| This dissertation, "Vestigia Cladis: The Afterlife of Defeat in the Roman Historical Imagination," considers the ways in which the Roman Republic responded to its military defeats from the Second Punic War (218-202 BC) through the end of the second century BC. Responses to defeat during the Republic have often been presented in generalizing and moral terms, such as praise for Roman fortitude and self-sacrifice. I suggest that Roman responses should instead be viewed as the particular production of individual generations, and thus that the range of responses varied with time and historical circumstances; the varied commemorative presentations of defeats that we find in Roman historical writing through the centuries illustrate the ideological needs of their producers, but do not necessarily reflect contemporary reactions to defeats. I discuss this process as the "rewriting" of defeats within larger historical narratives of triumphs, hegemonic expansion, and the development of an idealized "Roman" character.;I consider the defeats of the Second Punic War and their contemporary consequences for Rome's inherited civic, religious, and economic systems; the literary presentations of the war and its commemoration in the second century by Latin poets and historians, Rome's elite families, and the Achaean historian Polybius; the defeats of the second century, and the evolving relationship between these defeats and the celebrations of the triumph in that period; and the commemoration of civil wars during the first century BC at Rome. I employ primarily literary sources, augmented by material evidence (such as inscriptions) where possible. |
