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Seeing Caesar in ruins: towards aradical aesthetic of ruinsRichard Alston aa Royal Holloway, University of London , Egham , Surrey , UKPublished online: 04 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Richard Alston (2011) Seeing Caesar in ruins: towards a radical aestheticof ruins, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 18:5-6, 697-716, DOI:10.1080/13507486.2011.618321

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Seeing Caesar in ruins: towards a radical aesthetic of ruins

Richard Alston*

Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK

This paper considers two ancient instances of engagement with the ruin: resonantdescriptions of Troy in the second-century historian Tacitus and in the Neronian poetLucan. Both represent the encounter with the ruin as alienating, which provokesinterpretations corresponding to those of modern engagements with ruins. Theseinstances undermine the particularity of the modern experience of ruins and insteadintroduce a dialectic between the ruin and the imperial state. Although one mightassume that the ruin as a symbol of times past offers a locus outside Modernity or the(Roman) imperial state from where an oppositional perspective becomes possible, thisalienation works instead to reinforce political norms. The ruin operates as an illusion ofopposition. Although totalitarian systems operate with monological visions of historyand unitary imaginaries, and the ruin would seem to encourage plurality, imperial timeoperates in more complex ways, which allow different historical periods to be enfoldedin and subordinated to the imperial dialectic. Collective memory in the imperial societyis critically ambivalent and that ambivalence imbues imperial society with a pervasivesorrow.

Keywords: Lucan; Tacitus; Troy; city; postcolony; historiography

Although the interest in ruins is sometimes seen as a characteristically Modern

phenomenon, this paper will, I hope, demonstrate that there are clear parallels between

Roman and Modern interest in the ruin. I start with a section (‘Caesar among the Ruins’)

concentrating on two examples of the Roman engagement with ruins. These instances

focus on particularly resonant descriptions of Troy in the second-century historian Tacitus

and in the Neronian poet Lucan. These accounts are notable particularly because of the

involvement of imperial figures. Both represent the encounter with the ruin as alienating,

which provokes interpretations corresponding to those of Modern engagements with ruins.

These instances undermine the particularity of the modern experience of ruins and instead

introduce a dialectic between the ruin and the imperial state. Although one might assume

that the ruin as a symbol of times past offers a locus outside Modernity or the (Roman)

imperial state from where an oppositional perspective becomes possible, I propose that

this alienation works to reinforce political norms. I argue, therefore, mainly in the section

‘The Memory of Ruins’ that the ruin operates as an illusion of opposition. To make this

case, I take the alienating effect of the ruin as indeed oppositional, arguing that totalitarian

regimes (which may exist within an imperial framework) operate with monological

visions of history and unitary imaginaries (as discussed in the section ‘The City without

Ruins’) but that the ruin would seem to encourage plurality. Nevertheless the complexity

of time within the imperial context is such that imperial time allows different historical

periods to be enfolded in and subordinated to the imperial dialectic, and thus that imperial

ISSN 1350-7486 print/ISSN 1469-8293 online

q 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.618321

http://www.tandfonline.com

*Email: R.Alston@rhul.ac.uk

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire

Vol. 18, Nos. 5–6, October–December 2011, 697–716

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time is to be differentiated from totalitarian time. Collective memory in the imperial

society is critically ambivalent and that ambivalence imbues imperial society with a

pervasive sorrow. Such complexity allows oppositional elements to become part of the

imperial construct. In ‘An Imperial Home in Ruins’, I argue that rather than being a distant

stillness of absolute value allowing an abstraction from the contemporary, the ruin offers

merely an ‘illusion of historical separation’. The ruin is thus enfolded in the modern

(imperial) and in the modern (imperial) conceptions of time.

I see this form of temporal construction as an ‘imperial time’ and I perceive a

fundamental homology between Roman and Modern understandings of time. This time is

imperial both in a ‘conquest’ of historical time and in its association with particular

political formations (imperial states). These imperial conceptions of time create the ruin as

a revolutionary other, either the moment before or the moment after the imperial epoch,

the fear of which supports that epoch (see ‘The City without Ruins’). Additionally, that

other time is a form of chronological void in which individuals or whole communities may

locate themselves or be located in a state of suspension (as discussed in the section ‘An

Imperial Home in the Ruins’). Unfolding this complexity of time requires an experimental

history and a radical aesthetic, and it is to these that I turn in the final section (‘The Ruin of

Revolutions and the Angelus Novus’). This is a radicalism that rejects revolution and,

indeed, rejects the ruin and in so doing calls for a rethinking of history. Although I find in

the ruin the spectre of revolution with its promise of liberation for a particular regime of

power, that spectre lurks hand in hand with Caesar, and the inhumanity of imperial power.

Caesar among the ruins

Tacitus’ Annales, perhaps the most sophisticated and certainly the most influential thesis

on Roman imperial politics, centres in its early books on the drama of Tiberius and

Germanicus, individuals who operate as contrasting models of the imperial statesman and,

ultimately, of the imperial self. As Germanicus moves towards his death, Tacitus sends

him on an archaeological tour of the Roman East. At various sites, Germanicus viewed

ruins with a particular resonance. At Actium, he visited the Augustan trophaeum, but also

Antony’s camp and was able to call up the ‘imago’ of a battle fought, as Tacitus reminds

us, between Germanicus’ ancestors. Tacitus conjures for Germanicus the spectre of the

civil war that gave birth to the new age of imperial rule. At Athens, Germanicus toured the

city with a single lictor in respect for the city’s treaty with Rome and for the antiquity of the

place. The Athenians lavished him with honours, for his recollection of their venerable past

and imitation of the city of old.1 At Troy, he was struck by the varietate fortunae et nostri

origine veneranda (‘the variance of fortune and our venerable origins’).2 In his next port,

he visited the oracle at Clarus and received, it seems, predictions of his own death. The

next year, in Egypt, Germanicus toured Alexandria wearing the local Greek costume in

imitation of the Republican military hero Scipio Africanus in Syracuse, and then embarked

on an archaeological tour of the wonders of Egypt. Among the ruins of Thebes one of the

older priests, clearly a remnant himself, read the hieroglyphic accounts of Egypt’s empire:

the tribute lists, the provinces, the flows of weapons and gold and spices and the

enumeration of Egypt’s vast army, an army far larger than that of contemporary Rome.3

These briefly reported episodes foreshadow Germanicus’ own death, directly at Clarus

and indirectly in the remarks on fickle fortune. They also foreshadow the ends of empire in

the destruction of Troy and Egypt. In reading of Germanicus at Actium, we recall our first

meeting with Germanicus in the Annales, when Germanicus in Germany, after being

offered the throne, refused to move against his adoptive father and plunge Rome once more

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into civil war.4 Knowing the ultimate fate of Germanicus, we realise that his refusal to fight

will not save him or his family.5 The tour, with all its imagery of uncertainty and death offers

Germanicus a poor choice: he could either face death, with nobility and boldness, in the

certain knowledge that his enemies in Rome would not stop at his death and would seek to

attack his wife and sons, or he could take the place of Antony, from whose camp he surveyed

the victory monuments of Augustus, and engage in a war from which the only certainty

would be the mass slaughter he sees monumentalised on the battlefield. Yet, the tour also

associates Germanicus with the Republican past in his imitation of Scipio Africanus and

with the Classical Greek past in his honouring of Athens. In Athens and Alexandria he lives

in past imagines. Yet the weakness and falsity of these imagines are exposed by Tacitus;

