Tablets of Memory

This chapter focuses on one of the foundational images in Western epistemology: that memory is like a wax tablet. Charting the origins of the figure in the theories of mind of Plato and Aristotle through its development in the Roman practice of an oratorical ars memoriae (“art of memory”) as described by the Auctor ad Herennium, Cicero, and Quintilian, it recovers a variety of ways that writing and thinking were connected in the ancient imagination. Especially within theoretical handbooks of the discipline of Roman oratory, memory was understood fundamentally to be a practice dependent upon and at the service of written texts. From the tabula rasa to the “memory palace,” the tablet functioned as both tool and metaphor for Roman thought.