People Should Know When They Are Conquered: Memory, Conquest and Community in the Roman Imperial West

This project investigates the role played by memories and memorialisation in Roman conquest and its subsequent position in community formation in the Roman imperial West. Conquest was memorialised through literary accounts, monumentalisation of the processes of conquest and resistance in the commemoration of battles and campaigns, and in symbolic representations of Roman culture and power. This can be seen in victory arches, trophies, on coins, and through institutional representations of Roman hegemony. Conquest transformed the landscape through large-scale Roman military engineering and the damage caused by warfare. Reading landscape as memory points to the scale of transformation that followed conquest. Using these memorial traces, I show that knowledge of cultural memory’s role as a cornerstone of community formulation is crucial to our understanding of the effects of conquest on the conquered communities of the Roman west during and after conquest. Provincial communities were positioned as part of the imperial Roman community through cultural memory. Collective and cultural memories are hybrid, as memories of the colonised are present amongst memories of the colonisers in post-conquest spaces. Consequently, memory was contentious and formed an ideological battleground during the extended process of conquest.

This is first examined using Tacitus’ Agricola, a text within which Tacitus shows a remarkable grasp of the concept of collective and cultural memories. The account of the Battle of Mons Graupius demonstrates that memory was central in the violence of conquest and resistance to it. The link between memory, landscape and community is strongly attested in the aftermath of this battle. Discussion then moves to a demonstration of how memorial forms such as tombstones were key to developing an understanding of how memory generated communal integration in colonial centres, showing the development of local communities and their memorial frameworks. As memories were generated in imperial spaces and through imperial forms, the local memorial culture shifted and with it the sense of self of these provincial communities. The ways people were memorialised, both in text and iconography, illuminate these aspects of local change and integration, alongside showing the hybridity of communities in the Roman west. This argument moves to a discussion of the Teutoburg disaster. The desire to commemorate Teutoburg by the Germans and the Romans lead to ongoing conflict, throughout which control over the battlefield and its memory was a central concern. Control of the memory was used by both sides to reaffirm a sense of community and to determine belonging to cultural and political groups. The final two chapters demonstrate the use of victory monuments to secure territorial claims and renegotiate the political and cultural geographies of conquered lands. Monuments, through their placement, iconography and inscriptions were used to position conquered communities within a nexus of imperial space, power and time.