform funerary basilicas).16 Drawing on associations closer to the loculi, these triangular forms may have also recalled the vaulting and ornamental articulation of the more complex cubicula. Even the reciprocal semi-circle border so common in gold glass designs finds a precedent in the repetitive arched forms of a catacomb cyptoporticus or in embellished decorative borders delineating the ceiling tondi of cubicula in the Via Latina Catacomb.

146 Susan Ludi Blevins Also instructive for understanding a visitor’s experience of martyrial tombs and shrines in the second half of the fourth century are the 60 or so epigrams in Vergilian hexameter that Pope Damasus had engraved on marble slabs and mounted in or in close proximity to tombs and shrines associated with martyrs and saints (Trout 2015). These epigrams eulogized honored saints by extolling their piety and virtues and, in some cases, describing their martyrdoms. Recent scholarship on the epigrams tends to center on their role, or lack thereof, in the Christianization of Damasan Rome, asserting that the epigrams projected an impression of a unified Christian community under episcopal leadership in the face of factionalism in Rome or rewrote history in in the service of a new Christian identity rooted in virtuous heroes of the past (see, e.g., Denzey Lewis 2020: 110–20; Denzey Lewis 2018: 434; Trout 2003; Sághy 2003). Whatever their intended function, embedded in the catacombs the epigrams also mediated individual visitors’ experiences by directly instructing them on memorial conventions. Just as the elogium of Tarsicius directly exhorted the reader standing in front of the so-called Crypt of the Popes to “recognize the equal merit of the two to whom Damasus the bishop has dedicated this inscription” (Epigram 15), so too did the elogium of Peter and Paul mandate to its reader that “here, you ought to know, first lived the saints . . . [who] by the merit of their blood they followed Christ through the Heavens” (Epigram 20).17 Further merits of the saints enumerated in the panegyric included those of the martyr Eutychius “who demonstrated the glory of Christ” (Epigram 21) and Hippolytus who “devoted to Christ, sought the realms of the righteous” (Epigram 35). We might, then, also understand these epigrams as models of how collectively to remember the Christian dead at the tomb in the later fourth century: by highlighting and recalling pious deeds of the deceased during their lives, devotion to God and community, as well as the heavenly or ethereal realm in which the blessed dead dwell as result of their meritorious actions. The seemingly purposeful ambiguities inherent in cut and incised gold glass imagery should be further considered in the context of ritual practices such as the refrigerium, the offering of funeral feasts suitable for the ordinary dead and martyrs that were celebrated in specially equipped areas in or near the catacombs (MacMullen 2009: 76–89). With reference to the adaptability of the refrigerium in family ritual in late antique Rome, Ramsay MacMullen underscores its “dynamic nature” that accommodated “both the family’s honoring and communing with its own, mere mortals that they were, and the individual and general honoring and communing with the saints, immortal” (MacMullen 2009: 89). This ambiguity was not only confined to funeral feasting for the Christian ordinary dead and Christian martyrs but also extended to the non-Christian dead. Despite the increased formalization of saints’ veneration in feast calendars such as the Depositio Martyrum from the Philocalian Calendar of 354, the refrigerium remained substantially similar for Christians and non-Christians alike (see Salzman 1990 on the Codexcalendar of 354). Contemporaries even highlighted connections between banquets for the ordinary dead and martyrs, as attested by Zeno of Verona in his late address to newly baptized Christians to express his concern that forbidden pagan sacrifices were dangerously similar to meals on tombs and near martyr’s shrines (Zeno of

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Verona, Tractatus 1.25.6.11, quoted in Rebillard 2009: 144). Likewise, Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, attested to the funerary banqueting for both the ordinary dead and saints when he criticized the drunken revelry that could result from the festivities (Paulinus of Nola, Poema XXVI). In concert and when recontextualized in proximity to mortal remains, the materials, decorative motifs, and figural images of gold glass vessels must have encapsulated to a striking degree the developing visual environment of martyrs’ and saints’ tombs promoted in the second half of the fourth century. By calling to mind martyr veneration, the gold glass discs, when removed from their vessels and affixed to loculi, associated remembrance of the “ordinary” deceased Christians with the remembrance of Rome’s martyred saints. I suggest that this connection motivated the reuse of gold glass discs in the catacombs, as people imagined how future viewers would be reminded by the discs to sacralize and aggrandize the humbler deceased whose tombs the discs came to decorate.

Conclusion: imagining future remembering The iconographic and formal connections between the gold glasses and martyrs’ tombs that I have described prompt a return to the object biography of the gold glass vessels and their patrons’ metaintentions. I argue that, for Roman Christians who purchased a gold glass vessel with which they might become associated during life through domestic ritual and ceremony, the purchaser envisioned a future in which the same object embedded in the catacombs ensured or, at the very least, foregrounded a future remembrance of the deceased as pious and dutiful. Moreover, reflecting on the web of social and symbolic associations prominent in the second half of the fourth century through efforts such as the ecclesiastical promotion of martyr cults, it is likely that striking visual echoes of martyrial tombs were intended to condition a mode of veneration like that of the saints and orchestrated to create a perceptual aura of the sacred and perhaps even the miraculous. It is difficult and beyond the scope of this chapter to determine the origins of the practice of embedding gold glass discs in loculi, but once the practice became established as a possibility the intention to avail oneself of this practice must have been on the minds of people who purchased intact gold glass vessels. I argue, therefore, that it is not mere chance that hundreds of people who owned gold glass vessels broke off the walls and embedded the remaining disc in Christian tombs. Instead, an intention of the deceased—and possibly also family and community members—to do so must have motivated the initial purchase and subsequent use of the vessel in the owner’s life and afterlife in Rome’s catacombs. The gold glass vessels thus were intentionally repurposed as mnemonic cues that helped Romans control the uncertainty of remembrance after death, not by triggering a remembrance like the proverbial string tied around one’s finger but by conditioning the nature and substance of the remembrance and directing how the remembrance should be conducted. The uncertainty of proper remembrance after death had long been a concern in the Roman world. As Karen B. Stern demonstrates in this volume, such concern manifested in the Roman Empire’s Jewish

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communities, not just in its pagan or Christian ones. Such uncertainties, however, were compounded in the later fourth century by the ambiguities inherent in the veneration of martyrs who were neither gods nor ordinary mortals. Many other cultural practices, including the refrigerium on feast days and anniversary celebrations of the deceased, ensured that the family would observe the passing of the deceased. Reusing the gold glass discs, however, embodied the intention to ensure precisely how posthumous remembering was carried out: to bring a sense of pilgrimage and veneration borrowed from the cult of martyrs as the family and community of the deceased looked back on the pious life of the deceased embodied by the use of the intact gold glass vessel in ritual while alive. Placement of gold glasses on loculi, moreover, meant that familial encounters with them as mnemonic cues occurred during the performance interval, a time set aside for veneration of ancestors. Thus, I argue that, while the lifetime use of the gold glass vessel was significant and necessary for its association of a person or memory to the object, the later use in the catacombs may have been the primary one. This conclusion might also explain why a purpose-made object for burial was insufficient. In seeking to influence the substance and conditioning of future retrospective memories of the deceased, the choice and use of gold glass discs were shaped by prospective memory and cognitive processes of metaintentions.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Maggie L. Popkin for the invitation to present an early version of the ideas in this chapter at the Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting in 2019, as well as her and Diana Y. Ng for their invaluable comments and suggestions on the draft and their endless patience during the editorial process. I am further indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their critical reading and thoughtful comments, in particular highlighting crucial new contributions in the relevant scholarship. My appreciation extends also to the University of Georgia Studies Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy for the opportunity to work with them and return repeatedly to numerous museums with the gold glass collections to which I found myself inexorably drawn. All errors and omissions are my own. 2 Unfortunately, antiquarian interest in the vessels coincided with the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century rediscovery of Roman catacombs, leading to the extraction of numerous examples without scientific documentation. Recent studies of the archaeological evidence for the numbers of Christians in Rome in the second half of the fourth century have revised estimates from 50 to 75 percent of Rome’s population to a much smaller 5 percent (for a discussion of these estimates, see MacMullen 2009: 87–88). Even assuming that the actual percentage is somewhere between these two estimates, it stands that the Christian community in Rome was much smaller than traditionally believed, which results in a much greater proportion of the Christian population engaging with the cut and incised gold glass vessels. 3 For the argument that owners of gold glass vessels were most likely from nonaristocratic families for whom gold glass vessels were considered expensive, if not treasured, objects, see Howells 2015: 64–65. 4 Dealers in the Early Modern period may have ground and trimmed the edges to accommodate an antiquarian aesthetic (Howells 2015: 25, 55). See Howells for one example of a seventeenth-century drawing of a gold glass base with substantial segments of vessel wall still intact but now in the Vatican Museum collection shorn of its edges (2015: 26). 5 Examples of gold glass vessel bases with clearly visible fragments of wall: see Figure 8.2; base with Peregrina between Saints Peter and Paul, fourth century, Metropolitan

