The Suicide of the Saguntines: Remarks on the Invention and the Integration of a Fictitious Collective Trauma into the Roman Cultural Memory

Authors

  • Simon Cahanier Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i19.685

Keywords:

Saguntum, mass suicide, cultural memory, trauma, fides

Abstract

In several literary sources from classical antiquity, the story of the siege of the Iberian city of Saguntum by Hannibal in 219 BC. –an episode which marks the beginning of the second Punic war– ends with the description of besieged citizens’ collective suicide. This article intends to study the literary motif of the Saguntines’ suicide by connecting it with two current fields of research: Memory Studies and Trauma Studies. The episode is considered both from its psychological dimension and as an essential element of Rome’s cultural memory of the war against Hannibal, based on the dual observation that the act of collective self-destruction in the context of a siege may be analysed, in the light of modern categories of psychopathology, as a symptomatic response to a psychological trauma derived from war. As critics point out, however, this event has no historical basis. In fact, the story of the Saguntines’ suicide is clearly based on an historiographical topos originated in Greek literary works in the fifth century BC. It is hence necessary to study the conditions, the reasons and the chronology of the invention and integration of this traumatic memory into Rome’s collective memory. After the presentation and classification of the narrative variants of this story as reported in the works of Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Titus Livius, Valerius Maximus, Silius Italicus, Florus, Appian, Cassius Dio and Augustine, extracting their common features, this article defends the thesis that this collective suicide constitutes, above all, a Roman «lieu de mémoire» created in the middle of the 1st century BC. The insistence on the paradoxically founding dimension of suicide, which preserves the cohesion within Saguntine community beyond its very annihilation, represents a counter-model directly opposed to the rupture of the Roman social body in the context of then-current civil war as the story was written.

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Author Biography

  • Simon Cahanier, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3

    Simon CAHANIER est ancien élève de l’ENS de Lyon et professeur agrégé de Lettres Classiques au collège Nicolas Appert de Châlons-en-Champagne. Il prépare actuellement une thèse de doctorat sous la direction de Marie LEDENTU (Univ. Jean Moulin-Lyon 3) et François CADIOU (Univ. Bordeaux-Montaigne) consacrée à la mémoire culturelle des guerres romaines en Hispanie du iiie s. av. J.-C. au début du ve s. ap. J.-C. à travers les sources littéraires, épigraphiques et iconographiques.

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Published

2020-12-14

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 19 (2020): Fear, Trauma, and Violence in the Wars of Antiquity

Section

Dossier

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How to Cite

The Suicide of the Saguntines: Remarks on the Invention and the Integration of a Fictitious Collective Trauma into the Roman Cultural Memory. (2020). Revista Universitaria De Historia Militar, 9(19), 36-55. https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i19.685

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