Roman Death

Andrew Feldherr writes in the TLS that Romans were known by the way they died, as well as how they killed. Not only individual Romans either: “The Romans as a people ‘decline and fall’; and their collective role as the West’s memento mori continues in the stream of recent books that imply the collapse of American society merely by comparing it to Rome.”

Feldherr is reviewing Catherine Edwards’s recent Death in Ancient Rome (Yale), which argues that Romans considered death a contest and a victory rather than a defeat. As Feldherr says, “The identity of winner and loser that results from claiming death as a contest becomes a perfect figure for the paradox that it takes a Roman to beat a Roman. And it is in this context that suicide, the most immediately active form of death, becomes a particularly Roman art, epitomizing, but also displacing, the events of the battlefield.”

Edwards sees continuity between the Roman way of death and Christian martyrdom, which she argues owes much to “the Roman calculus of death as victory.” Feldherr disagrees, saying that Christian teaching changed everything by preaching “a creed that denies the reality of death itself.” Well, no. It’s a creed that preaches the grim reality of death but also the victory of resurrection.