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Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 18.145.2; base with couple in center surrounded by multiple rod-wielding figures, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, fourth century, inv. no. AN2007.13; base with the Sacrifice of Isaac, State Hermitae Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. no. 1223, fourth century. Severin Bowl, British Museum, inv. no. 1870,0606.12, c. 360–400 CE; Howells 2015: no. 16. For those still remaining in situ in the catacombs of Novatianus, see Filippini 2000; in the catacombs of Panfilo, see Morey 1959, nos. 220–25. In diminutive medallion-studded vessels, small cut and incised gold glass designs are sealed within glass blobs and included within the walls of large glass vessels. Brushed technique cobalt blue sandwich medallions were similarly produced through the application of gold to a vessel base, however, rather than incising the outline, artists used an extremely fine steel tool and small strokes to create a chiaroscuro effect and render more lifelike images than the cut and incised technique. Gilded plaques lack the ring foot of cut and incised glass vessels and are much larger, often exceeding 15 cm. In addition, in gilded plaques the gold design is not fused below a layer of protective glass, making it extremely unlikely that these objects were ever part of a vessel. For a distribution map of findspots for all types of gold glass, including the cut and incised type, see Howells 2015: 54. Nicola Denzey Lewis (2020) has convincingly called for and demonstrated a thorough reevaluation of the evidence for late-antique Rome that examines the impact of Early Modern and modern scholarly agendas and assumptions. It is acknowledged that the corpus of works in museum collections that serve as evidence for this period, including late-antique gold glass, are likely influenced by collecting practices that may have privileged images of, for example, known individuals such as saints and popes. It remains uncertain to what extent and how often families returned to the tombs within the catacombs on annual feast days either for their family members or those set aside within the religious calendar to celebrate martyrs. Although space for dining seems to have been provided in some of the largest cubicula, the cramped, dank, dark, unwelcoming atmosphere of the catacombs is well attested. Thus most dining would have occurred above ground. Such aboveground feasting did not, however, preclude families from visiting tombs, and most catacombs were not abandoned until after the later fourth century. Moreover, difficulty in traversing catacomb corridors because of backfill from new tombs or restrictions of new burials only to the areas around well-known martyr tombs and shrines because pathways to those areas were the only ones maintained also seem to have been challenges that, at least on a large scale, postdate the fourth century (on the Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter for example, see Guyon 1987). Vessel base with male bust, British Museum, inv. no. 1870,0606.12, c. 360–400 CE; Howells 2015: no. 31, demonstrating clear evidence of smooth edges that were trimmed in recent centuries and at any rate not in antiquity. Vessel base with Saints Peter, Paul, and Peregrina, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 18.145.2, mid-300s CE. Vessel base with Saints Peter, Paul, and Agnese, Vatican Museum inv. no. 737; Morey 1959: no. 83. Vessel base with Christ and saints, British Museum, inv. no. 1863,0727.9, c. 360–400 CE; Howells 2015: no. 13. Christ in central medallion: British Museum, inv. no. 18.0727.13, c. 360–400 CE; Howells 2015: no. 13. Married couple in central medallion surrounded by saints Peter, Paul, Laurence, Sixtus, Ciprianus, and (less legible) likely Hippolytus: Bargello Museum, Florence; Morey 1959: no. 240. Vessel base with Christ and saints, British Museum, inv. no. 1863,0727.6, c. 360–400 CE; Howells 2015: no. 11. Vessel base with Daniel and the dragon of Babylon, British Museum, inv. no. 1863,0727.1, c. 360–400 CE; Howells 2015: no. 23. Diminutive medallion with Lazarus in the tomb, British Museum, inv. no. 1854, 0722.14, c. 350–400 CE. Translations of Damasan Epigrams are from Trout 2015.

9

Prospection in the wild Embodiment, enactivity, and commemoration Diana Y. Ng

The introduction to this volume noted the question asked by Roman historian Brent Shaw, “did the Romans have a future?” and his answer that—based on the absence of long-term, credit-based state borrowing—they did not.1 The contributors to this volume have demonstrated, however, that Romans across time and geography had other modes of prospection, at levels both personal and institutional. They have revealed that Romans from many classes had awareness and aspirations for times yet to be, through means that have often been considered—until now—primarily retrospective. Historiography, monumental epigraphy, graffiti, and precious objects have all been seen as archives of shared and personal pasts, but this volume has shown that these corpora of evidence actually present affirmative answers to Shaw’s question. This chapter brings the volume to a close first by considering how the approaches of embodied and socially extended future thinking represented by our contributors’ chapters are situated in and present further avenues in research for Roman studies as the latter continues to engage with cognitive theory and science. Then, by considering Roman public honorific portraits and endowed spectacles, I further develop the argument presented variously by this volume’s contributors, that Roman concerns with the past are linked with their concerns for the future and that aspects of Roman public commemoration are evidence of cognitively distributed intentions to shape—and even to constrict—individual and collective futures and future actions. This chapter will thus demonstrate that it is possible to create a Roman historical cognitive science (see Popkin and Ng, this volume) that extends beyond the well-established boundaries of memory studies, to bring fresh insight and new questions to familiar archives of evidence.

Homo prospectus in the world: embodied future thinking One of this volume’s contributions is showing that Romans from various social classes and from across the empire could engage in future thinking in different ways, including materially. Theories of cognitive extension beyond the boundaries of the brain and even the skin were surveyed in the Introduction to this volume. Looking back on the chapters collected here, we can see that many aspects of Romans’ future thinking clearly belong in the broader discussion of embodied and enactive cognition, as demonstrated especially in the contributions of Molly DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-9

Prospection in the wild 151 Swetnam-Burland, Karen B. Stern, Maggie L. Popkin, and Susan Ludi Blevins. Furthermore, paying close attention to the bodily and social forms of prospection that these authors discuss also spurs new questions about thought, action, and material engagement. Popkin’s chapter nimbly weaves together the prospective and embodied cognition afforded by the four silver Vicarello milestone beakers, brought from Gades in Hispania all the way to their final deposition in the sanctuary of Aquae Apollinares near Rome. The silver cups themselves embodied the vastness of the western Roman empire and its connective road networks as they evoked mile-markers in miniature.2 The cups and the itineraries inscribed upon them were, as Popkin rightly notes, the means by which Romans and the particular Roman who owned the cups could conceptualize and mentally simulate travel. For one who had never made the almost 2,000 Roman mile trip spanning weeks or even months, these itinerary beakers materialized the scale of the empire and the matrices of culture, economics, and politics leading to Rome and provided a future context into which the self could be projected. For an owner who might have made this journey several times, the Vicarello milestone beakers, I suggest here, may have represented individual journeys, each unique and yet also interwoven in the mind. Gaps in the beakers’ itineraries activated the memory of a seasoned traveler of the Gadesto-Rome route, to retrieve not only the name but also the experiences of his past stays at the missing stations. As stops were visited once again on each subsequent journey, the memory traces formed previously would be modified and re-encoded with the new associations made at these locations—resulting in new and strengthened memories of these stations in the mind (Moscovitch 2007). Thus, the cups’ owner could look at the etched names on the itineraries such as Nemausus (ancient Nîmes) and simulate his eventual arrival there. After reaching and then departing from that destination, that same etching would spur his recollection of his experiences, both old and recent, in that city. The milestone beakers thus were pivot points of prospection and retrospection. Moreover, as retrospective memory was progressively revised through interactions with these cups on the road—drinking from them after a long day of travel, turning them in the hand to read the itineraries—progressive prospective memory revision might also have been triggered. How would the reflection at each night’s stop alter the simulation and prediction for the next night’s rest? How might the real physical movement through time and space, traced by and tracing the itineraries on the cups, affect one’s prediction of his physical and mental condition upon arrival at his ultimate destination in Rome? Intentions and plans, like memories, are not impervious to change. Perhaps—and this is pure conjecture—the journey had been arduous, the traveler had suffered, and at some point enroute he formed a new intention to dedicate the silver cups, his constant companions and witnesses to his discomfort, at the healing site of Aquae Apollinares after his arrival in Rome. The stops on the beakers’ itineraries then become prospective reminders that he would soon find relief. The embodied and enactive cognition afforded by these silver beakers over the course of their journey with their owner could have led to a different and greater appreciation of their value, not just as expensive

