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Xu, Theresa Ruoxi

In 88 BCE, Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysos, king of Pontus and one of the strongest enemies of the Roman Republic, ordered a mass massacre to kill all residents of Roman birth in Anatolia. Hellenistic poleis such as Ephesus, Pergamon, Caunus, Adramyttion, and Tralles were scenes of atrocities. This so-called Asiatic Vespers resulted in the death of between 80,000 and 150,000 Romans. (App. Mith. 23; Val. Max. 9.2.3; Memn. 22.9; Plut. Sull. 24.4.) In terms of historiography, Appian selects five poleis to present specific highly emotional tragic scenes; Cicero, a contemporary of the Asiatic Vespers, calls it a “stain” attached to the tapestry of Rome’s unfolding hegemony. (Leg. Man. 2.8) In the century that followed, the social reorganization of the Mediterranean world, escalating political crises, and the partisan effects of civil wars have complicated the traumatic memory of the Asiatic Vespers. Among different social groups that were involved in this incident – the local Anatolians, the Greeks, and the Romans, the dynamics of remembering and forgetting overlapped and competed. In this thesis, I seek to understand what specific roles terror and trauma played in forming the memory space of the Asiatic Vespers according to two of Paul Connerton’s typologies of social forgetting: (1) forgetting as annulment and (2) forgetting in forming new identity. First, the “forgetting as annulment” as an agenda guides Appian’s depiction of the Asiatic Vespers in The Foreign War by integrating independent sources and generating rhetorical tension. The “forgetting in forming new identity” as an specifically trauma-derived typology, sheds light on how traumatic feelings such as confusion, embarrassment, and humiliation served as the cornerstone for communities to negotiate the post-massacre collective identity and to respond to new social and political crises. I suggest that memories of the Asiatic Vespers were adjusted, renewed, and appropriated by the Romans to serve their contemporary purposes. These typologies of social forgetting helped them to locate themselves and to deal with during uncertain moments of political transformation.

Text

University of British Columbia. AMNE 499

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0444021

Arts, Faculty of; Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, Department of

Undergraduate

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