Germanicus was followed on his tour by Piso, his nemesis, who had been appointed by the

Emperor Tiberius to watch over his popular and able nephew. In Athens, Piso launched a

furious assault on the Athenians, berating them for their more-recent history of conflict with

Rome, demonstrating how far they had fallen from their fifth-century greatness.6 Tacitus’

Piso offers an accurate version of history that remembers stories conveniently forgotten by

Germanicus, and punctures the pretensions of the Athenians’ nostalgia. Tiberius is also

made to criticise the deportment of Germanicus in Egypt, one of the few points in the text at

which the latent hostility between the two men becomes explicit. Germanicus’ imitation of

Scipio Africanus in showing honour to the traditions of a great Greek city draws fire as being

un-Roman.7 Both Piso and Tiberius explicitly constructed for themselves a conservative

image, both looking to the Republic as a guide for their behaviour and political mores. Yet

their conceptions of history and of the Republic are radically different from those of

Germanicus. Germanicus’ decision to replay the role performed by a Republican hero is

rendered un-Roman by the emperor who thereby claims for himself a role as guardian over

Roman identity and the power to decide what in the Roman past has value. The emperor is

thus an arbiter of historical time. Although Germanicus may play with the notion of Athens’

greatness restored and pretend to be the great Republican hero reborn, these imagines are

repressed by Tiberius and Piso and their imperial power.

In Troy and in Egypt, the archaeological tour takes on darker tones. The tour of Troy

was a literary and archaeological pilgrimage. The Aeneid added layers of complexity to the

Trojan site, making it the fons of the Julian family and the Roman people; whatever the

darker tones that Virgil gives the story, the Aeneid is an epic of imperial foundation. But

when Germanicus views the site, he sees Homeric Troy as well, the site of destruction,

death and the fall of Empires. There is, thus, a compression of history in the ruins so that

all the Troys remain present in their potential realities. The varietas fortunae echoes back

through foundation myths with a prophesy of the fall of the city.8 In Egypt, that warning

becomes more explicit: when all these riches and an army of 700,000 can disappear into

the sands, what chance is there for Rome’s survival? In hundred-gated Thebes, the ruins of

which had become the most potent symbol of Egypt’s fall, the desolation extends beyond

Germanicus himself to imagines of the fall of cities and the ends of empires.

There is in this archaeology a departure from normal Tacitean practices. Although the

Annales continuously return to the theme of the Republican legacy and its effect on

imperial actors, the frameworks of historical time remain, in the main, quite limited and

constrained. Tacitus is not a historian who muses often on the broader frameworks of time,

keeping the ‘history of the present’ in focus. And yet, the historical imagines that float

uneasily around Germanicus insert his history into a framework of historical time

stretching far beyond that encompassed by the Annales. The scenes offer a context larger

than that of the immediate drama and a chronological and interpretative framework that

stretches beyond the particulars of Roman politics to encompass all historical time.

European Review of History–Revue europeenne d’histoire 699

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In a chronological and literary peculiarity, Germanicus’ tour of Troy had a direct

precursor in Julius Caesar’s visit to Troy, an account of which we find in the Neronian poet

Lucan’s epic poem on the civil war.9 Lucan’s Caesar among the ruins is thus both before

and after the visit of Tacitus’ Germanicus.10 After Pharsalus, and the victory that

established a monarchy, Caesar’s visit to Troy is surprisingly far from triumphant. Caesar

reveals himself an incapable archaeologist, unable to recognise the historical ruins, and

associate himself with the origo of his family and the Roman people. The Lucanian

episode has an obvious and direct literary precursor in Aeneas’ visit to the site of the future

Rome, and this creates yet another layer of literary and archaeological compression since

an associative reading of Tacitus’ Germanicus at Troy with Virgil’s Aeneas at Rome,

perhaps via Lucan’s Caesar, further locates Rome at the site of Troy.11 Furthermore, the

identification of the tourists compresses the imperial history of the Julian dynasty since we

can link Virgil’s Aeneas to his allegorical spectre, Augustus, and Lucan’s Caesar to his

revolutionary heir, Nero. Thus, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Germanicus and Nero

exist in the stratigraphy of this literary archaeology, these imperial figures sharing more

than a genetic link as they contemplate the ruins and the cities that will be.12

But unlike Aeneas on the site of the future Rome, Julius Caesar’s expedition to Troy

irritates his guide, and the master of the world offends the ghosts and gods of the site, as he

stumbles through the archaeological remains. The site remains as closed to him as it was open

and comprehensible to Germanicus. As a result, the guide voices the opposition of the stones,

becoming perhaps the first opposition to the new imperial regime and daring to lambast the

dictator for his ignorance. And so, at the local point of origin of the Roman people and at the

mythic and temporal point of imperial foundation, Caesar is strikingly faced by opposition. He

fails to understand the past, a past that will, as the source for the imperial epic and as a

foundational element for the imperial regime, also become the future. Yet, Lucanian Caesar,

the conqueror of Rome, is not to be defeated by a ruined past. The guide at Troy may be

irritated by Caesar, but there is no sense that Caesar is similarly inconvenienced. The scene

ends not with Caesar abashed at his failings, fleeing the site in confusion, but with him erecting

an altar and making a speech in which he asserts the meaning of the site. The voice of the guard

and the stories of the stones are repressed by the political power of Caesar, and it is that power

that enables him to reconstruct the past and reconstruct Troy, making an alternative imperial

history from the ruins that leaves us in doubt as to the fate of the guide and the site itself.

Lucan offers us Troy as a locus of resistance to the imperial regime and the past as a

tempus of opposition. One might suggest that in being obviously differentiated from the

tempus of Empire, the locus can exist outside the imperial perspective. In Troy, Caesar

faces a place which is not his, but which he makes his, or attempts to do so, by inscribing

and proclaiming its meaning, making it part of his imperial locus and tempus. Germanicus

among the ruins comes both before and after that imperial conscription, but Germanicus is

himself a locus of opposition, who cannot exist within the tempus of the imperial era.

In spite of his often demonstrated and stated loyalty, Germanicus comes to personify the

alternatives to the regime. He is unable to resist this ascription into the opposition: like the

ruins of Troy, stumbled over by Caesar, Germanicus, passively and inevitably, offers an

alternative to Tiberius. Even in death, there is no escape from this role since Germanicus

remains a spectral presence in the Annales, haunting Tiberius and posthumously offering a

great, lost hope for Rome, an alternative future that is forever dead. He is thus the site of

nostalgia, of ruination, of an alternative in the past, and of the future. In this sense,

Germanicus comes home when he reaches Troy, sharing with the site his temporal and

locational exceptionality, but an exceptionality that is always under pressure from the

imperial regime and is, ultimately, unable to resist.

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Nevertheless, although Piso, Tiberius and Caesar can narrate the past and give it

imperial meanings, Troy and Germanicus remain sources of discomfort and of alternative

histories. Tiberius and Caesar can assert the meaning of the ruins, but troublesome

archaeology lurks to trip them up. They can declare Scipio un-Republican, but the past is

not so easily determined. Even if the meaning of the archaeology is asserted and reinforced

by the power of the state, Tacitus’ narrative of Germanicus the hero, the martyr even, is a

history that cannot be repressed, even through death. And similarly, the imago of Actium,

the founding moment and monument of the Augustan principate is an imago that has within

it the Antonian perspective, an alternative history that opposes the monologic imperial past.