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objects but as intimate personal effects. With such a change, the owner might have been compelled to form a new intention and plan for himself and his possessions, unanticipated when he departed from Gades, to deposit his silver beakers at the sanctuary at Aquae Apollinares. The movement of the body through space, visual perception, and the creation of artifacts embodying intention also figure prominently in the chapters by Swetnam-Burland and Stern. Unlike the Vicarello beakers, the archives of evidence these authors explore—inscriptions, paintings, and graffiti—are stationary in nature. Yet they were deliberately placed in such a way that they could be seen by viewers inhabiting and walking through familiar environments such as the home and the synagogue. Swetnam-Burland demonstrates that spaces in the home were implicated in vows and remembrance—both those fulfilled and those anticipated. Domestic shrines were sites of prospection, where one could simulate one’s progress through life as represented in the common fresco imagery of the typical Roman family. A boy could simulate a future as paterfamilias, for example. Beyond the shrines, painted imagery such as that from the Pompeiian home of one Philocalus, marking the fulfillment of a vow to Isis-Fortuna and Harpokrates, represented what I see as a midpoint in a prospective trajectory: a past intention for the future was met through planning and action, and that resolution signaled the potential for further exchanges with the depicted deities in times yet to come. One of the main points made in this volume’s Introduction is that prospection and future thinking were the prerogative of all Roman social groups. The importance of emplacement as a part of embodied prospection compellingly demonstrates this idea. Shrines and shrine-like imagery in the home afforded spaces for members of different social groups to engage in simulation, intention, prediction, and planning (the four key modes of future thinking distinguished by Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016: 21; see also Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2014; Szpunar, Shrikanth, and Schacter 2018; see Popkin and Ng, in this volume)— whether they were enslaved people who worked near the kitchen’s shrine or the new matron of the home. Stern also highlights social place, casting inscriptions in the synagogue at Dura Europos and elsewhere as political prospective acts. The wealthy benefactors of the community could implicate their community as well as the divine in their plans to be remembered, through inscriptions in the floors and ceilings of their place of worship. Those with fewer means and less social power found other significant places in the synagogue at which to hail others. Graffiti clustered around doorways leading to the main halls, arresting the viewer’s progress and commanding them to act—to vocalize—in remembrance of the writer or face God’s wrath. The makers of these graffiti not only offloaded their intention to be remembered in the future into the physical world, but, I suggest, they also prospectively preempted elite bids for remembrance by choosing sites of passage for their writings, taking up space in the minds and mouths of future viewers before they could be seized by others. Bodily habits, action, and perception are thus central to political prospection, granting power and agency to those whose futures might have been and might still be overlooked.

Prospection in the wild 153 The intersection of prospective, embodied, and enactive cognition opens further avenues to explore. I draw attention in particular to the handwriting of selfgenerated texts as vehicles for prospection. Swetnam-Burland and Stern both make clear that ancient Roman writers of graffiti understood fundamentally that their markings had agency and also extended their own agency to shape the future itself through viewers’ thought and behavior. The addition of drawing, such as that of an infant alongside the inscribed birthdate of a girl named Iuvenilla (discussed by Swetnam-Burland, this volume) to enable specifically prospective remembering— remembering to remember—is suggested by research on handwriting and drawing in cognitive science. Drawing a picture of a word that one intends to remember enhances future recollection of that word (Meade, Klein, and Fernandes 2020: 206; see also Wammes, Jonker, and Fernandes 2016). The person who inscribed the birth details and drawing of baby Iuvenilla into the wall surface activated simultaneous visuomotor and cognitive activities (Olive, Alves, and Castro 2009: 759–61; Planton et al. 2017: 74–75) in a process that: 1) set an intention and plan for what immediately was about to occur and what may occur in the future and 2) enacted this intention into an especially effective externalized graphic form. In the moment and action of writing, the writer would have simultaneously thought about this infant and his or her relationship to the child. The writer, in planning and executing this graffiti assemblage, simulated a future moment when he or she (or someone else) could look upon the text and image and remember, with happiness or grief, Iuvenilla. This process can be nothing if not a prospective cognitive act through material engagement (see Popkin and Ng, this volume, for material engagement theory). Cognitive scientific studies of the perception of handwriting have, I believe, even further implications for handwriting’s role in future thinking. Experiments conducted over the last four decades have shown that a viewer—not necessarily a reader but simply a perceiver—of handwriting can spontaneously detect dynamic gestural information in static characters. For example, in an early study, participants were asked to write by hand a series of nonalphabetic and nonnumeric characters. They then were presented with samples of the same characters produced by others and asked to reconstruct how they were written. A significant portion of the participants were able to predict the direction and order of the strokes used by others from looking at the dynamic traces left in the static characters (Babcock and Freyd 1988). Thus, even if the perceiver of the handwriting has not witnessed the act of writing, there is still an unconscious, embodied understanding of the writing motion in the brain (Babcock and Freyd 1988: 120; Nakamura et al. 2012: 20762–66; Longcamp, Hlushchuck, and Hari 2011: 1257). For Roman material, this research on the visual and motor connections in handwriting perception may suggest that, in looking at graffiti, the reader perceives and could simulate how that text was produced. If this volume’s engagements with cognitive science and theory in the humanities might generate new questions for researchers in neuroscience and psychology, then this observed embodied reading compels me to ask, for its implications for ancient graffiti (and dipinti) and prospection: could motor activation and recognition of handwriting gestures during reading suggest

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an unconscious—or even conscious—coexperience of the act and moment of writing by the writer and the reader at distinct moments in time? If the answer to that question were affirmative, it would further allow us to consider the multiple temporalities of various handwritten texts. The incision of words in gypsum enacts the intention to remember and reflects a simulation of a time yet to be, with the possibility that, when any person would gaze on these words, the moment of writing could be experienced again. That experience could potentially strengthen one’s memory and affection for a thriving or departed child. Or, in the case of the demands to remember the writer for good, as in Stern’s examination of informal writings around the doorways of synagogues, the reader’s coexperience of the act of writing with the author could potentially make the threat of divine punishment feel closer and more dangerous. Perhaps, then, the reader would feel more pressure to do what the writing demands, because of that cognitive and temporal convergence with the author. Future research in both the sciences and humanities will hopefully shed more light on the rich possibilities of retrospective and prospective thinking surrounding handwritten texts.

Distributing prospection: socially extended future thinking The chapters by Jacob A. Latham, Eric Orlin, and Aaron Seider, in contrast, consider future thinking from a less intensely personal and more collective perspective. Socially extended cognition falls under the larger framework of distributed cognition and has generated a great deal of debate and differing approaches. Scholars posit that cognition can take place in collaborative contexts, such that multiple agents in a group perform cognitive processes individually but, through forms of cognitive practice such as communication, arrive together to an idea or action that the members of the group could not have achieved individually. The presentation of socially extended cognition in this chapter is by no means intended to be a comprehensive overview of the scholarship on socially extended or socially influenced cognition in cognitive science or philosophy of mind. Rather, it engages with a selection of approaches that are of particular interest to my analysis of socially extended future thinking afforded by Roman cultural practices and institutions.3 In Edwin Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild (1995), the task of piloting an airplane is a socially extended cognitive process, in which the pilot, the copilot or first officer, and the navigator each perform specific cognitive tasks that, together, allow the airplane to take off, fly, and land safely. The practices and technologies that make this collaborative work possible are, as Hutchins (2011) and Richard Menary (2013) argue, enculturated. Menary in particular connects enculturated cognition to his model of cognitive integration, in which human cognitive processes and activity develop diachronically to extend to external elements such as written text, spoken communication, and other devices shared by members of a culture (Menary 2013; see also Menary 2010).4 Using the example of mathematical tasks as cultural cognitive practices, Menary makes the point that,

