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History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity

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Evidence from the past doesn't alone make history. While literary and physical sources provide the foundation of facts for modern day scholars, it is our interpretations of sources from which our histories are formed. Our conclusions must not only take into account what was said and what we see, but also what is not said and the unseen. This idea is the very essence of Charles W. Hedrick's work, History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity. Hedrick uses a Roman inscription that reverses the damnation of a man as the basis for exploring the significance and forms of silence in historiography. The subject of silence has been explored in past centuries by philosophers and scientists alike. Hedrick provides those views along with recent historical interpretations to present his own to the reader, while developing the physical evidence. After combing through centuries of what silence means and its potential to explain what is not only hidden, but unobtainable with ancient history, Hedrick analyzes his inscription in a frame of mind that can easily be applied to other studies of historiography.

Opening with a presentation of his primary source, Hedrick provides a translation of a statue base that has been erased, then rewritten upon; a palimpsest. The source itself has not been approached in over a century by historians. The inscription deals with Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, who had held several prestigious public offices, but participated in a failed usurpation in 394 A.D., and had been damned from memory - a damnatio memoriae - for it. The inscription's expressed purpose is to recall Flavian to memory, because for he was unjustly dishonored. That rehabilitation would also restore dignity to Flavian's son, Flavian the Younger, who likewise had been leading a life in public politics, but with the shadow of his disgraced father over him. The book then goes into depth about the style of Roman inscriptions and how the passage conforms and differs from Late Imperial trends. What the author points out most is the vagueness and dissimulation of the source, and important facts that were left out of the inscription. Explaining the why of these omissions make up the bulk of the book.

Hedrick states that, "the person or thing is to be `brought back,' and the restoration is to `stand for' them." That restoration has left out facts we know about from other sources ofFlavian and Hedrick wants to know why the authors left these facts out, another obstacle since there is no written authorship. The very cause of Flavian's disgrace is noticeably left out of the inscription as well, reflecting the nature of a damnation memoriae. The memory of Flavian was damned because of his actions and his recovery allows his name to be praised again, but his actions are still to be unspoken in Roman society. Honor and personal achievement were always something to be flaunted in Rome, and were still regarded very highly by the aristocracy of 5th century Rome. To rehabilitate the reputations involved, the statue and its inscription would have been restored publicly, likely in a forum.

One of the facts left out from the inscription is the position of pontifex maior from Flavian's cursus honorum -list of titles. This pagan priesthood was commonly found amongst inscriptions of other priests, so its absence in this case seems to stick out like a sore thumb. The creators of the inscription must have found the title either irrelevant or inappropriate and Hedrick explores reasons for both. The inscription doesn't mention Flavian's reason for disgrace, being a memory Rome wished forgotten still, and the lack of mention of pontifex is thus possibly related to his disgrace. Today the rebellion is thought of either motivated by pagan sentiment or an outright final stand of pagans. Ancient sources about the revolt are almost entirely Christian and support the more radical pagan fervor. Modern historians have judged more conservatively, one reason being the other two leaders of the revolt were Christian, but the fact that Flavian's priesthood is neglected lends support to a conclusion that the rebellion may have made paganism much less acceptable in public, being associated with a rebellion against the Emperor. We can assume the statue was sponsored by the public upper class, since it bore the names of the current Emperors and Senate, and attribute this attitude towards paganism as one shared by most of the aristocracy.

Charles Hedrick defines history in regards to silence as such: "In concrete, human terms, history is about those who once were living but now are dead; who once could speak for themselves but now are silent. So the dead past provides the referential object for history as its silence produces the condition of possibility for historical discourse." He considers historians are, like the inscription, restoring what has been erased. In this way, historians are uncovering what has been forgotten and neglected, depending on what the historians and societies of the past choose what to record. Historians now provide a voice for the dead, championing them against silence. Hedrick refers to Tacitus more than once when he says that when those in power attempt to silence a memory, it only spurs historians to keep that memory alive.

Many of Hedrick's ideas are developed in his writing in a Cartesian style. In my own summarization he wrote: `Historians cannot know exactly what silence means, since it isn't indicative itself. When we replace silence with specifics, we use our imagination. Thus finding the authority for a history in silence strengthens and undercuts the authority of the historian.' At times this process of development can seem fruitless, but Hedrick uses his `thusly' conclusions of thought like a mathematical proof, referring to his conclusions many times in the remainder of his work. Where pedantic terms seemed at threat to emerge, Hedrick explained just what he meant before using the word, such as how he uses "dissimulation" as a method of indirect silence.

Hedrick teaches his approach to understanding historical silence supported by a wealth of sources. He uses examples of Tacitus, who battled silence in history directly, as well as numerous sources from the recent past. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche in particular have tackled the idea of silence. Hedrick acknowledges his debt to these sources, and maintains that his historiographical interpretations are influenced by these theoretical works, but are his own. Examples of approach in other subjects I found noteworthy:
A scientist [is] not concerned to write what is not, but rather to write what is, but has not been said: that is, to write what exists in silence. In this sense, scientists must conceive of themselves as discoverers, not creators. Literary critics[aim] to explain a text; that is to say, they attempt to bring into appearance something that is there[but is] not explicit. If it were explicit, there would be no point in saying it. Again, their interpretation is conceived as speech over a silence.
The concept of using silence, something that isn't there, seemed almost ridiculous to me when I first picked up the book, but Hedrick's approachable language and solid methods of proof in turn taught me a new approach to historiography.

The book ended up being much more about methods of historiography than I thought it would be. The inscription is the physical core of the work; all lessons in the book can pertain to researching the Imperial letter. The book spends much time away from the statue, and while that time is not wasted, I almost forget the purpose of that piece of evidence. We are lucky with this particular piece of evidence that there's supporting sources that can help us fill in what silence there is. To what extent can we apply Hedrick's lessons on silence on more remote sources? We can only consider, in post-modernist fashion, that there is inherent silence in all sources. We may however, be prone to exploring a vague source and come up with endless interpretations, abusing the memory of silence. This is not a bad lesson, however, and detecting silence within a memory of the past can lead us to investigate what the authors of the memory had to hide, or what they valued.