This oppositional possibility in history is written throughout the Annales, continually

resisting attempts to suppress its meanings and establish the imperial perspective. We see this

most obviously in the person of Cremutius Cordus, the historian of the Republic who, when

charged with maiestas for his honouring of the assassins of Caesar, left the court to proclaim

himself ‘last of the Romans’ and to commit suicide.13 But Tacitus’ account does not finish

with Cordus’ death, since the imperial power acted to burn Cordus’ works. The censorship

was unsuccessful. Cordus’ works were hidden, copied and republished, their status enhanced

by their suppression. Although there is good reason to believe that Tacitus undermines

Cordus’ interpretation of the Republican past, Cordus’ histories are presented as surviving

both as a symbol of resistance to imperial tyranny, and to have a real presence in the future, as

‘the memory of the following age’, a memory which is beyond imperial control.14

In his depiction of memory as a site of alternative history in the Annales (his last work),

Tacitus recalls his self-condemnation of the behaviour of the senators in Agricola 2 in the

face of Domitianic oppression: ‘We would have lost our very memory also along with our

voice, if it was so much in our power to forget as to remain silent.’15 Under Domitian,

memory was a reluctant locus of resistance, immune to the workings of power. As such,

memory operates as a ‘return of the repressed’, haunting the monologic history of empire,

and, seemingly, preventing the integration of the remembering individual into the imperial

narrative. The imagines of memory, as we see in Germanicus’ tour, would seem to be

multiple and elusive, surviving in their unreality, their unyielding archaeology, and in the

‘underground’ of forbidden texts. Yet, Tacitus uses singulars for ‘memory’ and ‘voice’

suggesting that this memory (and the voice of this memory) is societal and singular, rather

than individual and plural. The memory is thus collective, and as memory is constitutive of

community, would appear to attest to an alternative community to the imperial, rather than

an opposition between individual and community.16 If we read against the grain of the text,

against the Tacitean silence, the reluctant memory becomes a source of sorrow, resisting

an accommodation with imperial power, hoping for the Homeric waters of Lethe. Only in

forgetfulness might peace and pleasure become possible. Thus monologic history faces its

nemesis in the polygenous and collective memory that, since it always is threatening to

return in a future age, cannot, in the last instance, be repressed. Yet, that sorrowful

memory is also alienating, preventing the union of imperial state and people and the

creation of an ideal, utopian polis.

Returning to Germanicus, musing among the ruins of Troy, and to Cordus, walking

from the senate and proclaiming himself the last of the Romans, we face questions that lie

outside the normal parameters of Roman historiography. Latin historians proclaim their

purposes to be straightforward, limited and moralistic, being to praise the good and punish

the bad and in so doing offer exempla for the future.17 It is thus a ‘history of the present’.

But the story of Cordus and the ruins of Egypt and Troy operate outside this framework.

If Cordus was the last Roman, or could plausibly present himself as being so, what was the

present, and what preceded it? If the history of the Roman present was at an end, as the

European Review of History–Revue europeenne d’histoire 701

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history of Troy was at an end, what comes after, or, indeed, before that present? If Rome is

written onto Troy in a stratigraphy of empires and cities, what is the remnant of Troy in the

present, and how does it function? Ruins unsettle the Caesars not just in promising a future

when they are dead and a future in which memories are continuously in return and in

opposition to their history, but in suggesting a different structure to the past and present,

and in that structure the rules are far more fluid and uncertain. Germanicus among the ruins

questions his place in history, his power as an agent in the face of aeons of historical time,

and his insignificance in the face of Empire’s fall. His place in the history of the present,

the tempus in which he is located, is in question once the history of the present is reset in

other histories, among other ruins. The other histories are an irruption, but an irruption that

is not within the history of the present, but beyond that history; the irruption throws into

question the history of the present as a system of signification since other signs, more

powerful, more sublime, potentially suppress that epistemological system of the present.

The memories that Tiberius cannot repress, and that haunt the senators of Domitian’s

time, are those which fail to find their place in the imperial episteme and there is a sense, a

strong sense, that these intrusions are moments of sorrow which not only presage death,

but forbid the closing of the episteme, and the careless engagement with imperial society.

In the compression of time that we can perceive in the encounters with Troy, there is a re-

imagining, the production of a new imago, in which the ontological workings of space and

time are restructured.18 That restructuring, however, carries within it the idea of the fall of

Rome and the destruction of the world, and in that encounter with a different framework of

time, there is that dislocation, a taking one out of the sense of oneself, an externalisation to

the normative frameworks of society that we associate with the sublime and which we

associate with the ruin. But in the association with death, and with a loss of control, we are

reminded that the experience of the ruin is not just an experience of pleasure, but can be an

experience of existential angst.

The memory of ruins

Germanicus at Actium provides an example of the interplay of collective and personal

memory. Germanicus was not present at the battle of Actium. His imago of the battle is,

then, a collective memory, an imago that is part of a historical narrative and can only be

accessed by Germanicus as part of that historical narrative. Thus, he recalls the imago of

the story of the battle, and his recollection is, at best, a recollection of a recollection. This

establishes a distancing that rests uneasily with Germanicus, who can see the field from the

Augustan perspective of history and monument, from the trophy of victory, but also from

the ruins of the Antonian camp, and this multiplicity of perspectives is written into a

memory which is fundamentally social, stemming from public narratives that form part of

the collective memory.19 The unavoidable consciousness of the space between event and

recollection demands ambivalence, which is very different from claiming that the

narrative of the event is in some way untrue.20 That ambivalence thus exists within the

formation of the memory of imperial society and, since that memory is shared by all in

imperial culture, resonates through imperial life as a formative ambivalence. Imperial

society was thus built not on the certainties of a monological narrative, but in the moral

equivocations of civil war. Additionally, for Germanicus, Actium was also a central

personal memory, constitutive of his own self as a descendant of the warring parties and as

a creation of the political settlement that resulted.

Ricoeur in Memory, History and Forgetting, argues that memory can only be recalled

through language and narratives which have to be expressed in the public sphere. We need

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our memories to be reinforced through narratives, either by ourselves or by others.21 As we

remember who we are, our memory operates in a socio-linguistic context and through

collective and mutually reinforcing narratives: memory is thus always collective. It

follows that collective memory must always also be personal, constitutive of identity and

selfhood, but also that there must be ambivalence in the face of such memories. The social

nature of memory must co-exist with the personal experience of memory, with the imago

in the mind that co-exists with the imago of the narrative in the world. The recollection that

exists both in public and in private is unlikely to fully assimilate both those spheres, and

thus there will be an inevitable negotiation and a certain dissatisfaction. Recollections are

thus uncertain and imperfect mirrors in the world and such imperfections potentially

destabilise both individual and collective identities. For example, in the Germanicus

episode, it is the ruin that sparks this ambivalence, but Germanicus’ reaction to the ruin is

but an extreme case of a (mis)recognition, when faced with a trace of the event. It is a

recognition in that he associates the ruins with certain memories of events and correctly

manages to insert those events within narratives of memory. Yet, it is a misrecognition

since the available narratives are replete with ambivalence. But further, and more

radically, the traces of Troy, with all the compression of historical personae and narrative

possibilities tend to the denial of Germanicus’ individuality, associating him with Aeneas

and Caesar, Augustus and the Nero who is to come. The individual is thereby subsumed or

enfolded into the imperial with a discomforting and (almost) irresistible force.22

Such parallels establish the ruin as a form of mirror that produces a reflective imago

that cannot ever be quite perfect, and which is crucially uncertain. But the imago that is

reflected is not, in the first instance, of the self. The imago in these instances is of the city,

of the human community or polis. The ruin is thus a collective imago and it is through the

collectivity that the memories of the self are constituted and reflected in the ruin. The key

point of contrast becomes the individual in the ruin. In the ruin, Germanicus experiences a

‘compression of time’ that threatens his individuality, but also establishes Germanicus as a

point of resistance in which there is the potential (however futile) to escape the temporal

frame of contemporary Rome. For Caesar among the ruins is Caesar outside of the

temporal system that makes him Caesar and in a city which exists only in traces. The

uncertainty effect of the mirror lies in creating an analogy of contemporary societies and

the misrecognition in the mirror, the distancing effect that it produces creates individual

dislocation and temporal alienation. Further, that distance can never be crossed, as we can

never reach the image of the mirror and never embrace our distant imaginary other. The

Troy of ruins can never be restored. But in the misrecognition of the mirror, there is also a

realisation of a truer image: in the ‘realism’ of the image there is a greater level of

accuracy of representation than can be achieved through other means. For we stand apart

from the image of the mirror and can observe it as object as we can never observe our

selves or our society.