Prospection in the wild 155 [t]he manipulations of inscriptions in public space are normative, there are right and wrong ways to manipulate them. There are also norms for the different ends to which we put the inscriptions, for example, there are norms for using general graph representations, such as pie charts, to represent a variety of different quantitative relationships. The representational format is flexible enough to be applied across a range of domains. Furthermore, the representational format can be deployed to meet a variety of cognitive and epistemic ends—it is directable by our purposive norms. (2013: 30) Menary was referring to the performance of mathematics in representational systems such as Arabic numerals, written in “public,” that is, external of the mind, in order to facilitate the cognitive tasks of calculation (see also Menary 2009). Yet, the basic concept and structure of written text in “public,” viewable by others, in a variety of culturally accepted formats and to serve different epistemic ends fits very well as a form of enculturated cognitive practice with the Roman use of inscriptions—ranging from monumental ones, as with the Secular Games monuments from the Augustan and Severan periods discussed by Orlin, to the informal graffiti made in homes and synagogues and engraved inscriptions on the Vicarello milestone beakers investigated by Swetnam-Burland, Stern, and Popkin, respectively. The Secular Games inscriptions and other formal inscriptions adhere closely enough to enculturated norms that epigraphers are able to partially reconstruct missing sections. The placement of graffiti in groups around doorways in the synagogue indicates a culturally understood significance for this spot as a display zone for personal interpellations. The lists of specific waystations in columns on the Vicarello beakers correspond to widely known and traveled imperial itineraries, such that ancient and modern viewers could fill in omitted stops. Within this enculturated cognition, there is the additional factor of social extension to other human agents, such that cognition occurs within a reciprocal dynamic that ultimately leads multiple persons to a shared goal. While the example of piloting an airplane highlights specific cognitive tasks distributed across several crew members to achieve the common purpose of safe flight, the social extension of cognition toward more abstract ends arguably also occurs.5 As Mattia Gallotti and Bryce Huebner suggest, it is reasonable to think that “[p]erfectly aligned minds might then be shared, but not in the sense in which the extension of my mind into ours, and vice versa, generates identical thoughts or enables identical actions” (2017: 253). That is, the minds of separate persons can act together when a context is shared, without turning into a “hive mind.” For example, as Seider argues in this volume, when the Romans were, as a society, at a loss as to how to mourn the death of Germanicus, their interactions as they waited, watched, and commented together as Agrippina arrived with the ashes of Germanicus allowed them to come to a common understanding of their grief and shared laments. Each individual Roman need not have responded intellectually in the same way to Germanicus’ death, but their minds nonetheless aligned to produce a collective response. Indeed, Seider notes that, even prior to the death of Germanicus,

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Romans were remembering with each other and, in doing so, simulating and predicting together a time in which Germanicus might meet an untimely death, a time in which they would need to calibrate their responses so as not to provoke the ire of Tiberius. The collective intentions of the Romans were thus served by many individual minds acting in concert through social interaction.6 Casting one’s eyes back across the vast body of literature on social and collective memory, this model of cognitive alignment via communication is reminiscent of Maurice Halbwachs’ sociological model of collective remembering (1950, 1952, 1992), in which social groups remembered to and with each other to create a memory that is relevant for the present, and—as this volume has argued—for the future (see also Szpunar and Szpunar 2016). The unity of thinking and action toward a common goal through sharing of information is the model of socially situated cognition that seems most readily applicable to the case studies in this volume.7 Communicative capacity rested not only with singular Romans gathered together—as in the crowds described by Tacitus—but also with monumental inscriptions that were available to the public for viewing and discourse over generations and that established communal ritual observance in the city of Rome. These modes of communication may have enabled corporate mental alignment not only in the present but also in—and for— the future. In the case of Secular Games inscriptions, I believe that the alignment is not in the very close replication of Augustan pageantry by the Severan organizers. Rather, it is in the formation—over the two centuries between the Augustan and Severan games—of a shared Roman belief that the Augustan iteration established ritual orthodoxy, such that the legitimacy of the Severan iteration depended on its flamboyant fidelity to its early imperial model. A not-exclusively epigraphic example from the Severan era that also demonstrates this multitemporal collective mental alignment—and the shaping of future perceptions of history—is that of the Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome. As Popkin has shown (2019: 391–95; see also Popkin 2016), imperatores and emperors had engaged in arch building along the triumphal route since the Republican period, even when historical accounts note that no triumph was actually celebrated. The Arch of Septimius Severus, like the Severan Secular Games inscription, followed distinctively in this political and architectural tradition, but it also accomplished something more. Later historians claimed that the Severans celebrated a triumph in 202 CE, even when none might have taken place at all (Popkin 2019: 392). The Arch of Septimius Severus, in its prominent symbolic location and thorough incorporation of triumphal iconography, may reflect an intention to create and disseminate a counterfactual version of events. The public monument shared its selective visual narrative with viewers yet to be, affording a mental alignment that occurred over subsequent time. The celebratory vision of Severan victory in Parthia depicted in reliefs and the quadriga statue on the Arch, thus, became a triumphal one by the fourth century CE. By engaging with perspectives of socially extended cognition and future thinking, questions about Roman traditions—including their purposeful creation and ruptures therefrom— may find new answers.

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Prospective commemoration: intentions for posterity “Is remembrance done for remembrance’s sake, or does the notion of the future intervene in meaningful ways in this process?” asked Piotr Szpunar and Karl Szpunar (2016: 383) as they formulated a concept for collective future thought. The final section of this chapter seeks to illustrate how the intersections between theories of embodied, enactivist, and socially extended cognition and research on social and collective prospection can illuminate the Janus-like nature of Roman commemoration. First, I consider the repurposed gold glasses examined by Blevins in this volume. Then, I focus on collective prospection manifested in public honorific portrait statues and the endowments of festivals and games in honor of individuals. The imbrication of specific and schematic future thinking and the bond between retrospection and prospection—indeed, the engendering of retrospection as a result of prospection as argued by Szpunar and Szpunar (2016)—in Roman commemoration also demonstrate how Romans’ intentions for the future are distributed and extended to visual culture, whether the actors in question were Christian or pagan. Blevins’ discussion of late antique gold glasses draws attention to how personal intentions could form in response to the emergence of a new cultural schema and manifest in artifacts and how the novel context for prediction, intention, and planning depended on the visual perception of the gold glasses (see also Orlin, this volume, for schematic and specific future thinking in the Augustan period). Blevins argues that, as Pope Damasus promoted a Christian identity for the city of Rome by marking saints’ burial places as sites of sacred memory and by illuminating their subterranean tombs with skylights, the architectural forms he used were translated into the delicate designs of gold glass. Awareness of the theologically driven urban and spiritual embellishment of the city Rome was brought to the front of mind by the sight of these objects, either in their original form as the bases of vessels or in their deliberately broken and reused state, pressed into the walls of catacombs. The perception of torch-lit gold glasses’ radiance at the tombs of ordinary Christians likewise compelled a viewer to think about the nature of the deceased: was this person whose tomb shone in the dimness a saint or at least saintly in both their virtue and in their veneration by their family? As Blevins explains, fourth-century Rome presented new material tools by which to contemplate one’s membership in the Christian community, and these novelties likely spurred individuals to simulate and plan for their posthumous futures in a matching visual vernacular. As a result, Roman Christians collectively participated in a four-decade-long “trend” in which gold glasses bearing the images of canonized martyrs and particularly evocative architectural iconography were reused at catacombs’ loculi to be seen at some later time and—here I am enticed by the evidence to speculate and reach—even by a different (divine?) audience in a specific, eagerly anticipated time yet to be. The codevelopment of specific and schematic futures and prospective cognitive practices thus weave together embodiment, enactivism, and socially extended cognition. The example of the gold glasses showcases the conjunction of a historical moment of theological, craft, and architectural innovation in fourth-century Rome.

