Damnatio memoriae

Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning "condemnation of memory," meaning that a person must not be remembered.

It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate on traitors or others who brought discredit to the Roman State. The intent was to erase the malefactor from history, a task somewhat easier in ancient times, when documentation was limited.

Damnatio Memoriae was originally created by the Romans, who viewed it as a punishment worse than death itself. Felons would literally be erased from history for the crimes they had committed.

The sense of the expression damnatio memoriae and of the sanction is to cancel every trace of the person from the life of Rome, as if he or she had never existed, in order to preserve the honour of the city. In a city that stressed social appearance, respectability, and the pride of being a true Roman as a fundamental requirement of the citizen, it was perhaps the most severe punishment.

In Latin, the term damnatio memoriae was not used by the ancient Romans. The first appearance of the phrase is in a dissertation written in Germany in 1689. The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions whereby the physical remnants of a deceased individual were destroyed to differing degrees.

In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of Roman elites and emperors after their deaths. If the senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked. Because there is an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official damnatio memoriae actually took place, although it seems to have been quite rare.

Historians sometimes use the phrase de facto damnatio memoriae when the condemnation is not official. Examples of this may include the destruction of the statues and other images of two close members of Caligula's family, his wife Milonia Caesonia and his daughter Julia Drusilla, which occurred after the emperor was assassinated. Among those few who suffered legal damnatio memoriae were Sejanus, who had conspired against emperor Tiberius in 31 CE, and later Livilla, who was revealed to be his accomplice.

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