[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
“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.” (3) As Popkin and Ng state in their introduction, the eight essays in this anthology explore a specific form of future thinking. They claim that people in the Roman World—defined as homines prospecti—sought to preserve events of their personal or collective past by shaping the future memory of them, and they explore the question of what strategies people developed to remember in the future what they had once set out to do. The media of this form of prospective memory are material objects—historiographic and epigraphic texts as well as images and objects—which function as externalized retrospective memory and at the same time as prospective memory, and to which the authors furthermore attribute agency.
This volume strives to explore and reexamine , with new approaches, previous discussions in historical, philological, and archaeological research: Why did individuals, groups, or entire communities donate monuments and inscriptions in both private and public spaces? With what intention did individual authors compose their writings and how were these received intertextually? What functions did individual images or (inscribed) objects have for their owners? Given this ample scope, the topics of the essays turn out to be as diverse as their methodology. The authors make use of various neuropsychological models from cognitive science which mostly reaffirm common knowledge, drawn from everyday experience as well as from phenomenological and historical reflection: among them the concepts of “prospective memory”, of “episodic” or “semantic future thinking”, of “future-oriented mental time travel” or of “predictive processing”.
The key reference for most authors is the so-called 4E Cognition Theory which distinguishes four forms of cognition: future thinking is “embodied” since sensory perception by the brain involves the whole body. It is “extended” since memory strategies not only rely on brain processes but also make use of other body parts and co-agents in the external world (wrapping thread around fingers); this includes e.g. writing, visualizing and objectifying. It is “enactive” because the objects of the physical world activate mind and body independently of each other. And it is “embedded” because future thinking takes place in social, political, and historical contexts.
Setting aside enactive cognition, which currently plays a major role in archaeology and seems to be based on a problematic notion that things in themselves possess agency, one must wonder whether the recourse to neuropsychological models of cognition really opens up new perspectives that go beyond the insights from historical research, as put forward, among others, by Maurice Halbwachs, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Lucian Hölscher, François Hartog or Christopher Clark. The editors themselves concede that a neuropsychological perspective is not sufficient to grasp individual as well as collective memory in its historical embeddedness (13).
Things are complicated further by the fact that the term ‘future thinking’ remains undefined and in most contributions simply denotes the coming time in contrast to the past and present. Thus, its meaning is narrowed down to the anthropologically based time experience of individuals or collectives. Rarely is ‘future’ understood as a limited period of time (saeculum), and the authors outright omit to address the question of what ideas Roman contemporaries had of the future: whether they regarded it as malleable and open or, fatalistically, as already fixed; whether they could expect something new or if they assumed that the past would simply repeat itself.
The essays in this volume do offer some insightful observations. However, not all are convincing from a methodological point of view. Jacob Latham discusses the description of the pompa circensis handed down in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, itself drawn from Fabius Pictor, which heralded the ludi magni. Drawing on Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, he interprets the ritual description as a text of remembered history that has become canonical. Further referencing Baudrillard’s simulacrum theory, Latham rejects the possibility that Fabius Pictor might have written a contemporary account of the rite based on autopsy: rather, he assumes a simulation of the past, possibly an invented past or historical simulacrum. Then, he analyzes the ritual description as a prospective cultural memory resource for later intertextual references or allusions in Vergil, Ovid, and Statius, and treats it as examples of a simulation of the future. Whether the poets actually drew on Fabius Pictor or Dionysius or rather their own view of ritual is not clarified, nor is the question whether this ritual description actually became a canonical text. The argument as a whole does not convince: “The future of the past” (which is the title) and thus future thinking can in this context only mean an examination of prospective (Reinhard Koselleck) or retrospective futures past (Jonas Grethlein). But Latham does not tell us what kind of future thinking we are dealing with in either Fabius Pictor or Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
Aaron Seider, using the example of Germanicus in Tacitus Annals, instructively analyzes how individual protagonists or collectives tried to anticipate future events in situations of political uncertainty by drawing on their remembered experiences. He examines the interplay of retrospective and prospective thinking in the conflict between Tiberius and Germanicus over the latter’s Germanic campaign and subsequent triumph as well as in the conflict between Tiberius and the plebs Romana over the appropriate mourning rituals after Germanicus’ death. In so doing, he draws on the model of predictive processing and the problem of disappointed and realigned expectations. Seider’s conclusion, however, that Tacitus’ Annals themselves served as a memory resource for future actions of their readers is less convincing, since those readers were certainly not to be found in the plebs Romana.