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Earlier in the history of the empire, extending from Italy to the eastern provinces, another socially extended practice of prospective commemoration can be found in the public honorific portraits scattered broadly and densely across Roman cities. These bronze or marble statues depicted male and female elites in a defined range of poses and dress that articulated the honorands’ moral probity and cultural identities (e.g., Smith 1998; for female portraiture in the widespread Herculaneum Woman types, see Daehner 2007). They were awarded to notables and officials by governing bodies and could also be dedicated by members of a corporation in honor of one of their own (for corporations dedicating statues, see Laird 2015). That the erection of statues with inscribed bases honored and marked a person of worth or an act of generosity for others to remember, looking backward through time, is no new observation. That these monuments and events acted in the time of their pledging or creation to define contemporary political and social relationships and obligations among elites, nonelites, and their communities has also been remarked upon (Fejfer 2008: 63–70; Fejfer 2002: 250–54; Stewart 2003: 79, 120, 267; Ng 2016: 241–46; see Ma 2007, 2013 for the Hellenistic period). The implications of these monuments for past and present are much better represented in scholarship than those for the future. Here, therefore, I offer a brief example of how we might bring a fresh perspective to by-now-familiar discourses on statuary and monuments as social currency by revisiting some cases that I had considered before from the cognitive perspectives of learning and recollection, but now examine with explicit consideration of how such monuments both are instruments of and instrumentalize prospective cognition. Let us tackle the connected issues of social and enactive cognition first. Public honorific statues were not complete without their accompanying inscriptions that identified the subject of the portrait. Thus, like publicly or—in the case of domestic and synagogue graffiti—somewhat limitedly visible and legible inscriptions and published historical texts, these urban monuments both mediate and facilitate the exchange of information by which a city comes to know and potentially to remember in the future its elite benefactors. But, as I have noted elsewhere, it is not simply the passive storage and display of information in these dedicatory inscriptions that qualify these statues as cognitive artifacts. Their appearance and their altered appearance through the reinscription of their bases for rededication (a practice referred to as metagraphe) engendered significant cognitive activity in their viewers (Ng 2019b: 363–67, and in progress; for discussion of metagraphe aside from cognition considerations, see, e.g., Platt 2007; Shear 2007; Ng 2016; Blanck 1969; Keesling 2010). For example, from the Athenian Acropolis, a fifth-century BCE base for a statue originally dedicated to Athena Parthenos by a permanent resident who had fought in the Persian Wars for Athens and gained citizenship was reinscribed and rededicated in the early first century CE to a Roman consul. The new inscription was added just below the original so that both texts had to be seen and read together (Figure 9.1; Keesling 2017: 124–30; Shear 2007: 280–81; Blanck 1969: no. B30). The marks of erasure and recarving on this statue base, and many others, are the sensory stimuli that drive a first-century CE viewer’s mind to make sense of new and unexpected information. How can the new names on an old statue

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Figure 9.1 Drawing of reinscribed fifth-century BCE statue base from the Athenian Acropolis. Drawing reproduced from A. Rumpf. 1964. “Zu den Tyrannenmörden.” Source: In Festschrift Eugen von Mercklin, eds. E. Hormann-Wedeking and B. Segall, 142, Abb. 5d. Waldassen/Bavaria: Stiftland-Verlang. Public domain.

fit into existing knowledge and beliefs about one’s fellow citizens and town? As a result of this enactive cognitive trigger, new knowledge and beliefs are formed to minimize future surprises, or prediction errors (see Popkin and Ng’s Introduction in this volume, and Seider, in this volume, on predictive error minimization). Athens, once autonomous and the leader of the Greek world, must now be understood from this reworked statue monument as subject to and seeking the favor of Roman rulers. These honorific statues were intentionally displayed in locations of highest traffic, and were awarded through civic deliberation. They thus could not but have been seen, noticed, and thought with and about by the people of their cities, individually and socially (Stewart 2003: 136–40; Fejfer 2008: 51–63; for cognitive implications of statues’ urban placement, see Ng 2019b: 366). How, then, do these enactive cognitive partners connect to prospection? I propose that these public statue monuments, including their inscribed bases, represent cognitively offloaded intentions. As Jeremy Tanner has noted, the granting of an honorific portrait by the governing bodies of a city did not simply serve to praise a notable citizen for some service but also “sets up obligations for the future on the part of the honorand to reciprocate the gift in appropriate ways” (2000: 26; see Ma regarding the pressurizing language of the inscriptions on Hellenistic statue bases, 2007: 213–17). That pressure would have been even more keenly felt if the honorand paid him- or herself for the statue monument and its erection (Stewart 2008: 102, 104). Thus, the statue could be seen as offloaded intention, a reminder akin to a string tied around the finger, to both the honorand to “reciprocate” through

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further generosity to the city and to the community to hold the donor to account. A specific prospective memory—to remember to give back to the city—is given material form. After the installation of the statue monument in a prominent location, the sight of the statue and its inscription would jog the memory of the demos and boule that voted to grant the award to expect more contributions to come. For the honorand of the statue monument, the sight of the portrait would serve to remind him or her that whatever was promised must be given. Therefore, public statue monuments marked a time in the past, exerted a pressure in the now, and anticipated a specific event in the future. In fact, this enculturated use of honorific statues as a reminder arguably finds a parallel in public inscriptions recording a pledged benefaction. For example, the boule of the Lycian city of Oenoanda called for a stele inscribed with the extensive dossier related to the foundation of a new, eponymous festival by a local citizen named Iulius Demosthenes to be erected next to the honorific statue that was previously awarded to this patron for the food market he had already built for his city. The publication of these decrees so close to an embodiment of Demosthenes’ identity and earlier generosity would likely have been a compelling reminder to Oenoandans and to Demosthenes himself—who paid for the stele to be erected—to see the foundation through. It is unknown if that earlier statue was granted in anticipation of or after the completion of the food market (for this dossier, see Wörrle 1988; Mitchell 1990: ll. 95–98; Ng 2015: 115; Ng 2019b: 366–67). The granting of public honorific statues as part of civic participation also highlights what Maria Brandimonte and Donatella Ferrante have called a “prosocial prospective memory.” Their research suggests that prospective memory is enhanced when there is an “importance effect” for a task to be completed; when there is benefit to a broader group rather than to just the individual agent; and when a stranger was present during a task that an agent had to remember to perform (2008). The motivation to do something in the future that benefits others can be driven by altruism or simply because “[p]eople care about the opinion others have of them, that is, they care about their own self-image, and this concern contributes to pro-social behavior in a substantial way” (Brandimonte and Ferrante 2008: 356). Brandimonte and Ferrante postulate that, while prospective memory for a directed task is in fact negatively impacted when someone charged to do a future task works alone and is given “an explicit personal benefit,” when working in the presence of a stranger and when the completion of a future task would avoid damage to others, prospective memory is enhanced. The implication here is not that Roman benefactors would have forgotten to complete their donations if they were given a statue monument when alone in their bedrooms. Rather, it is that the granting of public honorific statues in a civic context creates prosocial motivations and behaviors that make it more likely for the pledge to be fulfilled. Therefore, not only is the honorific statue monument itself an enculturated instrument of prospective memory, but so is the social process by which it was awarded. That same process is also an example of schematic collective future thinking (see Orlin, this volume). When an honorand has appropriately met his or her obligation for the statue that had been awarded, the portrait monument then

Prospection in the wild 161 becomes differently retrospective and prospective. Now, it commemorates both the donor and the successful benefaction from a time in the past. Such statues no longer looked to a specific event in the future. Standing in their tens and hundreds throughout the city, however, these retrospective commemorations reflect a sense of collective continuity, a schematic vision of a future in which the city would continue to thrive with the generosity of its notable sons and daughters (for collective continuity and schematic future vision, see Szpunar and Szpunar 2016: 380). The understanding of public statue monuments as the vehicle for both commemorating a shared past and embodying a shared vision of the future could also explain why these monuments were so prolific in the Roman world, such that they had to be cleared away from overcrowded spaces (e.g., Livy 40.51.3; Cass. Dio. 60.25.2–3; Stewart 2003: 128–26; Fejfer 2008: 63–65). Indeed, the clearing of old statues to make room for new ones is a simulation and prediction of the schematic future—in which there would be no shortage of generous benefactors—enacted within urban space.8 Understanding statue honors and their award process as vehicles of collective schematic future thinking also explains the consternation felt by people such as Dio Chrysostom, who inveighs against both the practice of recarving statue bases in Rhodes for rededication to Roman officials and the Rhodians who engaged in this practice (Or. 31). Dio decries the breaking of a social contract between cities and their elite citizens, because, he asks, who in their right mind would spend their wealth on the city if their only tangible reward could be snatched away and recycled for someone else (Or. 31.12–16, 22)? It is not only the system of elite benefaction that supported civic infrastructure and basic functions that Dio sees in danger. In his estimation, the sight of a recarved statue base should provoke fear for a culture and autonomous way of life whose continuity was now in doubt. Dio claims that the dissolution of Greek civic systems of obligation and reward represented by metagraphe has “undermined every institution whose stability rested upon the same premises” (Or. 31.23).9 He decries the loss of a shared vision of the future in which prestigious Greek cities should continue to resist Roman meddling, asking his audience, “are you Rhodians so afraid of all your casual visitors [i.e., Roman officials] that you think if you fail to set up some one person in bronze, you will lose your freedom?” (Or. 31.112). While his Rhodian audience seems to have acknowledged and moved to assert some agency in a schematic future of Roman imperial authority, Dio chafes—rhetorically, at least—at the obsolescence of his own future vision of Greek autonomy. Roman honorific statues, thus, commemorated the past, conditioned the present, and shaped the collective vision of the future (Ng in progress). Prospective memory cognition, and the imbrication of the individual and collective, could also be socially extended in other ways. Shaun Gallagher has proposed a model of socially extended cognition (Gallagher 2013; Gallagher and Crisafi 2009; Crisafi and Gallagher 2010) that is not limited to shared information and “standard” enactivity (i.e., cognition driven by sensory interaction with the external world). He argues instead for a “liberal” view of distributed cognition that pushes beyond that articulated by Andy Clark and David Chalmers with Otto’s notebook

