Of his three methodological approaches, Seider’s engagement with social scientific work on memory yields the most fruitful results. 3 Seider argues that this then permits him to consider passages that describe any mnemonic process-such as when characters recall their personal past-even in the absence of core or secondary vocabulary words.
To understand how the language of memory in the Aeneid characterizes “mnemonic processes,” Seider outlines a core and secondary vocabulary of memory, concluding from these lists that memory in the Aeneid is a “process that makes present something that is absent” (9). In delineating the scope of his project, Seider restricts himself to the question of how the epic’s “characters and narrator think about and engage in recollection and commemoration” (6). With his introduction (1-27), Seider articulates the volume’s main goals, summarizes the vocabulary of memory in the Aeneid, elaborates the role of memory in Roman culture, and enumerates his varied methodologies, which draw on philology, critical work on memory, and narratology. The bulk of the volume accordingly explores the tensions between remembering and forgetting, between being remembered and being forgotten, tracking the ways that the Aeneid ’s characters, Aeneas chief among them, (attempt to) manipulate memory in their efforts to move on from the trauma of Troy. On the contrary, Seider is acutely aware of the maxim that memory is constructed, not reproduced. This is not to say that Aeneas’ memories are always intended to be faithful reproductions of past events, nor that Aeneas always exerts control over his memories. The “uncertain future” entails two questions: can the Trojans overcome their past, and (how) will future generations remember them? From the outset, Seider positions himself against recent scholarship on the Aeneid that has privileged the “therapeutic effects of forgetting.” 2 Though remembering may be painful for Aeneas, Seider insists, it is necessary. For Aeneas and the Trojans, that “traumatic past” is the desolation of Troy. Seider argues that “memory in the Aeneid acts as a social and narrative mechanism for integrating a traumatic past with an uncertain future” (4). 1 Aaron Seider’s study of memory in the Aeneid is one of these publications. Classical scholarship has mirrored this trend, and thanks to Karl Galinsky’s project, “Memoria Romana”-the recipient of a Max-Planck Prize for International Cooperation in 2009-a number of new publications addressing memory in Roman culture have emerged in the last few years, with more to come. The last decade alone has seen a sharp uptick in scholarship on memory from the hard sciences to the social sciences to the humanities.
Memory studies are on the rise in all academic disciplines.
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