ABSTRACT
Quintilian's remark about familiar things being most apt to lodge themselves in the mind points to the close relationship between memory and imagination in ancient thought. The artificial memory techniques discussed by the author of the rhetoric ad Herennium, by Cicero and by Quintilian relied heavily on mental images. Aristotle and others frequently appeal to analogies with the visual arts to express the nature of the impressions made by sense perception upon the soul and their lingering form as memories. The ideal of kataleptic phantasia reflected the Stoic belief that true knowledge of the world was possible and that the wise man was able to distinguish between accurate representations, which formed a correct basis for action, and those that did not derive from reality. The imagination involved in the production of ekphrasis and enargeia is therefore conceived as neither entirely free and creative, nor as simply reproductive of sensation, but lies between these two poles.