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(1998; see Popkin and Ng, this volume, for further discussion of Otto’s notebook). In Gallagher’s view, cognition can be distributed to institutions as well—what he and Anthony Crisafi (2009) called “mental institutions.” Gallagher explains: We create these institutions via our own (shared) mental processes, or we inherit them as products constituted in mental processes already accomplished by others. We then engage with these institutions—and in doing so, participate with others—to do further cognitive work. These socially established institutions sometimes constitute, sometimes facilitate, and sometimes impede, but in each case enable and shape our cognitive interactions with other people. (Gallagher 2013: 4) The specific example of a mental institution used by Gallagher is that of the legal system, which exists as a result of human social cognition within specific historical contexts and then continues to shape how groups think and act. Legal precedents and the frameworks for how to deliberate on specific matters are equivalent to Otto’s notebook in that, without access to them, it is impossible for a society to arrive at valid actions and conclusions. Menary’s advocacy for cognitive integration discussed earlier is in part to argue against Gallagher’s framework, as he believes that institutions cannot constitute cognition but stand as systems that enculturate specific “cognitive practices” that “individuals learn and acquire . . . during development and many of these practices will be collaborative in nature” (2013: 27). Roman period evidence clearly supports the understanding of an enculturated range of cognitive practices that developed as Roman culture and the Roman Empire themselves developed. The ways through which Romans thought about time—time that was and time yet to be—are embedded in history and culture, as in the examples discussed earlier in this chapter. I would argue also, however, that while Gallagher’s proposal that the legal system can constitute cognition may go too far for Roman evidence to follow, there is value and relevance in his contention that “[p]articipatory sense making is always shaped by super-individual norms and institutional practices” (Gallagher 2013: 5). As a heuristic framework for the study of Roman spectacular foundations named for individuals, for example, an awareness of the imbrication of social and material interaction within civic and contractual contexts can show how Roman prospection could be structured through other institutional practices beyond the civic granting of statues just discussed, which again connected individual and collective agency and future thinking. As athletic and musical festivals and processions are, by their performative nature, ephemeral, our evidence for the private foundations established to support these events survives in epigraphic and other textual records. The reiterative nature of these festivals, taking place at predetermined intervals of several weeks to several years, obviously implicates an extended temporality that projects from the moment the spectacles are endowed into the future. Yet the dynamics of these foundations are different from those of the honorific portraits discussed previously. Instead of a city using the award of public statues and the statues themselves as

Prospection in the wild 163 enculturated future-thinking mechanisms to shape the futures of both the community and the benefactor, these private spectacular foundations reveal benefactors predicting and planning for future personal and collective scenarios and then using contractual mechanisms to define and control what a city might do in an openended future. The inscriptions of festival and other spectacular endowments record the establishment—per the wishes of the patrons and the agreement of the city— of the kinds of sacrifices, competitions, and participants an endowed festival or procession must include and how often and at what times of year they should take place, who the organizers would be, and how much money would be given as the original endowment. There is also evidence from different sources of the penalties that would be assessed against the city entrusted with the endowment should it fail to carry out the actions laid out in the gift decree. These penalties range from fines to be paid to the temple of Artemis in the case of an endowed procession in Ephesus (Ng 2018: 70; Wankel 1979: no. 27, 106–16, 315–25, 358–64) to the return of endowment principal to the heirs of the benefactor should a city fail to mount the festival as stipulated by the terms of gift (Scaevola, Dig. 33.2.17, Replies, Book 3; Ng 2015: 112; for further examples of endowments and juristic opinions from the Digest supporting the preservation of donor stipulations, see Ng 2015: 112–16).10 As I have said elsewhere, foundations of festivals and civic rituals, such as the parade of icons through early second-century CE Ephesus funded by C. Vibius Salutaris, are commemorative in their intention (Ng 2018; see also Rogers 1991 for the foundation). The provisions made to ensure a city’s ongoing fulfillment of a donor’s wish to be thusly celebrated into the future—one in which the benefactor would no longer be alive—reflects fundamentally the same intensely personal desire for future remembrance that led members of the Dura Europos synagogue to invoke divine wrath against those who ignore their graffiti’s entreaties, as deftly argued by Stern in this volume. What differs between these situations in the execution of similar intentions is that the spectacular endowments and relevant legal opinions reflect not just a personal vision of the future enmeshed in a collective one but also the attempt to extend one’s agency into a time yet to be through institutional instruments of contracts, financial endowments, and penalties that could shape and constrict the collective future. The community will, for as long as the endowment provides adequate money, hold games and events according to the mutual agreement of benefactor and city; if the city’s intention should change, the published inscription of the agreement would exert social pressure to dissuade a change in action. The threat of a loss of income via penalties serves as an additional deterrent to deviate from the vision of the future that had been, at one moment in time, shared by all parties (Ng 2015: 113). Even when a town sought simply to return a gift of money to a donor’s heirs, legal opinion supported the donor’s original intention and plan to be remembered in the future. In one case, a man had left a legacy to a town specifically to fund a commemorative spectacle; when it was found that the type of spectacle he had stipulated was not legally permitted, the town and the man’s heirs were directed to spend the sum of money on a different form of commemoration, rather than let the money revert from the town to the heirs (Modestinus 33.2.16, Replies Book 9; see Ng 2015: 117). The collective

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future of the city, which might have found more pressing or at least more desirable ways to spend the endowment funds, was controlled and perhaps curtailed (at least in theory) by an individual’s socially extended future thinking. Looking beyond the evidentiary archives of endowed festivals and honorific statues for future avenues of research, we might also consider how manubial building—that is, building funded by war spoils—in Rome from the republic through the empire were also attempts by individuals including emperors to shape both their own futures and that of their city and state.

Conclusion It seems appropriate to close this chapter with a brief consideration of commemoration, retrospection, and prospection from our modern context. As I have argued here, cognition about past, present, and future are extended to the physical world and enacted by our interaction with the visual culture and artifacts surrounding us. What stands as a monument to a time or person in the past is always, at every stage, an object of multiple temporalities and intentions. The raging debate and legal battles surrounding statues of Confederate soldiers in public spaces in the United States demonstrate the urgency of such an analytical perspective (see Orlin, in this volume, for discussion of artwork commemorating the Black lives lost to police violence). The majority of the monuments honoring figures such as Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson were erected not during or immediately after the Civil War but during the white supremacist backlash to Reconstruction and in the Jim Crow era (Lieb and Webster 2015: 11). These monuments did not simply commemorate a past, but also made a statement about a future in which the racial inequalities for which the Confederacy had fought to preserve would again dominate; they embodied the intention for a future in which white supremacy would continue to hold sway. As Alessandra Tanesini has argued, such monuments facilitate the retrieval of a selective account of the past, resulting in retrieval-induced forgetting of the complete historical circumstances and thus “promoting a strong ignorance” in the public (Tanesini 2018: 214; see also Popkin 2019: 384–85, 394–95 for retrievalinduced forgetting in a Roman context). But fear, anger, and an understanding of perpetual racial oppression are also the cognitive effects of these monuments. The efforts to remove these monuments are not, as some would argue, refusals of retrospection. Rather, they are embodied collective future thinking, to shape and bring about a future in which Black Americans can live in the full equality for which they had fought and for which they continue to fight.

