Damnatio Memoriae, or the Unfortunate Persistence of Memory

“Et te, Catilina, minaci pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem…”

And there you are, Catilina, hanging onto a threatening cliff and shuddering before the Furies…

Virgil, Aeneid 8.668-669

Yes, here I am, hanging onto a threatening cliff and shuddering before the faces of the Furies—Catilina. Or Catiline. I prefer the former; the latter sounds too Anglicized, too crass, too vulgar and vernacular. I suppose I prefer either of them over the dreaded “Cataline,” a misnomer which some are wont to use. But oh well, I throw up my hands; or I would, rather, had they not been busy grasping the rock as I—as the story goes—hang onto the threatening cliff. The Furies, though, are nowhere to be found; I suppose they are busy at work elsewhere. In any case, I remain hanging.

I digress. I am Lucius Sergius Catilina, and my most prominent iteration features on the shield of Aeneas as a decorative side-piece, as a morality tale—albeit with the Republic dead and Augustus supreme, for what, no one can tell. The shield is not real, neither is pious Aeneas. They’re props. The story that they are situated within, the Aeneid, is one that’s been elaborately crafted and churned out by the emperor’s favorite propaganda machine: the poet Virgil.

Of course, the emperor graciously refuses the title of king, and anybody inclined to keep his head keeps the word out of his mouth. The word he uses in our language is imperator—which eventually evolves into its clumsy English form, ’emperor.’ That said, the two are not exactly the same. In the days of my youth, imperator simply meant ‘general.’ Soldiers would gift the title to their general after a particularly memorable victory; no strings of permanent supremacy attached, for our people back then spit on the memory of the monarchy still: striking down tyrants like Tarquin the Proud, like Julius Caesar.

Perhaps that is why the boy known previously as Octavian—Caesar’s adopted son—adopted a thousand euphemisms for king. Imperator, leader. Princeps, first citizen. Augustus, the venerated one. ‘August’ was a word we used to describe our gods, the old gods, the ones native to Italy before the Greeks imported their pantheon en masse unto our land—the Etruscan ones. By using that word, that quiet word, the divine Augustus fitted himself into a diadem, disguised as a ‘civic crown,’ that no one bothered to look too closely at. He gently fit the bit around the teeth of the Roman people, who found that they preferred easy slavery to rugged liberty. Bread and circuses, the saying goes. Or maybe it was the desire to keep their heads after seeing so many of the dissenters’ roll on the ground. Who knows. He kept the line intentionally vague.

Needless to say—all the while, Augustus claimed to be restoring to the Republic to the old days, the old ways. He instituted moral legislation, the Lex Julia, to outlaw adultery (to which he himself was an exception to, incidentally), require marriage, and the like. Propaganda’s always in style. His house was famously modest, as well as his dress; “a heaven-sent boy,” as Marcus Tullius Cicero once called him. How Cicero would eat his own words now, seeing how things came to be and his beloved Republic crumbling under his divinus adulescens.

Ah, speaking of Cicero. I would dare to say I’m almost fond of him, the old fool. (True, in life, I was two years older than him—but the dead do not age, and he’s outlived me for decades.) I wanted to kill him at first, of course. While I lived. After I died, though, and the Furies found more interesting wretches to torment in due time, I grew bored with my eternal punishment. Dangling on a threatening cliff is dull work. I would’ve preferred the fire and brimstone promised to sinners in the Christian gospels; that would’ve been exciting, at least.

I had time on my hands. I began to take glimpses into the living world. It was a tenuous grasp at best, at least initially: I wasn’t as name-brand as Marius or Sulla. But I did exist in the shadows, in the peripheries of history—in that historian Sallust’s monologues and those speeches, those damned Catilinarian speeches of Cicero (that he preens about, to this day). So I managed to hang around indefinitely.

You see, we Romans’ endless chase for glory was for a particular end: remembrance. When we die, we leave nothing behind. Our flesh rots. Our bones are ground to meal to the dogs. In time, all that remains of us is what others remember of us. And it’s this element that allows us to retain our footing in the living world, to escape the blank oblivion that awaits the rest of our peers.

To only be remembered by a few is not enough. That’s why so many of the good, with wives and children whom they’ve loved in their own quaint, private lives, vanish without a trace of having walked this heart. It’s not enough to be good; one must be great. Our presence in the public consciousness, in the minds of those still living, is what allows us to hold onto our own identities. We spirits need to be remembered, commemorated.

Well, I certainly cannot lay claim to the latter, but I did manage the first, for my conspiracy: I tried to burn the Roman state. My name went down in infamy. A Pyrrhic victory, the Stoics would say, as the remembrance came in the form of infamy at the cost of their so-called virtue—but a victory nonetheless, and I am not a Stoic. I found my way to remain in history, and what remains in the collective memory of the living is all that remains of the dead. Thus, I retained my grip, however tenuous, in the world above Tartarus as a spectator, a shade. In the meanwhile, I waited for some more formal consecration of my name in a firmer medium.

And as luck would have it, Augustus took an ample interest in my biography: a nice dactylic hexameter about me in the Aeneid (of how much I was suffering for my sins), and voila, it was done. Lucius Sergius Catilina was confirmed in his immortality. Now although nowhere on par as Augustus himself, or Virgil at that—or Julius Caesar (Julius Caesar, Shakespeare) or Brutus (burning in hell in Dante’s Inferno) or the like—I hold enough influence in the world to watch it through its centuries. It’s the same old cycle, though: autocracy, democracy, autocracy yet again.

