In this guest post, Simon Hunter, of 13 Old Square Chambers, muses on the inherent contests of heritage, and on Rustat
Introduction
“No chief has Rome so loved, nor thee so much, Caesar, as now; thee too, albeit she would, she cannot now love more.”
Martial, Epigrams VIII:11. (Loeb editions 1919, translated Ker)
“…those innumerable golden images [of Domitian], as a sacrifice to public rejoicing, lie broken and destroyed. It was our delight to dash those proud faces to the ground, to smite them with the sword and savage them with the axe, as if blood and agony could follow from every blow. … all sought a form of vengeance in beholding those bodies mutilated, limbs hacked into pieces, and finally that baleful, fearsome visage cast into fire, to be melted down, so that from such menacing terror something for man’s use and enjoyment should rise out of the flames”
Pliny the Younger, Panegyricus, 52 (Loeb editions 1969, translated Radice)
Two thousand years ago, give or take a few decades, the poet Martial put aside his barbs and his obscenities and sang out his praise for his “Unconquered”[1] Emperor, Domitian. No doubt it was expedient for a jobbing poet to do so, at least occasionally. Thanks were given for the Emperor’s mighty triumphs, for the splendour of his palaces, for the munificence of his benefactions, for the love of his adoring people. All of Gaul had, apparently, heard Rome acclaim its beloved God-Emperor.
Not even a decade later Pliny the Younger put into practice the oratorical skills he had learned from the great Quintilian and delivered to the Senate a panegyric in praise of his Emperor, his “excellent ruler”[2]. In the time of Trajan, it was expedient to belittle the memory of the previous dynasty. Domitian was, by then, a dictatorial tyrant whose murder was a righteous, honourable act. By the good offices of the same emperor that he praised with such soaring prose Pliny would serve part of the year 100AD as suffect Consul, and he would later go on to be the Imperial legate of Bithynia and Pontus. Sycophancy served Pliny better than it served Martial.[3]
We are justified in being wary of accepting all of Pliny’s criticism of Domitian, just as we are wary of accepting all of Martial’s praise of him. But the contrast of the Epigrams and the Panegyric does show us a contest about heritage in action long before cancel culture had a name: how should you remember a recently deceased tyrant, and how do you praise the current one? For a Roman, chucking out a statue or two was a culturally acceptable response, at least in theory. One might reasonably suspect that a faculty did not need to issue from the Registry for the destruction of statues of Domitian in 100AD. And it is unlikely that anyone who threw one into the Tiber ended up in the Crown Court in Bristol.
Domitian, of course, was not alone. Inscriptions survive showing the chiselling away of the names of Commodus and Geta. In the 1350’s Marino Faliero, the Doge of Venice, suffered a similar fate after his failed coup attempt. In 2003 statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down across Iraq.
Other destructive contests about heritage which do not include damning the memory of a deceased and (allegedly) unlamented ruler can be found littered through history. The Iconoclasm of the mid 8th century in the Byzantine Empire. The whitewashing of doom paintings during the Reformation. The Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s and ‘70s. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban. The list is endless and as old as history itself.
Other overt contests about heritage have been less destructive. In 1983 Melina Mercouri, then the Greek Minister of Culture, gave an emotive appeal[4] for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, part of a long line of such appeals: all, so far, unsuccessful. The (ab)use by sports clubs of logos based on Native American headdresses[5] also come to mind. And the growth of Welsh and Hebrew as spoken first languages shows that some contests can be positively constructive.
“Historic England has defined contested heritage as objects or places that can be seen as “symbols of injustice and a source of great pain for many people””
Church Buildings Council and the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England report Contested Heritage in Cathedrals and Churches, 2021[6] Continue reading