Notes 1 I would like to acknowledge my immense gratitude to Maggie L. Popkin, who invited me to participate in the joint AIA/SCS session on prospective memory that she organized at the 2019 Annual Meeting, co-organized with me our SBL session on prospection and material culture later in the same year, and was the best coeditor and collaborator that I could have hoped for on this volume. I learned so much from her and benefited

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2

3

4 5 6

7

8 9 10

from her wonderful editorial input on our jointly authored Introduction to this volume and on this chapter. The discussions of embodiment and embodied cognition in this chapter and volume are distinct from recent phenomenological and art historical work on embodied objects (Gaifman, Platt, and Squire 2018) that refer to objects—often anthropomorphic—with which humans engage. The scholarship on distributed cognition and 4E cognition all touch, to various degrees, on socially distributed or socially extended cognition (see Introduction, in this volume). For further discussions of socially extended cognitions, see, e.g., Cuc, Koppel, and Hirst 2007 on socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF); Sutton et al. 2010: 545–54 for a philosophical survey of socially extended memory; Carter et al. 2018 for collected approaches to socially extended epistemology, which focuses on how “knowledge can be collectively realized by groups or communities of individuals” (2) including through interaction, collaboration, and material culture. In this sense, though Menary does not make the connection himself, cognitive interaction is quite similar to MET in stressing the long-term coevolution of human cognition and external cognitive partners; see Popkin and Ng, this volume. See Mackey 2019 for an example of Roman social cognition, as psychological imperatives for imitation of others aids in the perpetuation of Roman religious ritual. De Bruin and Michael suggest that social interactions may allow people to “pool together cognitive resources in order to detect errors all the better, and to ensure that the common ground necessary for successful joint decision making and joint action is sustained” (2021: 14), though they believe this hypothesis demands further testing. Theiner, Allen, and Goldstone (2010) consider their “extended mind thesis” of socially extended cognition to be a “special case” of the extended-mind hypothesis proposed by Clark and Chalmers 1998 (see Introduction, this volume). There is considerable debate in philosophy of mind as to whether cognition can be socially extended while each person in a multitude retains their own representations (see Gallotti and Huebner 2017 for a survey of different positions). I thank Maggie L. Popkin for this insightful observation. Translations are from Loeb Classical Library. See Ng 2018 and Ng 2019b for the ways in which reiterative interactions with public honorific portraits and periodic spectacles could have promoted long-term knowledge about the honorands and patrons through enactive cognitive engagement and the repeated retrieval and re-encoding of information. Such cognitive effects are argued to have mitigating effects on the uncertainties surrounding recycling of statue bases and the financing of spectacles. Therefore, they stand as further examples of externalized intention for the future and enactivity.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed by “n” indicate a note. 4E cognition 7–10, 18, 115–16; embedded cognition 11–13; embodied cognition 8, 10, 13, 14, 19, 115, 150, 151, 153; enactive cognition 8–10, 150, 151, 153, 159; extended cognition 7–8, 13, 19; radical enactivism 9–10; socially extended cognition 154–6, 157, 161–2, 165n7; socially situated cognition 11–13, 156 Achilles 2 Aeneas 3, 6 Agrippa, Marcus 61, 62 Agrippina the Elder 50, 51–3, 155 Amores (Ovid) 31, 32–3, 34 Annals (Tacitus) 19, 37–53; Germanicus in 19, 37–8, 39, 40, 41–5, 46, 47–50, 52, 53; Tiberius in 19, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41–2, 43, 44–6, 47, 48–50, 51, 52, 53 Antonine Itinerary 125, 126 Antoninus Pius 65 Antony, Mark 60 Apollo 2 Aquae Apollinares 113, 115, 116, 121, 123, 151, 152; see also Vicarello Ariadne 2, 7 Ascanius 3 Athenaios 24 Athena Parthenos 158 Augustus 19, 23, 44, 52, 119, 121; death of 47–8, 69; Ludi Saeculares of 54–7, 55, 60–2, 63, 64, 65–9, 70–1, 83, 156; and pompa circensis 34 Bath Pan 130–1, 130

Callixeinos of Rhodes 24, 26 Carmen Saeculare (Horace) 54, 61, 71n4 catacombs, Rome 133–4, 136, 137–47, 157 Cato the Elder 67, 75–8 Chalmers, David 8, 126 Cicero 1, 2, 15 Clark, Andy 8, 46–7, 48, 52, 126, 128 Claudius 48, 65–6, 69 clay tablets (Linear B) 9, 70 cognitive archaeology 9, 13 cognitive ecology 11, 14 collective continuity 58–9, 60, 68–9, 161 collective future thought 15, 30, 57–60, 61, 93, 157; and honorific portraits 160–1; and Ludi Saeculares 58, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70–1 collective memory 12, 15, 27, 29, 30, 31, 56, 57–8, 156 Compitalia 73, 84 Confederate soldiers, statues of 164 consciousness 8 Constantine 71 Cottius, Marcus Julius 119 cultural memory 15, 23, 27–8, 29, 30 Damasus I 143, 146, 157 default mode network (DMN) 7, 13, 14 Dido 3 Dio Chrysostom 161 Dionysios of Halikarnassos 23, 24, 25–6, 27, 28–9, 30, 31, 33–4, 58 distributed cognition 7, 14, 18, 70, 154, 161–2, 165n3; see also 4E cognition

Index domestic shrines 73, 74–9, 76–7, 84, 90–1, 152 Domitian 65–6, 71n8, 116, 122 donor inscriptions in synagogues 98–9, 100, 101–2, 110 Drusus, Nero Claudius 44, 52 Drusus Julius Caesar 41, 43, 48, 49, 50 Dura Europos 99, 100, 102–7, 104, 105, 109–10, 152, 163 earlobe, and Roman ideas of memory 2 embedded cognition 11–13 embodied cognition 8, 10, 13, 14, 19, 115, 150, 151, 153 enactive cognition 8–10, 150, 151, 153, 159 enculturated cognition 154–5 endowments 157, 163–4 enslaved people 74, 75–6, 80, 82, 83, 85, 91n2, 152 epigrams 146 episodic foresight see episodic future thinking episodic future simulation see episodic future thinking episodic future thinking 5–7, 12–13, 18, 115 episodic memory 5–6, 7, 12–13, 30, 40, 58, 126 extended cognition 7–8, 13, 19 extended mind hypothesis (EMH) 7–8, 70, 165n7 Fabius Pictor, Quintus 19, 20, 23, 25, 26–9, 30–1, 33–5, 58 festivals 73, 84, 157, 162–3; see also Ludi Saeculares Festus 84 Floyd, George 58 Fratres Arvales 83 funerary inscriptions 87 funerary monuments 87–90, 88–9 future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) 7, 10, 12, 18, 102, 115–16, 139; and synagogue inscriptions 97, 108; and Vicarello milestone beakers 122–7 Gades (Cádiz) 113, 115, 116, 117, 119–20, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 151 Gaius Silanus 55 Gaul 16 Germanicus, death of 17, 19, 37, 39, 155–6; arrival of Germanicus’ ashes 50–2, 53; and death of Augustus 47–8; funeral

191

44–5; mourning 19, 38, 45–6, 47, 52, 155; and oracle of Apollo at Claros 37–8; and Piso 49–50; and Tiberius 40, 44–6, 48–9; triumph in Germany 41–3 Gilbert, Daniel 1, 3, 13, 41 Globe Theatre 14 gold glass 133–4, 147–8, 157; and ancestor veneration 138–47; architectural motifs in 142–3; borders on 143–5; edges of 136, 148n4; life and death, connecting 136–8; reflective materials of 141–2; vessel bases of 140, 141, 142; visual properties of 139–40 graffiti 17, 19, 73, 91n9, 91–2n10, 92n19, 152, 153; rites of passage and 85–7, 86, 90; in synagogues 98, 102–10, 104, 105, 108, 155; vows and 81–3; see also inscriptions Greek mythology: Achilles 2; Apollo 2; Ariadne 2, 7; Hector 2; Theseus 7 group identity, and collective future thought 58–60 habitus 23, 35 Halbwachs, Maurice 12, 156 handwriting 153–4 Hatra 107–8, 108, 109 Hector 2 Herculaneum 73, 78, 80, 86–7; House of the Bicentenary 81–2 Hercules 123, 127 Herodotus 21n2 historical cognitive science 12, 13–15, 18, 150 historical-collective memory 27 History of Distributed Cognition Project 14 Homo prospectus 1, 56, 150 honorific portraits 157, 158–61, 159 Horace 54, 61, 69 hyper-reality 29 Iberia 4, 16, 113, 117, 123; see also Spain initiation 84, 85 inscriptions 9, 17, 19, 56–7, 69, 70, 152; of festivals 163; funerary 87; and honorific portraits 158–61, 159; of Ludi Saeculares 54–6, 55, 61–5, 63, 66–9, 70–1, 83, 155, 156; as part of Roman memory system 70; in synagogues 93–111, 152; on Vicarello milestone beakers 113, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124; and vows 80, 83, 152; see also graffiti

