What are we actually asking for when we want a wrong erased—that it be made never to have happened, or that someone with the standing to do it pass a verdict on it?
In the Roman Forum, at the foot of the Capitoline, stands a triumphal arch the Senate put up for the emperor Septimius Severus in 203. The thing worth stopping for is not the arch. It is the four lines of letters cut across the top of it.
Three of the lines behave. They hand the emperor his names, his titles and his victories over the Parthians, in the dense abbreviated Latin of official Roman stone. The fourth goes strange. Where we expect a fourth name we get a phrase—optimis fortissimisque principibus—to the best and bravest of princes. It is flattery, it is vague and it is the only vague thing on the whole inscription.
It reads that way because something was taken out of it. The line originally ran P. Septimio L. fil. Getae nobiliss. Caesari—to Publius Septimius Geta, son of Lucius, most noble Caesar.[^arch] Geta was Severus's younger son. At the end of December 211 his older brother Caracalla had him killed by centurions in their mother's apartments, in her arms, and then set about removing him from the world's surfaces.[^geta]
The letters were gilded bronze, pegged into drilled holes.[^whe] Prise the letters out and the holes stay. They are still there, at the end of the third line and across the fourth, and epigraphers read the missing name straight off them.[^arch]
The obvious reading is that Caracalla was trying to make Rome forget his brother, and botched it. That reading is almost certainly wrong.
Start with the label. Damnatio memoriae is not a Roman phrase at all; it first appears in a German legal dissertation of 1689.[^dm] The Romans never named the practice that way, and did not conduct it like a cover-up. They left the gaps in plain sight. A painted family portrait from about 199, now in Berlin, shows Severus, his wife and his two sons; one of the four faces has been rubbed away, the other three intact and serene.[^tondo] Nobody smearing out that face imagined a viewer would count three heads and walk on.
Charles Hedrick, who studied these erasures in late antiquity, put the point about as flatly as it can be put:
> Disgrace not oblivion is the aim and the defaced monument still standing in public view is only the most obvious "sign of the thing repressed."[^hedrick]
So the erasure was a sentence in both senses—a verdict pronounced in stone, and a thing composed to be read. Caracalla needed the hole to spell the name.
I had assumed the whole business was a failed technology of forgetting, the ancient equivalent of a badly scrubbed hard drive. It was nothing of the kind. It was closer to a pillory: the man is on public display, and the display is the point.
Which is roughly the reverse of what we are doing when we delete something.
In 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for fifty million dollars over an aerial picture of her Malibu house, one of twelve thousand frames in a survey of coastal erosion. Before the suit the image had been downloaded six times, twice by her own attorneys. In the month after it, more than four hundred thousand people visited the site. The case was dismissed, and by 2005 the whole phenomenon had been named after her.[^streisand]
The legal version ends the same way. A Spanish man won a 2014 ruling from the European Court of Justice requiring Google to delist a 1998 notice of a forced sale over his unpaid debts. The judgment carries his name, and so does the debt.[^costeja]
The usual moral drawn from these stories is technical—the internet has no delete key. There is something else in them. The Roman erasure succeeded because it was public; ours fail because they become public. Either way the arithmetic runs one direction: the person is never subtracted, and every attempt adds. Whether the charge can be subtracted is a separate question, and nothing we do to a surface will answer it.
That separate question is not an abstract one for me. Years ago I carried a wrong figure into a client forecast, one misaligned column repeated across three pages, and it had to be withdrawn a week later in front of people who never quite trusted us again. "That's mine—I built the back end," a colleague said across the table. It was not hers. I was watching my own hands fold the corner of a page, and I said nothing. It is not a grave wrong and it has never left me. I would pay to have that afternoon struck from the record. When we want something we have done to be gone, what is it we actually want?
Secrecy ought to satisfy the wish, if the wish were simply for non-existence. It does not. A wrong nobody ever learns about is not thereby settled; it sits there, in the one person who knows. A confession nobody receives settles nothing either. What we are after is something done to the record, and we want the pen in our own hand, because the name on that record is what we are trusting to make us someone.
There is a strong and unsentimental account of forgiveness that handles most of this without any metaphysics at all. On this view forgiving is a change in the injured party and nowhere else: they held resentment, and they let it go. Jeffrie Murphy, who has argued the case as carefully as anyone, writes that forgiveness "is primarily a matter of how I feel about you (not how I treat you)."[^murphy] It comes with a hard-edged rule about who may do it:
> I do not have standing to resent or forgive you unless I have myself been the victim of your wrongdoing.[^murphy]
This explains a great deal, and better than the pious alternatives do. It explains why forgiveness costs the one who grants it rather than the one who receives it, and why a bystander announcing it on a victim's behalf is presumptuous rather than generous.