But that’s years into the future. I get ahead of myself.

I suppose I could thank Cicero for soldering my memory to public fame, infamy, whatever it may be. But I exist only as an appendix to his long and illustrious career; the evil conspirator that he defeated during his glorious consulship, for whose conquest he claimed a public thanksgiving and the title “Father of the Country” over—the latter still makes me laugh. In our contemporary years and then unto posterity, I’ve been cast in varying lights: always vanquished at the end, for sure, but whether I was a man or rabid animal has remained a subject of debate in various plays and theses. Cicero certainly presented me as the latter. I’m doubtful if he actually believed it; the man was, and has consistently been throughout his career (which regrettably overextended itself past its zenith) a realist, not the type to shoehorn people into stiff categories. But a politician’s job is not, and has never been, to tell the full, innocent truth; it’s to twist it for the sake of the public good, or private gain. Usually the latter. Although in his case, I think Cicero genuinely believed the two to be one and the same. A good man at heart, as the history books say.

I’d like to set the record straight. As well I as I am able to, anyway; ecause the remembrances of us by others anchor us to the living world and keep us from slipping into true oblivion, they also become us. The tales that the chronologists solder to our lives supplant our own memories, and within time, it’s difficult to tell apart the truth from the fiction, as the individual becomes a figure, a symbol in the course of history, and we shades achieve godhead, something more and less than the men we were. I’m afraid the narrative of Catiline, as set in the annals of history (ancient history by now) is one already set in stone.

Yet I have so much time on my hands. I’m hanging unto rock for the next millennium, after all. I need some way to pass the time. If anything, I’d like blemish the shiny story that Cicero has spun for himself. Debunk the canon. Since I have no Plutarch, no Vergil to sing my songs for me, I might as well write my tale myself. Where do I begin?

“ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;

ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,

par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.”

Thrice I tried to put my arms around her neck.

Thrice the image, grasped in vain, fled from my hands,

Like weightless winds—a featherweight dream.

Virgil, Aeneid 2.792-794

We ghosts are immaterial. We have no flesh and bone to grasp pen and paper with. This is why we appear as shades to the living, to invoke them to write our stories for us. Odysseus had his Homer, Medea had her Euripides; I needed my own poet to write my stories for me. So, when in an unholy hour of night I incidentally found my match, I didn’t bother to complain about her worthiness to take my diction—or her lack thereof, to be specific.

With my hands, I rendered open a gap on the page wide enough to travel through---and after a while, I emerged from a paper copy of the Aeneid to find myself in a room. Not in the depths of hell in which I’ve been burning, but a cramped and stuffy room and a girl looking like one of the undead herself.

It wasn’t that being outside of Tartarus in and of itself was a surprise. As I’ve explicated above, I hold enough influence in the world to wander it postmortem from time to time, as my memory waxes and wanes—even as Virgil said, I continue to dangle and tremble before the Furies. How so, you ask? As aforementioned, we spirits are not bound in flesh as the living are. And memory, inherently, fails to be static; it cannot be static; one story branches and bifurcates until it is like a prism, with multiple facets of the story each reflecting a different version of it. (Take Caesar’s last words, for example. According to Suetonius: καὶ σύ, τέκνον. Plutarch says that Caesar died silent. But the phrase most endeared to the public nowadays is the one invented by an English playwright: et tu, Brute? The last time I asked Caesar what his last words really were (partly out of boredom-borne curiosity, partly out of malice), his knee-jerk answer to the question was et tu, Brute; but then, he then caught himself: “no, that couldn’t be right.”) Naturally, just like our memories, we spirits are able to exist in plurality; we exist across texts, the collective memory anchors us—meaning that while my main form remained tethered inside the Aeneid, that didn’t prevent me from roaming the earth however much I liked—as long as I stayed at the forefront of the people’s minds.

I looked around me. Cramped, claustrophobic, sheets of paper strewn across the floor (what luxury! these sheets of paper would go for a premium in my time; the papyri we used tended to rot): what people call a dormitory room. The line of the Aeneid from which I had emerged from: Liber VIII, line 668—was now torn in half, by some rules of metaphysics (that I still do not, to this day, comprehend in the slightest). I observed the girl sitting next to me—or slumping, more like, as alongside the Aeneid rested her head flat on the desk. She appeared to be half asleep. After confirming that she was not dead (a dead bard would be useless), I hopped off of her desk, and took the time to peruse through the many volumes of books slotted in the bookshelves: Iliad, Odyssey, some of Euripides, some of Aristophanes—so she wasn’t a complete philistine after all. But my lips curled as my gaze found the other volumes in her collection: On Duties, On Laws, On the Good Life—all having Marcus Tullius Cicero emblazoned on their spines as their author.

When I turned back around to take a closer look at my bard, I found her with her chair turned (it was one of those swivel chairs with a a pivot point), staring intently at me—studying me intensely, but with no sense of surprise. We stood at a standstill like this for a few moments, as I waited for her to break the silence—but she did not.

Finally, I did. “Salve to you, puellula? Vivesne?”