‘Damnatio memoriae’ is a Latin phrase roughly meaning ‘erasing bad memory’. Although the phrase came into vogue much later, the practice dated back to the Greek and Roman periods in European history. Erection of statues, not of men of god or of wisdom, but of power, was a standard practice. Historians point out that, at one point, there were over 3,000 statues of the emperors in Athens and Rhodes for a population of a few tens of thousands. Then
