TABULA MEMORIAE

Readers who are familiar with a current opinion that there are radical differences between oral culture (based upon memory) and literate culture (based upon writing) may be puzzled by the very title of this book, and even consider it self-contradictory. My source, however, is Dante, who was newly articulating a very old observation. Even the earliest writers I discuss did not operate within a culture that could be described as fully oral. Yet for all these writers, memory is a central feature of knowledge – its very basis in fact – whether through recollection (as for Plato) or as the agent building experience (as for Aristotle). This emphasis upon memory persists, shared by societies varying widely in the availability of books to readers: that is, in their literacy. (I am adopting here Eric Havelock’s useful definition of “literacy” as coterminous with “book-acquiring public.”)

In none of the evidence is the act of writing itself regarded as a supplanter of memory, not even in Plato’s Phaedrus. Rather books are themselves memorial cues and aids, and memory is most like a book, a written page or a wax tablet upon which something is written. Cicero writes about the relationship of writing to memory in his elementary work, Partitiones oratoriae: