Ad perpetuitatis memoriam: Citizenship Performance and Social Memory in the Public Sphere at Lepcis Magna

Abstract

This dissertation presents an ‘urban biography’ of the city of Lepcis Magna through in-depth examinations of the architectural, epigraphic, and sculptural record of the city’s three major public spaces: the Old Forum, the Theater Complex, and the Severan Forum. These public spaces were the stages upon which the city’s prominent citizens performed what, by consensus, was deemed to be good, citizenly behavior. At the heart of this study is the city’s extensive preserved corpus of inscriptions which recorded acts of benefaction, veneration, and commemoration and served to produce and perpetuate social memory in the public consciousness of Lepcis Magna. These inscriptions, the public spaces they inhabited, and the architectural or sculptural objects to which they were attached were potent markers of local politics and intra-elite competition, each one representing the outcomes of a series of social processes and functioning as vectors for the communication of contextualized cultural information associated with euergetism on the part of an individual, a constituent part of the community, or the community as a whole. While it has been shown that this spatially or verbally encoded information was essential for constructing, maintaining, and contesting notions of power, culture, and identity, this dissertation shows that this information functioned similarly with regard to notions of good citizenly behavior within a community presented in both local and non-local terms. Thus, the production of these spaces and texts for the purpose of the engagement of a community with the information encoded therein transformed the urban landscape into a mnemonic device for the promotion and perpetuation of good citizenly behavior among the elite population. Through the act of reminding, these civic memories initiated processes of social and cultural reproduction with the aim of producing good citizenly behavior in local and non-local individuals across generations in the form of acts of ‘citizenship performance’ which were intended to benefit the city, the state, and the people. This dissertation utilizes the local specificity of the ‘urban biography’ framework as a means of understanding the preservation of social memory through identity expression and citizenship performance in the urban context of Lepcis Magna, as this framework allows for greater focus on the effects of these preferences, expectations, and aspirations within the local community. Drawing on this notion, this dissertation sketches out a biography of the city from his origins as a Punic emporion and city-state to its ultimate demise in the 6th c. CE. The case studies on the Old Forum, Theater Complex, and Severan Forum that make up the core of this dissertation portray how the city’s public spaces became palimpsests of messaging that simultaneously preserved the echoes of the city’s Punic and post-Punic past with a present that is increasingly framed in Roman terms, put on display for the edification and social reproduction of future generations. The extensive architectural, sculptural, and epigraphic remains of these public spaces reflect how the local inhabitants of Lepcis Magna ‘lived in’ the city and experienced its development and adornment at the behest of local elites who were afforded increased access to the imperial apparatus as the city gained greater juridical status from the 1st c. BCE to the 4th c. CE.