Palimpsest cities of the Roman Mediterranean
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Lenski, Noel
Abstract
This project shows how Roman culture was negotiated through the destruction and rebuilding of conquered cities. It operates in the space between two perspectives: that of the Roman conqueror and that of civic communities in cities that had once been violently destroyed. Part One traces Roman actions against rival cities in conjunction with the formation of Roman myths about their own history in the fourth and third centuries BCE. Even in this early period, the construction of Roman identity was intimately connected to forms of intellectual and cultural violence which erased and overwrote the communal memory of civic groups. Case studies of cities destroyed in the mid-third century BCE—Falerii and Volsinii—support these observations while their newly rebuilt iterations provide insight into how constructions of “Romanness” were imposed upon, and then appropriated and transformed by newly established civic groups. Part Two focuses on a later historical period, the ‘long’ second century BCE when the increased scale of conquest subjected Roman memory culture to new pressures. Case studies of Carthage and Corinth, both destroyed in 146 BCE, show that communities throughout the Empire found themselves at the intersection of competing historical experiences—the narrative perpetuated by the conqueror and the reality that memories of the past continued to inhabit their ancient civic spaces. Part Three turns to the high and late imperial periods with a case study of Byzantium which traces how the city’s foundation legends were transformed over the course of two Roman destructions and refoundations. Viewing destroyed cities as both literary and material palimpsests, this project explores how cities renowned for their demise became formative spaces in which communities negotiated past and present identities.
Recommended Citation
Hurt, Emily Lucille, "Palimpsest cities of the Roman Mediterranean" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 956.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/956