Where it stops is not a technicality. First, on this account an enormous number of wrongs have no available resolution at all—the person is dead, or never knew, or is alive and has decided not to. Second, and Murphy is careful about this, the account never claims that forgiving settles the wrong; he holds it apart from excusing, from justifying, and from remitting punishment. The mother who stops being angry has not thereby declared the murder dealt with. But that is the trouble. It tells us what becomes of her resentment and nothing about what becomes of the guilt.
So the account explains relief, and relief is real. The reply to wanting more than relief is obvious: a verdict is just another feeling we would like to have, and a self-flattering one. Perhaps. But one thing here is not a feeling at all. The wrong stays a fact about the world after every feeling about it has been managed away; the credit still went to the wrong person, and no settled nerves reach back and alter that. That leaves the pen in our own hand. And the standing rule has already told us whose hand it would have to be instead: a party to the wrong, not a bystander and not an arbitrator. Which means a verdict on every wrong ever done would require someone who was party to all of them, and there is no such person.
I never told her. I have told myself that telling her now would be for me rather than for her—setting a weight down on the person who carried it—and I cannot tell whether that is true or simply the most presentable thing I have.
When the New Testament reaches for erasure it reaches for one word: ἐξαλείφω, exaleiphō, from ek and aleiphō, to smear off. It is the ordinary word for rubbing writing off a wax tablet or sponging ink from a sheet.[^exaleipho] Ancient ink lay on the surface of the papyrus instead of biting into it, so a wet sponge really did return the sheet to blank.[^ink]
The verb occurs five times. Four are God wiping something out—sins,[^acts] the handwritten bond of debt standing against us,[^col] and tears, twice.[^tears]
The fifth is God refusing to.
> He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life.[^rev]
Caracalla kept the charge and removed the name. Here the charge goes and the name stays.
The threat it answers was real. Moses offers his own name—blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written—and is told that whoever has sinned will be blotted out (Exodus 32:32–33); the psalmist asks the same of his enemies (Psalm 69:28). The sponge can go the other way. The Lamb's book is not an exception to that threat but its settlement, and it settles it by someone standing under the charge.
And a beat Caracalla could not have bought at any price: the same letters promise the overcomer a new name written (2:17), one we did not write for ourselves.
The promise carries a condition that should not be slid past: it is made to the one who overcomes. The warning is not a bluff, and it is meant to frighten us out of ourselves rather than back onto ourselves—because Revelation names the overcoming plainly, they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb (12:11), and it is not a grip we supply. Perseverance is among the things grace gives, not the price it asks.
The pattern holds where we would least expect it. Paul, wrapping up a warm letter to a church he loves, stops to name two women who are not speaking to each other—Euodia and Syntyche—and asks the congregation to help them.[^phil] The quarrel is on the record forever, with their names attached, and in the same breath he says those names are in the book of life, put there by grace.[^comm] Neither woman needs the other struck out in order to be safe, because neither one wrote her own name there. The colleague across the table is a name on that record too, and not merely a character in mine. Nothing is chiselled out.
The verse about the bond of debt does two things that ought not to fit together:
> Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.[^col]
The document is sponged blank—and then nailed up in public, where a notice goes when it is meant to be read. If the aim were deletion this is the wrong move. Commentators from Lightfoot to Moo read the nailing as the public posting of a bond already cancelled, which is a judgement about what the display is for rather than anything the syntax settles. What goes on show is not the charge but its cancellation, and it needs a wall as badly as Caracalla's gap needed one, while saying the opposite thing from it.
Then there is the detail nobody had to include. Of all the things a resurrection might be expected to undo, the marks of the execution are first on the list, and they are the one thing the risen body keeps: reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands.[^thomas] Thomas is asked not to overlook them but to put his hand in them, and it is by them that the man is identified. Underneath the wish for a verdict is a wish we admit less readily: to be known all the way down and wanted anyway. An erasure clean enough to leave nothing of us in the record could not answer that. Kept wounds can.
And the standing problem, which looked insoluble, has an old answer. David, having taken another man's wife and arranged the man's death, prays: against thee, thee only, have I sinned.[^ps51] Read carelessly that is an insult to the people he ruined. The Christian claim is the reverse: that Uriah bore the image of God and stood inside God's covenant, so the wrong was twofold from the first—an injury to Uriah and an assault on the One whose likeness he bore. That does not hand Uriah's standing to God; it adds a party who was there the whole time, the only party who never minimises an injury, never forgets it and never settles it cheaply. Settling it cost a cross. All of which holds only if that third party is really there. What commends it is that it is the only account I know of that neither shrinks the wrong to something manageable nor leaves us holding it alone. Guilt as a status requiring a verdict rather than a feeling requiring management—I got that from Keller, and I have not been able to put it down since.[^keller]
Caracalla was an elder brother who struck a younger brother out of the record to keep a throne. The Christian story turns on a better elder brother, who went the other way—who let himself be reckoned among the transgressors,[^luke] written into the register under our charge, so that the charge against us could be sponged off the page.