Eric Orlin’s contribution deals with the ritual of the ludi saeculares, on the basis of the inscriptional acta from Augustan and Severan times. It is certainly correct—but also quite obvious—that the inscriptional record of the ritual, which lasted several days, not only provided commemorative aspects but also served to shape the future memory of this event. This is generally true of inscriptional records, not only in the public sphere, which offered a point of reference for future commemoration (ad futuram memoriae as recorded in the inscription)—in this case made clear by the fact that the Severan acta took the Augustan acta as a model. It is truer even of secular celebration which primarily focused on a future period, being related to the period of an emperor’s reign, for instance as saeculum Augusti or saeculum aureum, and often linked to dynastic ideas. The saeculum is thus not to be understood abstractly as the next 100 years, but as a notion which only gained significance retrospectively as a possibility for an emperor to host secular games again. [6] Hence, Orlin correctly identifies the recording of the acta of the secular games and the corresponding extraction of remembrance from the ephemeral ceremonial events into the lasting material form of an inscriptional text as preconditions for shaping future performances.
Molly Swetnam-Burland takes a closer look at the private cult for the Lares and Penates as well as the Compitalia, exploring future-oriented cognitive strategies of intention and simulation inscribed in them. Drawing on graffiti and paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum, she examines the vows of members of a domus, as well as the rites de passage in the life cycle of slaves and freemen in the household, handed down to us through amulets, dolls, and toys. While the vows, alternating between votum susceptum (intention) and votum solutum, established a rhythm between future and past, the rites—such as those held after birth, at the transition to adulthood or for the manumission—served as anchor moments for both looking back and ahead as well as pondering what one awaits in the future. The latter aspect is taken up in the gravestones for deceased children, on some of which future expectations, left unfulfilled by the children’s premature death, are wistfully mentioned. However, the nuanced remarks of Swetnam-Burland, among them the observation that while domestic shrines represented memoryscapes, other spaces were also used for graffiti vota, would not have required any recourse to neuropsychology.
Karen B. Stern discusses Jewish memorial culture in the synagogues of the Roman Empire, as expressed in the graffiti and dipinti on their walls and in the inscriptions on floor mosaics. In contrast to the rabbinic memorial culture, which sought to keep alive the future memory of the fate of the Jewish people, the desire to remember the personal fate of Jews of all social classes came to the fore in the synagogues. Using the example of donor inscriptions of the upper classes, Stern shows the strategies underlying this memorial practice: the commemoration of the donor’s generosity by name, the motives for the donation (a vow or the desire for personal salvation) and the invitation to future readers to donate as well. The only specific feature that distinguishes Jewish from pagan donor inscriptions lies in the partly otherworldly motivation instead of mere fame seeking. Having covered these official donor inscriptions embedded in the synagogue architecture, the author turns to look at the memorial practices of the Jewish lower classes as expressed in graffiti and dipinti and as prominently found on the walls of the synagogue in Dura Europos. Here, the focal point is the more or less explicit request that the future reader recall his name (before God) by reading it out aloud (no one read silently!), in part also coupled with a curse in case of omission. Stern’s accurate observations are made without any reference to neuropsychological models.