The ruin thus offers the possibility of an analogy-mirror that is more true, more real,

than the contemporary narrative understanding of society.23 Since that narrative is always

the political discourse by which power is structured, the ruin offers an alternate to the

monological discourse. Precisely because individual identities are written into the political

narrative within the collective memories of society, the ruin operates as a mirror of

selfhood that can undermine understandings of the self. The ruin is in its elusive and

eternally reflective quality beyond power, but in its realism creates an alienating

disjuncture with a monological imperial narrative.24 And yet, as we have already seen,

there are hints that the totalitarian and monological tendencies of imperial systems co-exist

with other memories and narratives, imagines tristium laetorumque, that offer a more

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ambivalent and contrasting reading of the events of the past. It thus becomes important to

distinguish between the totalitarian and the imperial, and we may find the distinguishing

shades in the understanding of the ruin.

The city without ruins: cities of the undead

Existing both within and outside the temporal zone of contemporary society, the ruin

operates in the era of observation, but as a remnant of a previous age. It exists within a

particular frame of space and time beyond that in which it was built, but in its dilapidated

state, does not exist as it was designed, as it was meant to be, with the signifiers that it was

intended to deliver, but is invested with new significations as the old are stripped away.

In this process of stripping away, traces of the old survive, but only as traces: a doorway

may be recognised as a threshold, but there is no spatial transition in its crossing, and the

very absence of that social negotiation of entry becomes part of the thrill of the ruin. In the

absence of the door, private and public, religious and secular blend and are rendered

open.25 Unlike a text in which the layers of reception pile signification on signification, the

dilapidation of the ruin is a loss of signification or a reduction of signification to the trace,

and in this lack absence is, primarily, figured.

The ruin represents the workings of history or history as process since the ruin attests

the event of the ruination. Analogously that which is currently replete with signifiers will

eventually be stripped of its meanings, losing its significance in the societal ‘production of

space’.26 The ruin attests a different mode of production of space and the difference of

history. An absence of ruins would signify an absence of history, and a city that is without

ruins, which has been turned into marble, or which has undergone a collective amnesia, is

a city without history. The city without ruins is also a city without a future, since a building

always contains a promise of ruination; ‘that which was’ is present and will become future,

but ‘that which is’ will become different in its future being. In its eternal now the city

without ruins stands in defiance of time, and the horizons of time are lost within it.

In its eternity, such a city denies death. Yet death is the fundamental marker of the

human, the being-unto-death; the city that denies death is denying humanity. The ruin

becomes the claim of the human and the promise of death in the city. The ruin can be seen

as the bastion of humanity, a promise of an end of civilisation, a point where all ‘that which

is’ will be no more. In this promise of absence, the claims of political authorities to quasi-

immortality find denunciation. In that promise, there are the spectres of liberation since the

end of civilisation would mean the end of a particular bio-politics of immortality. The ruin

liberates an individual by offering the prospect of a time when that individual and that

society will be no more, making visible the transience of life and power, and the historicity

of a particular bio-politics. But in that liberation from contemporary bio-politics, there is

an inevitable alienation in which a recognition that the human lurks within the ruin

becomes an acknowledgement that to be human is to be destined for death and thus

separated from the bio-political regime whose temporal expectations are very different.

The interest of political powers in fixing the process of memory and limiting the

destabilising potential of the ruin is obvious. Generating narratives around the ruin fixes it

into a historical scheme. In the imperial narrative, the ruin can be made monologic, turned

from the indeterminacy of ruination (in which absence is manifest) into a symbol of a

known past (in which the presence of the ruin plays a determining part). Such inscribing of

the ruin into the collective memory is aided by the process of restoration since restoration

normally invests a building with a particular (trans-)historical reading, insulating it from

the ravages of time. This process is always selective, choosing which past to restore, and

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denies the process of ruination. Restoration thus passes over the disruptions, traumas and

transformations that mark the course of history and asserts an often startling and

implausible continuity with a particular past.27 Presence is figured in the restored ruin and

in that presence the ruin is shorn of its power, mis-located and denuded of histories.28

Similarly, Bachelard imagined beneath his house an archaeological layering of Medieval,

Roman and Gallic houses, not to terrorise himself with the prospect of his own mortality

and the fragility of his civilisation, but rather to establish a spiritual connection to the very

soil on which his house was built that spread through a continuous transhistorical

history.29 This association with a particular narrative refigures the ruin as a living part of a

communal heritage and in so doing denies the death monumentalised in the ruin. In losing

its indeterminacy, the ruin is transformed, its meanings reduced, its temporal promiscuity

confined to a particular bed. And in all such confinements, there is an act and display of

power by which the cultured show their economic muscle through both the construction of

the ‘folly’, and in the transportation of an ‘antiquity’ into a new and managed imperial

context. In so doing, differences of time and place (or the production of space) are

compressed and repressed.30

It is this imperial context that gave birth to modern historiography, which is broadly

coterminous with the European imperial age. De Certeau characterises modern

historiography as aiming ‘through “meaning” at hiding the alterity of the foreigner; or,

in what amounts to the same thing, it aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present,

and at offering them scriptural tombs.’31 History puts the foreign (especially non-

Europeans) and the dead in their place, but, as De Certeau argues, modern historiography

‘is a procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in discourse, and that

yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past

as a form of knowledge. A labour of death that denies death.’32 In a peculiar paradox,

historiography posits epochs into which history is neatly divided, establishing the end of

ages, and, on a less grand scale, gives place to individuals within those ages. Thus,

historiography consigns all to a fixed place in the narrative of the past (note the obsessive

interest of historiography in periodicity), but simultaneously incorporates that past into the

narratives of the present. Modern historiography is the story of the dead, but those dead are

continuously returned.

In spite of the many authoritative attempts to bring history to an end, attempts that we

may, in deference to Hegel, associate with the Birth of Modernity, the failure to bring

closure to history results from the reluctance of the dead to lie quietly. If once we were able

to fix what is dead in its tomb, and close off the ruin and its destabilising potential, then we

would be at the End of History, since history’s work would be done. This would be a

twofold moment of death in that the Hegelian process would come to an end, and history

itself would stop, since now meaning has become clear and the ultimate purpose of Man,

which for Nietzsche was uniquely undetermined, is discovered.33 Everything, past and

present, is given its place in the Last History as written by the Last Man (and is thus the

totalitarian apotheosis of liberal historiography); in the declaration of that End of History,

there is a claim for the universality of now. In the city without history, there is no future,

and no past, and no life. The totalitarian city, then, is the city of the undead.

