The History of Memory

In Greek mythology Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. Her union with Zeus, king of the gods, produced the Nine Muses: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania. The Nine Muses presided over all of the arts and sciences. Thus illustrating that memory is one half of all creativity.

Memory systems have been in use since the time of Ancient Rome, and knowledge of them was kept throughout medieval times and into the Renaissance. Initially developed and always linked strongly to rhetoric, the art of memory declined as printing became widespread, in part eliminating the need for an artificial memory.

But in recent years the art of memory has reappeared along with the self-help craze and even more recently linked with modern sporting ideals.

Simonides of Ceos

"At a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric poem in honour of his host but including a passage in praise of the gods Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the poem. 

A little later a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but could find no on. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them. But Simonides remembered the places at which they had been sitting at the table and was therefore able to indicate to the relatives which were their dead. 

The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash. And this experience suggested to the poet the principles of the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor. Noting that it was through his memory of the places at which the guests had been sitting that he had been able to identify the bodies, he realised that orderly arrangement is essential for good memory." 

- The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates

The Origins of the Artificial Memory

Memory belongs rightly in rhetoric. When you watch a politician make a speech, often they will do this without notes. A dazzling feat of memory? Not really, because we expect this. But how do they do it? A trained memory has been an advantage since the Ancient Greeks, who used to expect their politicians to make extended speeches and debate ad hoc on many subjects from memory. The Ancient Greeks were also superb philosophers, and it was not beyond them to develop systems to aid in this task. Thus the earliest known artificial memory is from Ancient Greece, and the memory systems of today are direct descendents of these systems. Our memory systems were designed to help ancient Greek politicians make speeches.

Nowadays the artificial memory has expanded and deepened, and most of the systems you will learn about on this site are not what the ancients had in mind. Their systems were based almost entirely on the idea of Loci (Basic Systems, Advanced Systems) and now we have a much greater array of tools at our disposal.

The orators worked with location. There technique was to allocate exciting and unusual images among locations that you have previously memorised in a specific order. Then when they would come to learn a speech, the ideas contained within it would become images.

The Medieval Art of Memory

[... to be continued]