ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how art and architecture actively manipulated how ancient Romans remembered and knew their world, sometimes even creating false memories of places, events, and institutions. It focuses on three case studies of objects and monuments from the Roman Empire: a sports souvenir from Roman Britain, travel souvenirs from the Bay of Naples, and the Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome. Drawing on cognitive research into how external stimuli, including visual images, distort and falsify memories, the chapter demonstrates how these portable, private objects and monumental, public architecture all generated semantic memory of sites and activities around the Roman Empire. They may even have caused some Romans—and modern historians—to misremember certain historical events, such as the putative triumph in 202 ce of the emperor Septimius Severus. Cognitive theories such as the misinformation effect, the source monitoring framework, and the impact of conversation and collaboration on remembering illuminate how these objects and monuments—with their combinations of image and narrative—could shape semantic memories and create distorted and false memories through repeated viewing and use. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the souvenirs and triumphal arch projected manipulated semantic memories and false memories as a form of cultural and social connectivity; that is, a means of creating a shared cultural or historical narrative that could transcend time and space in the Roman Empire.