herostratus was the fourth-century bc greek who burned down the temple of artemis (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) in order to cement his place in history.  he was promptly executed by the government of ephesus, the city in anatolia where the temple was housed, but they weren’t content with that.  no, to thwart his ambitions, they issued what the romans later called a damnatio memoriae, seizing his property, striking his name from every record book, and killing anyone who so much as mentioned him forever after.

the ussr picked up on this practice, and my former professor joan fontcuberta cleverly (and gently) mocked this in his sputnik project, playing a cosmonaut who had been edited out of russian history.  it’s much harder to accomplish rubbing someone out of the record books now, with a massive decentralised base of information and communication, but joan has a deft touch – he knows that the right combination is a) a subject matter that is not too earthshaking, and b) an experience sweet enough that the viewer wouldn’t want to break its spell.  these things you can get away with faking easily, without inviting too much scrutiny from your audience.

the practice did work with herostratus, though; while contemporary writers documented his vandalism, he isn’t a well-known figure in modern accounts of ancient history, though he has given us the phrase ‘herostratic fame,’ fame at any cost.  the temple was restored, only to be destroyed for good in the fifth century ad by a mob led by st. john chrysostom, archbishop of constantinople, who aggressively tried to turn the people away from their false gods and to the light of christ.  (or something like that.)  it was not rediscovered (in the occidental meaning of that word) until 1869.

(file under ‘cartoon tyrannosaurs, things i’ve learned from’)