June
22
/ 2016
The ancient Roman decree of damnatio memoriae (“damnation of one’s memory”) was a mark of great disgrace and a punishment, deemed worse than execution, for an ancient Roman. The object of the punishment was to cancel every trace of the condemned person from the life of Rome, as if they had never existed, in order to preserve the honor of the city. The methods involved, but were not limited to, scratching the name of the condemned person from inscriptions, abusing the statues of the person, mutilating or painting over their likeness and destroying results of their labor such as writings, buildings and so on. From a modern perspective, we may not fully grasp the gravity of this punishment – We
