ABSTRACT

After Aristotle’s treatise on memory no extended discussion of mnemotechnics has survived until the Romans in the first century BC, even though memory became a formal division of rhetoric in the intervening period. George Kennedy dates this elevation of memory to the generation before the Auctor ad Herennium, that is, to the late second century BC, a time when Rome is already of greater influence than Greece in the Mediterranean world.1 Scholars, when studying Roman versions of Greek concepts, often attribute only the ‘misunderstandings’ to the Romans and none of the advances.2 Hence the general assumption has been that the Greeks themselves extended the system of topoi from a purely mental construct into a physical embodiment where the places literally become buildings or settings. According to this view, it is mere happenstance that we have only Roman descriptions of the architectural version. It is foolish to think that ideas remain static and that the Romans would either slavishly mimic all that is Greek or would not adapt Greek tools for their own purposes. In adopting the art of memory from the Greeks, the Romans had to make adjustments to the system, because basic organizational skills were not increasing at the same pace as the quantities of written matter, with the result that the need for good memory skills had increased dramatically from the time of Plato and Aristotle. To get some idea of the quantity that a highly literate Roman could produce, consider that 914 of Cicero’s letters have survived. It was imperative for the Romans to improve the Greek art of memory.