George Mason University: Monumental Politics in Athens & Rome

When people fight over the ‘sacred ground’ of the 9/11 memorial, grieve for people who resisted economic austerity, or regulate the size and design of funerary memorials, they demonstrate the political stakes and importance of public monuments. Monuments highlight the affective and aesthetic dynamics of politics--particularly around the production of a democratic, tragic, or tyrannical political body through death and sacrifice. This class compares the political significance of monuments in ancient democratic Athens, Imperial Rome, and the contemporary United States. What lives are worthy of commemoration? How should those lives and actions be remembered? We will also examine contemporary monumental practices in Greece in response to the recent austerity and immigrant crises. Looking at different ways that democracies, republics, and empires have attempted to memorialize, glorify, and mourn the ‘public’ dead improves our understanding of political life.