But as a city of the undead, the totalitarian city must always be a fantasy, nightmarish

and powerful, but always unreal. At a psychological level, the engagement of the living

with death resists totalitarianism. The human, as a being-unto-death, must recognise his or

her own confinement in the closure of the historical narrative and consequently resist that

closure. The possibility of a return of the repressed is always there, and in this possibility,

the ruin resists monological history even as it is turned to the purposes of the monological

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account. It is in the memories of the living that the dead find their life once more, and those

memories are, as Tacitus tells us, beyond our power and that of the totalitarian regime. But

although some aspects of the imperial city may be seen as tending towards the totalitarian,

De Certeau’s historians allow for a complexity in the engagement between past and

present, and in their continuous return to the past, and in the failed attempts to confine the

dead by their scripture, there is a recognition of the absence of a year zero, a point at which

all things were made anew. That year zero is the revolutionary point, which lures the

historian towards the totalitarian city. Whereas totalitarian historiography offers

monological history, Liberal historiography is more comfortable with individual voices,

contestation, and ‘the argument’ of history. The relationship of imperial cultures to the

ruin is more complex and more nuanced.34

History has been a site of combat with totalitarianism. When a totalitarian regime

declares the End of History, the spectral presences of that which has been denounced

become an obvious locus of opposition. These presences, as Derrida argued in Specters of

Marx, become more powerful through the very act of declaring them dead. Whereas the

Hegelian historical process transcends the event and offers us an End of History in the

triumph of the Spirit of the Age, a refusal to allow events to be fixed in a narrative allows a

resistance to the totalitarian spirit. Loyalty to the process of history, to the dead that haunt

the present, or, pace Badiou, to the event, requires a continual revisiting of the past, and a

refusal to allow it to rest in its fixed narrative beds. Thus, Badiou seems to suggest, loyalty

to the individual may transcend the tempus and in so doing escape the episteme that

assimilates us within the polis.35 Similarly, in spite of the energy put into the narratives

that would determine the meaning of the Actian ruins, Germanicus, as Caesar, enacts an

ambivalent recollection against any totalitarian monologism. There is in this no paradox.

The spectral traces of the revolutionary or the ghosts of the event, to which we return and

which we recollect, may denounce the totalitarian, but the imperial remains comfortable

with its formative ambivalence. Whereas the totalitarian city constructs itself without ruins

(as a city without death and thus of the undead and inhuman), the imperial finds a home in

the ruins (as a city of the dead).

An imperial home in ruins

The association between the imperial and the ruin, which we see in the episodes at Troy, is

perhaps more familiar to modern Western sensibilities from Goethian classics. It is, of

course, no coincidence that this radical engagement with an ‘other time’ was

contemporary with the emergence of imperial modernity. In this section, I will trace a

number of modern engagements with the ruin to argue that not only is this sensibility a

feature of the modern imperial age (but not a distinctive feature), but that the ruin is an

essential, indeed formative, element within the Modern. It follows from this argument that

the distance that separates us from the classical past is somewhat reduced (in itself an

argument against the orthodoxies of the contemporary engagement with the classical past),

since I find striking homologies between Roman and Modern sensibilities.

Goethian classics found in the ruins of Classical Greece a fixed aesthetic, a tempus

against which a moral and political sensibility could be established. The Classics are by

definition timeless and thus offer an ontology that transcends historical change: when ‘all

that is solid melts into air’ the Classical has a reassuring stability. That stability tends

towards the restorative, since the apotheosis of the Classical ignores the ruinous state of

the ruin; its present is obscured in order to elevate its past as a living tradition.36 It is also

an act of power in which the nostalgic move marks a separation from the contemporary

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and elevates a particularly aristocratic code of political and cultural values in the face of

the transformation of the contemporary world. That elevation was only possible because

the upper middle classes (those educated in the gymnasia of Germany and the public

schools of England) could deploy the wealth that modernity had brought. Classicism was

inscribed within a class position which denied the applicability of the contemporary

economic system, and all its manifest inequalities, to those who could afford to find a

universal truth and an ideological support for their privilege in the fifth-century BC. In so

doing, the capitalist system encompassed the classical past, making it a foundational

element in a class ideology.

The homologies with the Germanicus episode are notable. Germanicus’ fond attempt

to live in the past in Athens and Alexandria and to entertain the deception that their past

glories were present was always dependant on the imperial context. This was brutally

exposed in the Tiberian and Pisonian critiques of the prince, establishing beyond doubt his

temporal separation from Scipio Africanus and from Classical Athens. But such crude

monologistic assertions were redundant since it was impossible to disassociate

Germanicus’ actions as Republican emulator from his imperial position. His person and

his presence represented the imperial system, and his Republican emulations were

misrepresentations of his place in the system. But the imperial system allowed for such

miscognitions and even encouraged them in a foundational claim that the imperial system

was a restoration of Republican values and a return to traditional moral and political

precepts.37 The imperial system allowed for aristocratic retreat in which the values and

culture of the Republican era could be maintained in a quiescent opposition to the imperial

order. The security inherent in the imperial system allowed those whose power most

depended upon it to disassociate themselves from its workings.

The imperial would thus seem to offer the possibility of living in alienation, living

among the ruins, as part of the aesthetic of its culture. In this way, the oppositional element

of the ruin is continuously enfolded into the present, creating a complex dynamic in which

the seeming fixity of a particular temporal zone (a habitus or Chronos) is never quite fixed.

This creates a paradox. Deleuze argues for an opposition between social constructed time

which forms the frame for human interaction (Chronos) and the perpetual progression of

time (Aion).38 The latter has the ability to disrupt the (relatively) closed system of the

former. Yet it seems in modernity and in the Roman imperial regimes that Chronos was so

continuously transgressed that a subject position external to the imperial Chronos could be

constructed as a norm.39 In a similar vein, Bourdieu, in In Other Words: Essays towards a

Reflexive Sociology argues that his notion of the habitus should be interpreted as

presenting ‘regularities’ rather than rules. A reflexive sociology would allow a subject

position outside the habitus, in which the regularities are generally recognised as artificial

and yet still maintained as a useful (perhaps monopolistic) social technology. In the

tempus of the modern and of the imperial, different time frames exist formatively and

spectrally, powerfully present in the continuous receptions of pasts in which the modern is

remade. This continuously felt past and continuous reception differentiates mainstream

modernity from its totalitarian perversions.40 Yet, and more radically, in this continuous

reception, a subject position posited external to the Chronos of the modern would seem

(almost) inevitable: inhabiting the present becomes almost impossible and we are

condemned to inhabit other chronological zones. In the worst cases, we are forced to make

our home in the ruins.41

This suspension of the present is at its most obvious in the contemporary African city,

the postcolony, which as Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman argue in ‘Figures of the

Subject in Times of Crisis’, is trapped in a exceptional state of emergency and exists as a

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living city of ruins. Precisely as in the ruin, the signifiers of the city exist, but exist in their

absence. The roads, roundabouts, traffic lights remain, but ignored, denuded or broken.

The state functions in absence. Officials go to work, but do no work, and receive little or no

pay (capitalistic time is thus suspended and its valuation in crisis). Bureaucratic wheels

turn to produce certificates without meaning (the productive process is in denial of time).