We chisel at other people's names because our own standing is what is at stake. We can put the chisel down only when our own name has been secured by a verdict we did not write.
Which takes me back to that conference room. A settled verdict sends us toward the person, not around them: Zacchaeus, pardoned over dinner before anyone asked anything of him, came downstairs working out what he owed, at fourfold, and the Sermon on the Mount has us leave the gift at the altar and go to the brother (Matthew 5:23–24). The afternoon I would have paid to delete has not been struck from the record. It has been charged, settled, and handed back to me with a phone call still in it—and the call is not what settles the afternoon; it is what a settled afternoon makes bearable to pick up.
Eighteen centuries on, the fourth line is still doing what it was recut to do. Tourists photograph the arch; epigraphers photograph the holes. The gap has outlasted the man who ordered it, and it has never once stopped saying the name.
The one erasure offered to us does not work by subtraction. And the hands that offer it still have holes.
[^arch]: CIL VI, 1033 (= 31230). See "Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus (202–203 CE)", Judaism and Rome, which gives the Latin text, the original fourth line (P. Septimio L. fil. Getae nobiliss. Caesari), its replacement by optimis fortissimisque principibus, and the surviving dowel holes at the end of line 3 and in line 4 from which the erased text is reconstructed. [^geta]: "Geta (emperor))", Wikipedia: Geta was murdered on 26 December 211 by centurions in his mother's arms, at Caracalla's direction, and the erasure of his images and inscriptions that followed is, in the article's words, "clear from the archaeological record." [^whe]: Mark Cartwright, "The Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome", World History Encyclopedia — on the gilded bronze lettering and the substituted fourth line. [^dm]: "Damnatio memoriae", Wikipedia: the phrase "first appeared in a thesis written in Germany in 1689 by Christoph Schreiter and Johann Heinrich Gerlach." [^tondo]: The Severan Tondo, c. 199–200, Antikensammlung, Altes Museum, Berlin (inv. 31329); Geta's face was deliberately erased after his death. "Severan Tondo", Wikipedia. [^hedrick]: Charles W. Hedrick Jr., History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (University of Texas Press, 2000), as summarised and quoted in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2000.07.11). [^streisand]: "Streisand effect", Wikipedia: the 2003 suit against photographer Kenneth Adelman over an image from the California Coastal Records Project; six downloads before, over 420,000 visitors in the following month; dismissal and $177,000 in costs; the term coined by Mike Masnick of Techdirt on 5 January 2005. [^costeja]: Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos and Mario Costeja González, Case C-131/12, Court of Justice of the European Union, 13 May 2014. The 1998 notices in La Vanguardia concerned a forced sale over social security debts. [^murphy]: Jeffrie G. Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2003), 16 and 59, and Murphy and Hampton (1988), 21 — all three quoted in Brandon Warmke, "Forgiveness", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 edition). That entry also notes that the familiar habit of tracing this "renunciation model" back to Bishop Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons (1726) misreads him, on the arguments of Newberry (2001), Griswold (2007) and Garcia (2011); the account is best credited to its modern defenders rather than to Butler. [^exaleipho]: ἐξαλείφω, exaleiphō, Strong's 1813, from ek (G1537) and ἀλείφω (G218, to anoint or smear); the lexicons gloss it "to wipe out, blot out, erase", and note its administrative use for rubbing out writings or seal impressions on wax tablets. Strong's Greek 1813. [^ink]: On the erasability of ancient ink and on χειρόγραφον (cheirographon, Strong's 5498, a handwritten note of debt — its only New Testament occurrence), see the discussion at Precept Austin, Colossians 2:14–15. [^acts]: Acts 3:19 (KJV): "that your sins may be blotted out." [^col]: Colossians 2:14 (KJV). [^tears]: Revelation 7:17 and Revelation 21:4 (KJV). [^rev]: Revelation 3:5 (KJV). [^phil]: Philippians 4:2–3 (KJV). [^comm]: inkling-s Commentary, "The Secret of Contentment" (Philippians 4). [^thomas]: John 20:27 (KJV). [^ps51]: Psalm 51:4 (KJV). [^keller]: A debt, not a quotation: treating guilt as a status requiring a verdict rather than a feeling requiring management is Tim Keller's move, worked out in his sermons "The Problem of Guilt" (Psalm 51) and "Reconciled and at Peace" (Hebrews 9), Gospel in Life — summarised here in our own words, not his. [^luke]: Luke 22:37 (KJV), quoting Isaiah 53:12.