192

Index

intention 6, 10, 30, 41, 97, 115, 152, 157; and action, relationship between 78; metaintention 5, 18, 134–48; Roman religion and 73–9, 83 itineraria 20, 113, 114, 116–17, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–6, 127, 128, 151 Jackson, Stonewall 164 Jews 4, 19, 20, 93–111 Julia Augusta 62 Jupiter 3 Lares 73, 74, 75, 80, 82, 84, 85 Lee, Robert E. 164 Levant 4 Linear B tablets 9, 70 Ludi Saeculares 17, 19, 54, 60–1, 83; Antoninus Pius 65; archaism in prayers 68; Augustus 54–7, 55, 60–2, 63, 64, 65–9, 70–1, 156; Claudius 65, 66; and collective future thought 58, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70–1; Domitian 65–6; inscriptions 54–6, 55, 61–5, 63, 66–9, 70–1, 155, 156; Philip I 65; prayers 62, 66–9; rhetoric of saeculum 69; sacrifices 60, 61, 62, 66–8, 69; schematic future 68–9; Septimius Severus 62–5, 63, 64, 71, 156; sequence of ceremonies 61; specific future 61–6 Ludi Tarentini 60 Malafouris, Lambros 9, 70 Martial 66 martyrs, Christian 134, 138–47 Marx, Karl 35 material engagement theory (MET) 9 memory 15, 39, 97; collective memory 12, 15, 29, 30, 31, 56, 57, 156; cultural 15, 23, 27–8, 29, 30; episodic 5–6, 7, 12–13, 30, 40, 58, 126; historicalcollective memory 27; and intentions 78; location of 2; memory studies 15–16, 39; prospective 2, 3, 4–5, 12, 44, 56–7, 134, 160; retrospective 30, 44, 124, 126, 151; semantic 6, 21, 30, 58; social 31 mental institutions 162 Mercury 3, 6 metacognition 5 metaintention 5, 18, 134–48 milestone beakers, Vicarello 113, 114, 115, 116–20, 117, 129–30, 151, 155;

biographies of 120–2; and mental time travel 122–7; and physical interaction 128–9; as retrospective souvenirs 113, 115 mnemon 2 monitor 2, 3, 5 Nero 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 4, 13 Noë, Alva 8, 10 nomenclator 2, 3, 5 Numisia Maximilla, 62 Oenoanda 160 Ovid 23, 31, 32–3, 34 paintings, on walls 73, 74, 75, 79, 80–1, 81, 110, 121, 143, 152 Parentalia 73 paterfamilias 74, 76, 152 Paulinus 147 Penates 73 Philip I 65 Piso, Cn. Calpurnius 38, 49–50 planning 6, 10, 30, 41, 97, 110, 115, 152 Pliny the Elder 2, 68 pompa circensis 17, 19, 23, 24–7, 26, 58; authority of Fabius’ description of 28; as commemorated past 27; as cultural memory resource 27–8, 29; historical reality of 29, 30; as predictive cultural memory resource 30–3 Pompeii 73, 74, 78–9, 80–1, 82, 84, 85–6, 92n22; House of L. Cornelius Diadumenus 80; House of M. Pupius Rufus 86; House of Philocalus 80–1, 81; House of the Menander 74, 76–7, 78–9; House of the Priest Amandus 86; House of Trebius Valens 85; Praedia of Julia Felix 79 portable sundials 124, 126 prayers 62, 66–9, 78, 80 prediction 6, 10, 30, 41, 97, 115, 152 predictive processing 10–11, 18, 19, 38, 39–40, 52–3; and death of Germanicus 46–52; prediction error minimization (PEM) 10–11, 40, 45 present future 40 priming 30 processions 23–35, 75, 162, 163 promises 2, 3, 4, 80, 82, 83, 160 pro-social prospective memory 160 prospective cultural memory 23, 29–35

Index prospective memory 2, 3, 4–5, 12, 44, 134, 160; aids 2; definition of 56–7; metacognition 5, 134; pro-social 160; see also 4E cognition Protestantism 14 Ptolemy Philadelphos II 24 Quintilian 1–2, 15 rabbinic literature 94–5 radical enactivism 9–10 raw votives 130 refrigerium 146, 148 remembering-imagining system 29 retrieval-induced forgetting 164 retrospective memory 30, 44, 124, 126, 151 rites of institution 84 rites of passage 84–90 Roman memory studies 15–16 Roman religion 15, 20, 73; domestic worship 74, 75–7; intentions 73–9, 83; Lares 73, 74, 75, 80, 82, 84, 85; Penates 73; prayers 62, 66–9, 78, 80; rites of passage 84–90; rituals 61, 64, 66–8, 73, 74–8, 75, 79–90; sacrifices 60, 61, 62, 66–8, 69; sanctuaries 80; simulation 74; vows 79–83 Rome 2, 5, 59, 137, 151; Catacomb of Commodilla 144; Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter 144; Catacomb of San Callisto 143, 144; Crypt of the Popes 143, 144, 146; fourth century 139, 157; map of Agrippa 128; roads to 113, 121; Vicarello milestone beakers and 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128 Rudge Cup 129 sacrifices 60, 61–2, 66–8, 69, 77 Salutaris, C. Vibius 163 sanctuaries 80 Secular Games see Ludi Saeculares semantic future thinking 6, 7, 18, 115 semantic memory 6, 21, 30, 58 Seneca 2, 4, 13, 69 Septimius Severus: Arch of 156; Ludi Saeculares of 19, 62–5, 63, 64, 71, 156 shrines 73, 74–9, 75, 76–7, 84, 85, 90–1, 152 simulacrum 29, 31, 33, 34, 35 simulation 5–6, 10, 13, 29–30, 41, 97, 115, 138–9, 152 simulation system 7, 126–7

193

situated cognition 11–12 socially extended future thinking 154–6, 157, 164 socially situated cognition 11–13, 156 social memory 31 Spain 113, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128; see also Iberia spectacles 162–4 Statius 23, 31, 33–4, 66 Strabo 117 Strong, Melodee 59 Suetonius 65, 69 Susiya 99, 100 synagogue inscriptions 93–4, 110–11, 152; donor inscriptions 98–9, 100, 101–2, 110; future memory and 96–8; graffiti 98, 102–10, 104, 105, 108, 155; Jews and memory, common views of 94–5 Tacitus 17, 19, 20; Annals 19, 37–53 Terentia Flavola 62 Theseus 7 Tiberius 19, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41–6, 47, 48–50, 52, 156 Vegetius 125 Venus 3 Vergil 2–3, 23, 69; Aeneid 3; Georgics 31–2, 33, 34 Vestal Virgins 62; Numisia Maximilla, 62; Terentia Flavola 62 Via Augusta 117, 118, 119, 121 Via Flaminia 117 Vicarello 20, 113–31; Aquae Apollinares 113, 115, 116, 121, 123, 151, 152; milestone breakers 113–31, 114, 117, 151, 155; see also milestone beakers, Vicarello vilica 75–7, 78 Vinicius, L. 117, 127; denarius of 118 visual processing 8–9 votives: raw votives 130; votive paintings 80–1, 81; votive vessels 116, 122, 130–1 vows 79–83, 152 Wilson, Timothy 1, 3, 13, 41 writing 10, 21, 70, 74, 82–3, 86, 108–9, 111, 126, 153–4; see also graffiti; handwriting; inscriptions Zeno of Verona 146