Timetables are published, but the trains do not run to them, and seats are purchased in

carriages that no longer exist. Houses are left incomplete and with no prospect of

completion. Factories were taken over by jungles. In the ruins, societies are reformed and

reshaped by a continuous flow of peoples. There is a vibrancy, but also a lawlessness and

criminality as individuals look to ‘private’ resources to secure their goals. In an economy

and settlements that are euphemistically designated ‘informal’ but would more accurately

be designated as ‘slum’, the state (the centre of modernity) is both marginal and hostile.

Individuals are thus suspended in the ruination of the crisis, awaiting either the restoration

of a state that will make things work once more and restore the tempus of modernity, or the

new capitalist order promised by liberal economists.42

Such a suspension is hardly a marginal or unintended consequence of globalisation,

but a deliberate attempt to revolutionise a society which had organised itself along lines

inimical to modern capitalism. 43 The policy was supposed to create the conditions which

had allowed the development of modern Western societies.44 The postcolony may seem

confined to the waiting room of history, thrown back to the past, but this confinement is an

integral feature of global late-modernity. The capitalistic conversion of solidity into ruins,

the destruction of communal structures to enable the free flow of capital, and the triumph

of the economy over the polis is the apogee of a global capitalism. In the West, social

democracy has shielded most of the people from the ruinous effects of advanced

capitalism (often in spite of our political leaders), but in the restructured economies of

many African cities the people are plunged into the ruins, ruins of a political and

economically failed society that, abandoned by a withered-away state, awaits a miracle of

economic rejuvenation. When one billion people live in ‘informal’ settlements and there

are probably more in the ‘slum’ economy, if we wish to excavate the future (which in late

capitalism is a future of ruins), we might learn more from Lagos than Las Vegas.45

The city of ruins is not, therefore, the opposite of the city of signs, but its trace.

Benjamin’s description of the modern city gave us Paris as a city of promiscuity,

displaying a bewildering multiplicity of signifiers, a plurality of boundaries, of thresholds,

of crossings and penetrations.46 Benjamin represents this promiscuity in a bewildering

series of fragments in which the only possibility for understanding rests in the personal

observation of the flaneur whose observations of place and the passing instant of time

embed a human experience into the city. Not only does this city of fragments mirror the

city of ruins, but this promiscuity of signs echoes the reading of the postmodern city as a

space of ironic or empty signs, in which architectural promiscuity reflects a lack of a

system of signification. The signifiers are thus obscurantist, traces of signs and stripped of

signification.47 But such promiscuity is only possible within the cultural logic and

economic might of imperial capitalism. The glistening of the arcades and the continuously

reflective glass, the commerce that filled and justified the arcades, and the goods

themselves all depended on these sinews of modernity. The surfaces of the lit arcades in

themselves mirror the flaneur producing a perceptible though diminished reflection of his

self, embedded and refracted in the surrounding city. Benjamin’s Paris thus obscures

community and seems only to reflect the capitalistic individual, and even then only dimly

and in fragments. Similarly, the promiscuity of the postmodern American city drains the

system of signs and drives residents to ever more atomised spaces so that for ‘the citizen’

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the polis exists only as traces.48 In the imperial city, Paris, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the

global connections of commerce procure the signs of other cultures, encompass their

places and times, compress their differences, and envelop them in the promiscuity of the

great city.

The enfolding of the city of ruins is central to the imperial imaginary. It is a city known

to us from the very foundations of modernity. The anti-type of the city of signs exists in the

Orientalists’ cities of the eighteenth century, in Cairo, in Damascus, in Jerusalem, in Delhi

and Casablanca. Without signs as far as the first Orientalist tourists were concerned,

looking almost like ruins, these were cities of the fantastic, where the exotic lurked, with

its terrors and forbidden pleasures. These were cities identified with an unchanging and

timeless East, in which past and present were intermingled, a timeless, fantasy world

which provided the anti-type for modernity, and a false anti-type since if one knew how to

look, wherever one went in the ‘Oriental city’ there were crossings and boundaries, texts

and signs.49 Far from offering an alternative, the ruin is enfolded within the imperial

imaginary, formative and central, its justification for imperial order, and the place in which

the human, with desires and dreams, is forced to live in alienation from that imperial

imaginary. It is not the anti-type of the modern city, but its essential manifestation.

The ruin of revolutions and the Angelus Novus

In response to a recognition that the contours of modern thought are written into the past, the

radical tradition has come to imagine a transition, in which there is a revolutionary break

from the traditions of Western thought. This new epoch demands a new time

(Chronos/tempus). Levinas, for example, rejects the Hegelian tradition of philosophy, a

denial of the polis, and turns towards the Messianic promise of an Eden to come.50

Agamben envisages this new epoch as one of pleasure, for pleasure transcends the

limitations of time. This time of pleasure is the Edenic moment, and that moment can stretch

within time to become past and present and future.51 In Walter Benjamin’s 18 theses On the

Philosophy of History, this revolutionary moment is a coming together of past, present and

future in a moment of stillness, of suspension, in which the Messiah may enter, and history is

remade (Thesis XVI and Thesis XVII).52 Yet, this coming together of time, past, present

and future, the explosion which shatters the conventions of societal time is already present

in the ruin and, as I have argued, the ruin is already enfolded within the imperial imaginary.

The revolution is made manifest in the ruin, but that is a revolution that has already been

experienced. Benjamin’s moment of stillness is thus also an imperial moment, in which all

history is laid out before the historical observer, and all can be enfolded into the moment.

Similarly, the postmodern (French) philosophical engagement with Classical Greece in

which there is a seeking for the ‘voice from outside’ by which to crack open the episteme of

the present is already in-built into the episteme of the Modern.53 Such a move runs the risk

of repeating the aesthetic, privileged distancing from the modern in Goethian Classics. By

contrast with postmodern retrospection, Agamben’s turn to pleasure and Benjamin’s to the

messianic moment appeals to an epistemology and ontology that is yet to come. They are

acts of faith. But as Benjamin ‘concludes’ in his theses on history, the Jewish sages were not

allowed to see the future, and in that obscurity and uncertainty, the Messiah lurked.

Yet, if the Messianic future is unpredictable, the emergence of the Messiah seems less

so. In the hyper-modernity of the ruined cities of Africa, messianic cults abound.54 When

those who are imprisoned in the waiting room of history decide that the timetable of

progress and prosperity is a lie, the rational option is to leave the station and search for new

timetables, new ontologies and new epistemologies. Yet, far from introducing an epoch of

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pleasure, these new messianic urges, these rejections of the historical trajectories of

modernity, encourage a reinvention of old truths. The polarities of globalisation and

localism, revolution and Liberalism, messianism and rationalism remain fundamentally

unresolved and dialectical, and formative within the imperial dynamic.55

This dynamic is already present in the formation of the Roman imperial imaginary.

