Historical Memory of the Battle of Caudium 321 B.C. in the Ancient Tradition

Abstract

The article examines the Battle of Caudium 321 B.C. as the traumatic place of memory in the classical ancient intellectual heritage and the number of specific problematic issues of the topic. Based on the «synthetic» approach, which combines the methodology of positivism and historical memory, the work identified annalistic, Greek, family and Livy’s traditions, determined places of consensus and conflict memory and traced mnemonic strategies of taking past trauma in classical ancient historiography. The author concludes that in the II century B.C. the annalistic tradition adhered to the strategy of «normalization» of memory, which was also facilitated by the understanding the past trauma in the Greek tradition. However, during the same period, the family tradition attempted to change the memory of the event in the direction of «glorification». In I century B.C., the nostalgia factor in the era of crisis of the Republic led to the emergence of the Livy’s tradition, which established «glorification» as the dominant mnemonic strategy and almost completely supplanted all other forms of memory of the Caudine battle. Identification of the stages of memory distortion also allowed determining the earliest layer of tradition, which confirms the authenticity of Rome’s rejection of the Caudine treaty.