ABSTRACT
Thus far I have investigated the props of the highly literate in classical antiquity. I have considered what their writing looked like, how it was organized within a roll, and how, in turn, whole works were treated in public and in private. With this background I can now address the major issue: how did they find the written words they needed among the masses of written words that kept on growing and growing? Since their efforts at organizing their words for retrieval did not emphasize the development of major written aids external to the text itself, I believe that the highly literate concentrated on improving the one unwritten tool they already had: memory. Hence the Muses, the daughters of Memory, became more important as time passed. In this part of the book I focus on the ways they improved their natural memories through artificial memory systems. I consider the historical development of such systems, the way they worked then, and cognitive studies of their efficacy today.