Germanicus’ experience of Troy and Egypt is that of a different framing of time in which

the past (of Troy/Egypt) and future (of Rome) come together. Yet, the Messianic moment

is not so much the fall of Troy as the battles of Actium and Pharsalus, for it is these battles

that allow Caesar to take the troublesome ruins of Troy and pronounce for them a new

history, and a new telos which confers upon them a role in the inevitable historical triumph

of Caesar. Actium operates in exactly the same way: it is the traumatic moment which

gives birth to a new age, to a new sense of time which stems now from the imperial

position, but also a new history of Rome, to be written by Virgil and monumentalised in the

city of Rome, and for which the Augustan age is the End. Quite literally, these moments

allow the entry of a new time, now measured by the reigns of emperors, and new gods.56

The messianic moment is apocalyptic but it is an apocalypse that is foretold and also

ever-present in the past. It is monumentalised in the ruin. The explosion that transforms the

epoch is the building block of civilisation: the bio-political regime maintains the

emergency moment that would destroy it within its ideologies. As Agamben argues in

States of Exception, that emergency moment is fundamental to the construction of the

politics of the modern (and indeed Roman) imperial state.57 The ruin, as symbol of the End

of Civilisation, may promise freedom, but also threatens death, and in so doing, it justifies

the existence of the state. With Germanicus, the Messianic moment, recalled in the imago

of Actium, is the foundation of the imperial and the trauma that makes the imperial state

necessary. He sees at Actium the horrors of civil war; at Troy and in Egypt he sees the

remnants of a civilisation and it is precisely the fear that this was the future of Rome that

justified the imperial state in its suppression of political freedoms. The ruin offers

Germanicus imperial order (which meant death) or revolution (which meant death) and in

this there is little choice, no position from which to escape the present, no oppositional

locus and no obvious progression. The imperial state is thus itself a suspension of History,

which defends itself and us from the Messianic End of History, and does so by promising

and threatening us with that very Messianic moment.

Benjamin’s 18 theses of the On the Concept of History offer the metaphor of Klee’s

Angelus Novus, who, blown through history, face turned towards the past, views an ever-

receding but ever-present past of ruination.58 The metastructures of conventional

discourse are, quite literally, blown away in this Angelic ‘progress’ through time. The

Angel is repulsed by the ruins, and finds no home within them and proclaims his alienation

from the ruin. As we have found Caesar in the ruin, built into its very structure, enfolded

and at home, so the repulsion from the ruin becomes a rejection of Caesar, and the imperial

suspensions and divisions of time. I have argued that the totalitarian tendencies within the

imperial might offer a monological history in which the ruin may seem a place of

opposition, but nostalgic alienation, that place of sorrow and regret, is already confined

within the complexity of imperial time. Imperial (Roman and modern) historiography is

built on revolutions and ruins, the periodicities and the endless epochs that separate times

and places, and yet at the same time compress the past into an ever-present, ever-alienated

zone. I suggest that the radical history (and this is not just an ideological argument, but one

which is bound in particular historiographic practices) would deny the epoch and in so

doing deny revolutionary separation of the past from the present, deny the alterity of the

past, and its ruination, and deny the confinement of the many into the zones of the non-

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modern. For it is the epoch that forces us to overdraw distinctions between, for instance,

the ideologies of empire, ancient and modern, between the structures of domination in

different times, and normalise the contemporary as ‘the spirit of an age’ from which the

only escape is unthinkable. A new non-Hegelian history undermines the uniqueness of the

modern and the compartmentalisation of history and geography into stages in a

teleological vision. Hegelian histories condemn the past and so many of us to alterity and

to an imperial suspension, from which the modern can be observed and even critiqued, but

never escaped. To see Caesar in the ruins is to see the billions who are forced to live there

with him and to see that there can be no justification for that barbarity.

Notes

1. Annales II, 53.2. Annales II, 54.3. Annales II, 59–60.4. Annales I, 16–49.5. Tacitean historiography and, indeed, much ancient historiography, worked with materials

already widely known. The skills of the historian were literary rather than archival. Given thatGermanicus remained a figure of veneration for at least two centuries after his death, Tacitus’contemporary audience will have been fully aware of the outcome of the story.

6. Annales II, 55.7. Annales II, 59.8. One could draw parallels between this Tacitean text and the roughly contemporary description

of the fall of Carthage in Appian, Roman History, 8.132, which has Scipio weeping at thedestruction of the city as both a signifier of the inevitable fall of empires and as an omen forRome’s fate. In this view of Carthage there is a similar compression of historical times andplaces, that is, ultimately, imperial. The fall of Carthage in 146 BC can be seen as a moment oftransition between Rome the conqueror of Italy and Rome the imperial power. There is afurther resonance between Troy as read by Germanicus and Rome as read by Freud. See Freud,“Civilization and its Discontents,” esp. 725–6.

9. Lucan, Pharsalia 9. 961–999.10. It is probable that the sources exploited by Tacitus for Germanicus at Troy were also available

to Lucan. Tacitus’ account is clearly novelistic: we can see into Germanicus’ head. Althoughwe cannot know whether these insights were entirely Tacitean or were partially derived fromhis source, Tacitus does not seem to depart radically from the practices of contemporaryhistorians and it seems likely that Lucan would have been aware of at least some of the issuesthat arise in Tacitus’ discussion of Germanicus’ visit to Troy. Tacitus would certainly havebeen aware of Caesar’s visit to Troy and Lucan’s treatment of it.

11. See Gowing, Empire and Memory, 89–92 on the Trojan episode, arguing that Lucan producesan anti-Virgilian reading of Troy to undercut the ideology of the imperial regime. For theVirgilian episode see Aeneid VIII 97–369.

12. I am very grateful to Shreyaa Patel who brought this layering of personalities to my attentionand discussed with me the psychological implications of this passage.

13. Annales IV, 34–5.14. See Alston, “History and Memory in the Construction of Identity in imperial Rome,” 147–60.

Tacitus, Annales IV, 35: sequentis aevi memoriam.15. Tacitus, Agricola 2: Memoriam quoque ipsam cum voce perdidissemus, si tam in nostra

potestate oblivisci quam tacere.16. See Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, for the association of community and memory. See

also Ricoeur in History, Memory, Forgetting, who argues that all memory is social.17. See, for example, Tacitus, Agricola, 1; Histories I, 1–3; Annales IV, 32–3; Livy, Ab urbe

condita, praefatio; Sallust, Bellum Catiliane 1–4; Bellum Iugurthium 1–5.18. Annales II, 53 makes reference to the “imago tristium laetorumque” of Actium that

Germanicus recalls, suggesting a summoning of a world of memory. The summoning is initself an irruption into the present and gives rise to ontological ambivalence. See Ricoeur,History, Memory, Forgetting (Part I) on the imperfect mimesis of memory.

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19. There seems little reason to believe that collective memory must always be unitary andsimplifying, contra Halbwachs The Collective Memory, 1: “Society obligates people not just toreproduce previous events but also to ‘touch them up,’ shorten them, complete them . . . givethem a prestige that reality did not possess.” See Wertsch, Voices of Collective Rememberingand Nora, “Between Memory and History: les Lieux de Memoire,” for the elitist and ultimatelyimplausible view of collective memory as simplifying (and inherently false) andhistoriography as complexifying (and thus true). In the relationship to the event, collectivememory, as shown here, since it is inherently more individualistic (but not individual), can bemore nuanced and sensitive than much historiography.

20. This is the Holocaust question. An ambivalence about the narrative(s) of the Holocaust doesnot undermine the historical reality of the event. Indeed, the impoverishment of the event thatcomes with narrative raises an ethical dilemma when talking about the Holocaust. Part of theprocess of understanding such events of horror is the realisation that the narrative can never,thankfully, do justice to the event. On this, see below and Badiou, Handbook of Inaestheticsand Ethics: An Understanding of Evil.

21. Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting, esp., Part 1.22. There is an analogy (to put it no more strongly) with the mirror stage in Lacanian

psychoanalysis since the (mis)recognition is a fundamental source of discontent, but in thisinstance (mis)recognition is carried into the symbolic through its association with the polis. SeeLacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

23. Zizek, On Violence, 34–62 and 119–50 suggests that the most real version of the world canonly exist in those emotional aspects of the self that are freed from the conventions of theSymbolic Order.

