Choosing History How Societies Decide What to Remember and What to Erase

Imagine you are walking through Rome in the year 211 AD, and something is wrong with the walls. Not the structure itself — the marble is solid, the mortar sound — but the faces. Everywhere you look, on triumphal arches, on public inscriptions, in the imperial forums, faces have been chiseled away. Names have been gouged out of stone. The smooth, raw wounds left behind are not accidental. They are intentional. They are a message: this person never existed. We have decided to forget.

The person in question was Geta, co-emperor of Rome, murdered by his own brother Caracalla in a power struggle that ended with Geta's assassination — reportedly in his mother's arms. Within hours of Geta's death, Caracalla had initiated one of history's most dramatic acts of institutional amnesia. He ordered the destruction of every image, every inscription, every official record bearing his brother's name or likeness. Thousands of portraits were defaced. Coins were melted down or restruck. Legal documents naming Geta were altered. The memory of Geta was made, as far as Rome's political machinery could manage, illegal.

The Romans had a name for this practice. Damnatio memoriae. The condemnation of memory.

And here is the thought that should stop you cold: they were not the last to try it. Not even close.

From the Aztec emperors who commissioned the destruction of competing historical codices, to the Soviet apparatchiks who retouched photographs to remove fallen comrades from official history, to the very contemporary battles fought in city squares over statues of generals and slave traders — every society, in every era, has engaged in some version of this project. The active, deliberate, politically motivated shaping of what the public remembers and what it is allowed to forget.

This is not a story about history. It is a story about power. Because whoever controls the past controls the story a society tells about itself. And whoever controls that story controls where that society believes it is going.