Preserving the Monuments of the Past

As old as the human instinct to build is the desire to preserve a building as one’s own memorial. The intention of passing on something of oneself to posterity as a memory makes a building a ‘monument’, an artefact which can endure into the potentially infinite future. But, as Alois Riegl observed, much greater social importance is attached to buildings that are ‘monuments’ in a second sense, those valued by subsequent generations as traces of the past. Although Riegl believed that the ancient world recognized only ‘intentional monuments’, interest in ‘unintentional monuments’ is also widely attested in antiquity. But the two conceptions are clearly interdependent. Different cultures have varied considerably in their commemorative ambitions and their acceptance of the potential of buildings to commemorate. This chapter will examine some of these differences and the contribution made in the age of the Antonines towards attitudes to monuments. Monuments commemorate many things. Most obviously, they perpetuate the memory of individuals. Mortal human beings can be given a form of immortality by establishing a link between them and posterity, either on a private level, as family ancestors, or on a public level, as models for a nation or community. Such monuments serve as moral examples for the future: what is commemorated is both the personal memory of the deceased and the abstract ideal or virtue that they symbolize. Linked to this kind of commemoration of persons is a second object of commemoration, the record of an event, especially a military encounter or a decisive political occurrence; here too, the monuments present a connection between the present and the past. However, these human meanings with which one associates monuments today have not always been the only or most important object of monumentality. In classical antiquity the most impressive and ‘monumental’ structures were those situated in the dimension furthest removed from the world of human experience, the realm of the divine. The great temples of the prehistoric Aegean, regarded as the gods’ permanent, terrestrial homes, reflected not simply the religious loyalty of their builders and worshippers, but a profound sense of the monumental.