24. Since we are integrated into political structures through the operation of collective identities,such a disjuncture with a monological imperial narrative and the resulting destabilisation ofmemories questions the operation and meaning of the political body, and especially itsrelationship to the individual. Hence Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political and Zizek, TheTicklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.

25. The ruin is thus porous in that boundaries are perceptible, but continually crossed by sight, timeis never fixed, being always filled with the festival that has gone and is to come, and the past iseverywhere present. See Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” 167–76, for the notion of the porouscity as derived from their experience of Naples. In their account, they preserve an anecdote of avisit to San Gennaro dei Poveri to see the early Christian frescoes, which are described to themas “Pompeii”, an example of the layering of time upon time in the present ruin.

26. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space for space as produced by particular social formationsand reproducing the individual through the operation of that space.

27. Examples abound, from Mussolini’s restorative programmes in central Rome, clearly designedto establish a “living” connection between Ancient and Fascist Rome, to the “complete”restorations of Classical monuments in contemporary Greece. As Mussolini’s restorationignored the Medieval heritage of Rome since it inconveniently referred to a period when Italywas divided and Rome itself under Papal control, so restorations of Classical Greek sites havefrequently been at the expense of the Ottoman heritage.

28. A similar process occurs in the picturesque, managed landscapes of the country estates ofEnglish gentlemen, subtly decorated with “follies”. In these, there is an assertion of an inventedconnection to Medieval and Classical histories that hardly threatened the ontological status ofthe gentlemen. See Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 1–11. For Italian parallels,see Cosgrove “The Geometry of Landscape.”

29. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.30. There is an imperial aesthetic in these constructions that can be seen not just in the ruins built

for the display of the wealth and culture of the elite, but in the “Indian pavilions” (mostfamously at Brighton), the collections of art and artefacts pillaged especially but notexclusively from Egypt, Greece and Italy, and in the “borrowing” of architectural styles fromother cultures and ages. This artistic promiscuity is a feature of Roman and European imperialcultures.

31. De Certeau, The Writing of History, 2. De Certeau is, in fact, not particularly thinkingof the non-European in this image, but the reference allows a connection to colonialconstructions.

32. De Certeau, The Writing of History, 5.

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33. This would appear to be a major strand of Nietzsche’s opposition to Hegelian politics. For adiscussion of the complexity and anti-liberalism of Nietzsche’s politics, see Detwiler,Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism.

34. See n. 40, below.35. Badiou, Being and Event.36. See duBois, Slaves and Other Objects, 7–11, on “derealisation” in the Freudian encounter with

the ruins of the Acropolis. On Freud’s Classical archaeology of the self, see Armstrong,A Compulsion for Antiquity.

37. The restoration of Republican values was the foundational claim of the Empire. It is writtenthroughout the Res Gestae Divi Augusti from the first chapter in which Augustus claimed thathis violent coup of 43 BC was the overthrow of a tyrannous faction and a restoration of liberty,to the last in which the culmination of his achievements is the return of power to the Romanpeople in 28–27 BC. One might object that modern empires offer no such “restorative”agendas, but British, French and Italian Empires normalised their authority by reference toclassical imperial “burdens” that had in some way returned to the Europeans.

38. The tensions between Chronos and Aion run through Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense.39. Negri, in “The Constitution of Time”, argues that capitalistic time is universal, not allowing an

outside to that time, but is also in contradiction, measured and lived, divided and unified. Thesubject of ontological time is positioned in capitalistic universal time and can never be outsidethat time. I argue that an “outside” to capitalistic, universal time is an essential element of animperial construction of time that enfolds the capitalistic and other temporal regimes.

40. Although it is almost obvious that modern totalitarianism grew from the Enlightenment asmuch as modern Liberalism, and it seems that elements of the philosophical discourse overlapso that totalitarianism remains latent within Liberalism, it is the flexibility of capitalist ideology(perhaps even its self-proclaimed absence) that allows it to enfold but not destroy otherhistorical perspectives, and which differentiates it fundamentally from totalitarianism. ContraHorkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Agamben, inHomo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, argues that the state of exception is formative forthe production of the law, and this is written throughout Western politics. He sees “bare life” ofthe individual as not exceptional (not just a feature of the camps), but as pervasive (p. 114).I would see the “enfolding” and maintaining of the potentiality of reduction to “bare life” in a“suspended” state of exception as offering a way of understanding modern non-totalitarianstates.

41. There are various ways in which one could substantiate this argument. Chadhauri, in“Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face,” argues that the reinvention of the “ethnic” is an invention ofmodernism. Massey, in “A Global Sense of Place,” critiques Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity, by arguing that the global perspective offered by Harvey ignores the experiencewithin localities, where most of us live, most of the time. One could interpret this as anargument for a disjunction between the imperial (global) context, and the local experience, andas characteristic of imperial culture.

42. On restructuring for growth, see Davis, Planet of Slums.43. For a succinct paean of praise for this policy, see Wolf, Why Globalization Works. The classic

relatively recent statement of such views is Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, with itsemphasis on a limited state and economic inequality as the drivers of progress. Whereas neo-conservatives were the political inheritors of this doctrine, the economic-historical inheritancewas North’s neo-institutionalism, outlined in Structure and Change in Economic History, inwhich it was argued that transaction costs were the single drag on economic growth andreducing transaction costs to a minimum would make and had made the world rich. It was thisview that drove globalisation policy and the restructuring of African economies.

44. See North, Structure and Change.45. See n. 47.46. Benjamin, The Arcades Project.47. Venturi and Brown, Learning from Las Vegas; Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic

of Late Capitalism.48. See the classic critique by Davis, City of Quartz. Yet, the polis with its unified system of signs

would seem to have more in common with the totalitarian city.49. See Said, Orientalism, on the fantasies of the East, and Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, on the

“discovery” of the East.

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50. See, for example, Levinas, “God and Philosophy” and “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition”, inwhich divine transcendence offers an escape from the Greek ideals of the polis.

51. Agamben, Infancy and History.52. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 245–55. Negri, in “The Constitution of

Time”, argues that the still-point of no-time is a moment outside history and as such animpossibility that abandons the Marxist notion of time. Negri’s commitment to a revolutionarybreak with capitalist time emerging from within the extremes of advanced capitalism itself isperhaps somewhat more in tune with the argument offered here.

53. See Leonard, Athens in Paris and Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices, for this building ofClassicism into the post-modern.

54. See, for example, de Boeck, “The Apocalyptical Interlude”, on the Book of Revelation as adoctrine of hope in Kinshasa.

55. See Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in Subaltern Studies.56. For Messianic feeling, see the much-debated Eclogue IV of Virgil. For an equivalent of the

epoch of pleasure see Tacitus, Annales I 2 who describes Augustus “seducing all with thesweetness of leisure” (cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit). Religious experimentation is a notablefeature of the imperial regime with the development of imperial cult, the transformation ofpreviously local cults (such as those of Isis and Mithras). The chronological parallel ofemergence of Christianity and the creation of the Roman Empire is not coincidental.

57. Agamben, States of Exception.58. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 245–5.

Notes on contributor

Richard Alston is Professor of Roman History at Royal Holloway University of London. He workson Roman and early Byzantine history, especially on urbanism in the Roman East. His most recentbook, Reflections of Romanity: Discourses of Subjectivity in Imperial Rome (with Efi Spentzou) waspublished in Spring 2011.

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