In stark contrast, Maggie L. Popkin draws on both the future-oriented mental time travel model and 4E Cognition Theory for her study of the four silver cups from Vicarello in the form of milestones with engraved itineraria of the via Augusta from Gades to Rome. These were eventually dedicated in the sanctuary of Aquae Apollinares south of Rome. After lengthy remarks on Roman milestones and their representation, as well as speculation on the production and use of the cups as part of a travel table service in the sense of a cultural biography of things (Igor Kopytoff), she interprets the engraved itineraria as representing retrospective and prospective memory of the journey. Her statement that, neurologically speaking, our ability to imagine future events depends on our memory (126) as well as her assertion that tactile handling and rotation of the cup for visual reading are, in terms of 4E cognition, examples of cognitive aid for things in the physical world both border on the banal. Unfortunately, Popkin’s partly thought-provoking reflections suffer from a huge discrepancy between massive theoretical overload and interpretation of the object in question, a discrepancy that is starker than in the other contributions to this anthology.
Susan Ludi Blevins interprets a hitherto only partially understood aspect of Christian funerary culture in the second half of the 4th century, namely the reuse of images cut from the bottom of gold glass cups in the funerary context of the loculi in the catacombs. With reference to the future-oriented mental time travel model, she assumes that the gold cups bearing representations of figures of Christ, saints, and martyrs (sometimes in an architectural context) or biblical scenes were already purchased with the intention of being reused at the buyer’s tomb after his death. In this way, the future deceased may have wished to manipulate the commemoration of him or her—especially during the annual funerary banquet at the tomb (refrigerium)—, by way of the associations evoked by the objects: the light gold glass, the decorative architectural forms reminiscent of the contemporaneous martyrs’ and pope’s tombs as well as the amalgamation of the images of saints and martyrs with that of the deceased achieving the desired effect. Furthermore, the images evoked the deceased in ritual practices and ceremonies during his lifetime in the context of the family.
In the concluding essay, Diana Y. Ng summarizes the essays as theoretical models, all of which address a cognitive extension beyond the brain and the skin into the physical world, be it as “embodied future thinking” or as “socially extended future thinking”. In her own contribution, she then goes on to discuss the prospective significance of urban honorary inscriptions in Hellenistic and Roman times—according to her hardly ever considered, but long since recognized. These by no means had only a memorial function but were intended both to commit the honored to further future benefactions and to encourage other potential benefactors to likewise act as benefactors. The latter aspect is overlooked by her, although numerous inscriptions explicitly state this aim. She concludes with a discussion of the endowment funds of periodic festivals by means of which the founder wanted to ensure his agency beyond death, albeit without providing any new insights.
It is the stated aim of this volume “to create a Roman historical cognitive science” (150). However, it is doubtful whether historians will gain much from these “new approaches” drawn from cognitive science. On the one hand, the theoretical models often provide nothing but neurophysiological confirmation of long known phenomena, especially since they often linger on the anthropological level. When they go beyond that—with the notion of thing-like enactivity or agency—and thus aspire to replace the previously held view of an instrumental use of things by humans, they risk slipping into a new kind of magical thinking. It may have been inspiring for the authors—heuristically speaking—to try out such cognitive-psychological models. Ultimately, however, I surmise that they could have come to the same conclusions by means of conventional historical and philological interpretation.
Authors and Titles
- Introduction: new approaches to future thinking in the Roman world, by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng
- The future of the past: Fabius Pictor (and Dionysios of Halikarnassos) on the pompa circensis and prospective cultural memory, by Jacob A. Latham
- Remembering the future in Tacitus’ Annals: Germanicus’ death and contest of commemoration, by Aaron Seider
- Ad futurum memoriam: the Augustan Ludi Saeculares, by Eric Orlin
- Staging memories in the home: intention and devotion in Pompeii and Herculaneum, by Molly Swetnam-Burland
- Synagogue inscriptions and the politics of prospective memory, by Karen B. Stern
- The Vicarello milestone beakers and future-oriented mental time travel in the Roman Empire, by Maggie L. Popkin
- Ancestors, martyrs, and fourth-century gold glass: a case of metaintentions, by Susan Ludi Blevins
- Prospection in the wild: embodiment, enactivity, and commemoration, by Diana Y. Ng