ABSTRACT
As Mnemosyne, the personification of Memory, becomes less important, her daughters, the Muses, take on an increasingly important role and appear more frequently in art. While Mnemosyne has her own cult in Greece, she has no equivalent among the Romans. Consequently it might seem that writing has indeed replaced memory as a storage medium, but that would be a false picture. Memory as a technique, as a tacit substratum of Roman life, flourishes.1 In this chapter I concentrate on the daughters of Mnemosyne: why Memory is their mother and what their role is in Greek and Roman life.
