Memoryscapes
Beside words and the facility of expression, the sense of sight is another practical mental tool if combined with mnemotechnics (Assmann 2010: 111). Although it might look like a modern archaeologist’s point of view to use sites to aid memory, this approach is actually an ancient one.
Just as memory can see, the sense of sight also helps memory to come into action. A passage from Cicero narrating a terrible accident witnessed by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was already widely discussed in ancient times. Simonides was the only survivor when the roof of a banquet hall came down and buried the diners. Being able to identify the dead bodies by remembering who had been sitting where, inspired Cicero to argue that what can be seen can be remembered best. In De Oratore (2.86.353-4), Cicero famously linked places (loci) with good memory:[P]ersons desiring to train this faculty [i.e., the orderly arrangement of memories] select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves.
In this passage, Cicero suggests the use of ‘localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet’ (Den Boer 2010: 19). Nowadays we would refer to someone with these skills as a person owning a ‘photographic memory’, which probably comes closest to the wonders of digital photography (Van Dijk 2007: 107). Cicero, however, is not referring to snapshot impressions or random mental images which help to construct personal memory. The point he makes is actually not about seeing to create short-term memory but about making these memories last by organizing them. Buildings and other points of interest can indeed be instrumental in mapping out an individual’s memory while cities at the same time can become memoryscapes. Memoryscapes, in ancient as well as in modern times, both help to bring to mind the past and remind readers of the present that never became the past. To excavate and bring to the fore the mechanics that allowed the interactions between memory and urban religion to take place and flourish is the aim of this book.