J ulia H ell . The Conquest of Ruins

Julia Hell’s The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome offers a panoramic vision of the tradition of resurrecting the memory of ancient Rome. As she leads her readers on a journey from the Roman defeat of Carthage in the second century BCE to postwar Germany, Hell observes the centrality of monumental classical ruins in the European imaginary. She demonstrates that over the centuries, as the tools for engaging with the Roman model have evolved, successive thinkers have also woven a rich and ongoing dialogue with their predecessors. Ruinography has thus solidified and anchored the Roman Empire in public memory at the same time that it has confronted those who gazed at the Roman past with the inevitability of empire’s demise. To chart these developments, Hell identifies five notable features in the stratigraphy of acts of Roman imitation, including imperial mimesis, imitation as a public act...

Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Demise · Empire · Imitation · Political science · Roman Empire · The Imaginary · Classics · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies