4

The Bloody Statue

Memory as Metaphor

After decades of film, television, and historic fiction, we often feel that we know the ancient world.

We’ve learned to recognize ourselves in our ancestors to the point where we can sometimes feel that we know Odysseus or Augustus or Marcus Aurelius as well as our neighbor down the hall or on the next street over. We’ve even learned over time to accept, if not fully understand, some of the extremes in savagery (gladiators and crucifixions) and behavior (orgies and infanticide).

Yet the details of daily life in the ancient world can still surprise us. We’re still shocked to learn that the typical house in Pompeii greeted visitors—and the family children—with an erotic mural. Or that a young Spartan’s final test for manhood was to stalk and murder a slave.

One of the unexpected oddities that one would have encountered when visiting a major civic building or temple in ancient Rome, especially during an off hour, would have been the sight of famous figures—senators, orators, perhaps even Caesar himself—shuffling along like zombies and peering with great intensity at statues, pillars, pilasters, and other architectural features.

If you could have looked into the minds of these great men at such a moment, you would have been even more astonished, as they might well be mentally painting the statues with blood and gore, draping bull testicles over a god’s outstretched hand, or replacing the carved words on the pediment with figures on agricultural production in Gaul.

This wasn’t some form of collective madness, or even a bizarre and long-forgotten form of entertainment. Rather it was hard, disciplined memory work, using the most powerful tool of the age: what was called the “art” (that is, the discipline) of memory, Ars Memorativa. And what these men, among them some of the most celebrated figures in history, were doing alone in those public buildings was constructing some of the greatest feats of memorization ever known—feats that can inspire even more awe in us now than when it was an everyday achievement.

Prodigious feats of memory were hardly new, even in Republican Rome. After all, the bardic tradition of long, precise recitations was older than writing itself. The most famous example of this tradition, of course, was Homer. Whoever was the author(s) of The Iliad and the Odyssey, there’s no question that generations of bards recited, embellished and polished those epic poems of thousands of lines in front of kings and their courts during the centuries before the tales were finally written down.

But the first great story of a seemingly superhuman memory is that of Simonides of Ceos in 500 B.C.1 Simonides, a famous lyric poet (he even shows up in Plato) who actually invented some of the letters in the Greek alphabet, was invited to a banquet held by the Thessalian nobleman Scopus, to deliver a panegyric (a celebratory poem) about the latter’s recent victory in battle. This was an easy gig for Simonides, as he already had a reputation for a powerful memory capable of remembering long spans of text.

But Simonides’s performance only managed to infuriate his host, who apparently thought that the poet’s many decorative references to the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, took some of the attention away from him. So, when it came time for Simonides to collect his payment for the performance, Scopus offered him only half the amount and snidely told him to collect the rest from the divine twins.

Before an argument could begin, a house servant appeared to tell Simonides that two men were waiting for him outside. Stepping out into the garden, Simonides found that nobody was there … and just at that moment, the entire banquet hall collapsed, killing everyone inside.

So mangled were the crushed bodies of Scopus and the other guests that they were impossible to identify, and thus be given a proper burial. In stepped Simonides. To the amazement of everyone in the rescue party, the poet identified each of the many bodies by the location at which they sat around the banquet table.

Simonides’s feat of memory astonished the world—and set off a five-hundred-year race to discover his secrets and match his achievements.

One theory held, as with the story of magic, that Simonides had inherited a body of secret tricks from the Egyptians—a typical explanation of the era for anything remarkable, just as “the Orient” would be 1,500 years hence. Another theory, also pretty standard for the time, was that the Art of Memory had been invented just a generation before Simonides by the secretive Pythagoreans (presumably when they weren’t also creating music and the Golden Mean).

There is no evidence to support either story. And, in fact, Simonides’s skill may very well have been his own invention, forged from various tools of the bardic tradition, his own natural gifts, and some newly devised tricks. Whatever the explanation, the legend of Simonides proved so potent that for four centuries, imitators and admirers were as likely to attribute his work to mystical powers as to any replicable methodology. The first known mentions of the Art of Memory, probably inspired by Simonides, is in the Greek Dialexis (400 B.C.), and in some of the works of Aristotle.

MASTER TULLY

It wasn’t until the first century B.C. that a student of the rhetorical arts, whose name is still synonymous with oratory, set out to systematically explain the Art of Memory. He was Marcus Tullius Cicero (he was proud of the fact that his last name meant the humble “chickpea”) and he is perhaps the best-known figure of the Roman Republic—not least because of his heroic, if failed, rearguard fight to save his country from sliding into the dictatorship of the Caesars.2 As every Victorian schoolboy would someday know—they cut their teeth in Latin learning his most famous speeches—Cicero was born in 106 B.C. in a hill town outside of Rome to a lower-order (“equestrian”) aristocratic family. Cicero’s father was an invalid and had largely devoted himself to learning and the life of the mind … and passed that hunger on to his son. And by an early age, Cicero was already earning attention in the region, and in the capital, for his prodigious intellect.

Like most aristocratic Roman young men, Cicero’s tutors were almost all Greeks, and it was from them that he learned the three parts of classical education—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—the trivium. He more than anyone would popularize the trivium and would influence liberal arts education for the next two thousand years.3

In theory, the three parts of the trivium were supposed to be equal in importance. Logic was the art of dealing with the world as it was—of things. Grammar was the art of working with symbols. And rhetoric was the art of communicating thought from one mind to another. But for Cicero, especially after he embarked on an illustrious, and often courageous, career in the law and then politics, it was the last of these three that gained prominence.

Indeed, even though he began as a wide-ranging philosopher (he even visited Plato’s Academy in Greece to study), Cicero in time began to see rhetoric, especially oratory, as the supreme art of humankind. Great oratory, he believed, with its ability to convince others to act in concert toward a common end, was the ultimate moral guide for any society, especially a democracy or republic. And thus it followed that a great orator needed to be hugely skilled, learned, and, most of all, himself deeply moral—or his gifts would be wasted or used to the wrong ends.

It’s not surprising, then, that Cicero soon turned to the then-available memory tools and tricks to help him memorize his long speeches. And when these proved insufficient, he dug deeper … and rediscovered the Art of Memory. Being a good, pragmatic Roman, Cicero initially dismissed all of the mumbo jumbo surrounding memory training and set out, using Simonides’s own words, to deconstruct his achievement. What he found surprised him: Simonides had discovered a way to go beyond the usual tricks of repetition and mnemonics (verbal tools, such as “ROYGBIV” to remember the colors of the visible light spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) to a new kind of methodology that was almost sublime in its use of brain architecture. As Cicero later wrote:

[Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and the images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written upon it.4

Like a good lawyer piecing together his case, Cicero began to appreciate that what Simonides had done was to take something new (an observation, a draft of a speech, a course of study) and, in a very systematic way, attach it to something well known. Frances Yates, the British historian whose landmark book The Art of Memory revived interest in the subject, focused primarily on the use of architectural subjects, such as temples and public buildings, as the grounding for these memory exercises, and so it is the image of Roman senators shuffling through empty buildings that comes most readily to the modern mind. But Cicero and his fellow Romans also used geometric patterns, imaginary structures, landscapes, and other familiar “places” onto which to attach the new memories. The key was to work from a source location that was well-known nature to the thinker.

The next step was the tricky part. Because the human mind tends to remember extreme images and emotions over the common and quotidian (what today we call the Von Restorff effect), when mentally attaching a new memory to an old location, the thinker has to use the boldest strokes possible—preferably related in some symbolic or mnemonic way to the topic to be remembered. Hence the use of blood, absurdities, obscenities, and strange symbolism in order to lock in the memory.

Nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time.…

[W]e ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily. The things we easily remember when they are real we likewise remember without difficulty when they are figments, if they have been carefully delineated. But this will be essential—again and again to run over rapidly in the mind all the original backgrounds in order to refresh the images.5

BALLS AND BLOOD

Those words are from the first great work on the Art of Memory, Rhetorica ad Herennium, written in about 95 B.C. and traditionally attributed to Cicero (although that authorship has long been questioned). Here, in a legal analogy supporting the case for Cicero’s authorship, is the following description from the same work. Containing the images that began this chapter, it demonstrates how the architectural-memory technique works in practice:

Often we encompass the record of an entire matter by one notation, a single image. For example, the prosecutor has said that the defendant killed a man by poison, has charged that the motive for the crime was an inheritance, and declared that there are many witnesses and accessories to this act. If in order to facilitate our defense we wish to remember this first point, we shall in our first background form an image of the whole matter. We shall picture the man in question as lying ill in bed, if we know this person. If we do not know him, we shall yet take some one to be our invalid, but not a man of the lowest class, so that he may come to mind at once. And we shall place the defendant at the bedside, holding in his right hand a cup, and in his left hand tablets, and on the fourth finger a ram’s testicles [in Latin testiculi can mean either testes or witnesses]. In this way we can record the man who was poisoned, the inheritance, and the witnesses.6

Now the process is clearer. The orator, or other memory expert, embarks on what is a four-part process. First, he prepares the text, be it a speech he has written or an existing narrative such as an epic poem. The details of this preparation process aren’t fully known, but the process—probably refined with practice—likely involved breaking up the text into discrete, self-contained pieces that the user had the experience to know would lend themselves to simple and powerful imagery. This technique is similar to what psychologists today call “chunking”—the ability of the human brain to hold only about seven items at one time in short-term memory … one reason why American phone numbers were set at seven digits.

With the text now broken into thought-sized pieces, the memorizer would then move to the underlying structure of the process. In modern computer terms, the orator would use a system of addresses that were second-nature to him and onto which could be hung the text segments once they were converted into symbols or otherwise amped up. Exactly how this worked isn’t entirely clear. But some memorizers famously used architecture and decoration as the “loci” of their memorizations. Others may have worked from gardens or other natural features. Still others appear to have worked from paintings or other images that were specifically designed for the memorization process.

The crucial part of these loci was that they’d be so well known to the memorizer that they would be second nature—that is, they would be burned into his long-term memory so completely that the memorizer could close his eyes and “walk through” the loci remembering every feature as vividly as if it were real. Indeed, it is very possible that experienced orators and other memorizers eventually stopped visiting their locus sites and conducted their memory tours virtually.

The third step was then to actually, or virtually, walk through each locus, mentally attaching the narrative segments to design features in the manner described in Rhetorica ad Herennium. In this way, the orator might memorize a speech of several hours, or the scholar the poem of a thousand stanzas, not only in the right order but even with an accuracy down to the actual sentences. Needless to say, it would be a lot easier, after considerable practice, to do this memorizing at home, where a scroll’s (or the dozens of wax tablets’) contents could be read and placed in memory rather than lugging them through a nearby temple.

The fourth and final step is, in many ways, the most mysterious of all. Somehow all of this attaching words and concepts to architectural and other details within the locus, using all manner of strange and gory imagery, actually worked. Somehow too, all of this added glitter managed to stay intact, and in the right place, in the orator’s mind. In the fourth step the whole process had to be reversed—that is, the orator had to stand in front of an audience, as Cicero did many times before the Roman Senate, and somehow walk through this memory structure, picking out one showy detail after another, converting its symbolism into a continuous flow of words … all while simultaneously adding tone and emotion and everything else needed to connect with and influence the audience before him. One would imagine the less experienced speaker would talk like someone lost in a dream.

Even more impressive is the possibility that a master orator skilled in the art of memory might even have been able to compose a speech this way—that is, mentally walking through his memory loci, composing text, and then immediately converting it to imagery and draping it over some nearby fixture in a real-time, multistage brain ballet that remains quite hard for us to fathom.

MAGIC WORDS

Even to the people who study it, the art of memory can sometimes seem impossible. Certainly it was incredibly difficult, which probably helps explain why the art of memory largely was abandoned and forgotten once paper, and then printing, became cheap. These memory arts are also difficult to duplicate because the ancient texts—and there were several, including not just Rhetorica ad Herennium but also books on the subject by Quintilian and, most famous of all, Cicero’s own De Oratore—aren’t entirely clear in the details of the process, as is often the case with valuable insider knowledge.

For example, while the “method of loci” is the best-known technique of the ancients—not least because it is so bizarre—evidence exists that these same orators also used a number of other mnemonic techniques, including the tried-and-true process, well known to actors and schoolchildren, of just reciting the same text aloud multiple times until it is pounded into one’s memory.

One thing we do know is that such extraordinary feats of memory are not beyond the capacity of the ordinary human brain. The ability to quickly memorize huge quantities of data has cropped up throughout history in people endowed with what we today call a “photographic” memory. Once deemed rare, thanks to game shows, television, and Internet videos, this skill in full or partial form has proven to be a lot more common than we previously imagined. And it has remarkable durability: Even in his nineties, the great actor Sir John Gielgud claimed he could recall every line of every Shakespearian play in which he had ever appeared. More prosaically, every day in the Muslim world, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren crowd madrassas to repeat over and over again the Koran until they have memorized every line.

Author Joshua Foer, writing about twenty-first-century memory competitions, describes one competitor using a “method of loci” technique to remember a run of playing cards that is right out of Ad Herennium:

I was storing the images in a memory palace I knew better than any other, the house in Washington, D.C., that I’d lived in since I was four years old … At the front door, I saw my friend Liz vivisecting a pig (two of hearts, two of diamonds, three of hearts). Just inside, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades) …7

Surely some of the ancient masters of the art of memory were in fact, born blessed with a photographic memory. But it is also just as likely that most of them weren’t, and had to work with brains possessed of little more than average imagination, memory, and intelligence.

Roman orators certainly could have carefully written their speeches on papyrus paper and then used some kind of jig to hold and turn the resulting scroll—much in the way a teleprompter is used today. So why go to all of the effort needed to master the art of memory? For all of the same reasons people have always pursued mastery of a trade or skill: It offers pride of achievement, it teaches the discipline needed to pursue other goals, it distinguishes the master from the common run of humanity, and, quite often, it pays well.

Most of all, in the case of this practice, once again memory was power. In the ancient world, access to information was difficult, the tools were unwieldy, and the recall took forever. With the art of memory, however, vast libraries could reside in the human brain. And in the hands of a great orator like Cicero, a mastery of the memory arts, combined with an unequalled skill at oratory, could move whole empires.

THE LAST REPUBLICAN

But the story of Marcus Tullius Cicero is also a reminder of the limitations of memory. Armed with his aristocratic birth, superior Greek education, and matchless gift for oratory, the young Cicero quickly made a reputation for himself in Rome as a lawyer, a teacher of the Greek trivium, a translator, and even a philosopher. His gifts were widely recognized, and soon Cicero was climbing the ranks of Roman political leadership, typically reaching each new level—quaester, aedile, and praetor—at the earliest possible age until he was finally named consul at just forty-two. This was a remarkable achievement by any measure, but especially so for a figure from the lowest aristocratic class, and a tribute to Cicero’s gift as an orator. In an era without any real form of mass communications, Cicero had still managed through his public speeches to become the equivalent of a media superstar. A future of fame and glory in the elite leadership of Rome now seemed guaranteed.

But Rome in the first century B.C. was an unpredictable and sometimes very dangerous place. In the early years of that century, the Republic had collapsed into civil war, ultimately leading one general, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, to march on Rome and be proclaimed dictator. Sulla proved to be a surprisingly enlightened ruler, and eventually even stepped down after making a number of positive changes in Rome’s government. But the die was now cast. Rome was for the taking.

Eventually three men, all generals, rose to the top in pursuit of this ultimate prize. Crassus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar together formed the First Triumvirate of Roman military dictators. In 60 B.C., Julius Caesar even invited Cicero to join this troika, no doubt believing that in so doing he would gain an ally. But when Cicero refused, believing that it would damage any chance for a restoration of the Republic, he made a very powerful enemy. Then Crassus (the man who crushed the Spartacus revolt) was killed in battle, and Pompey and Julius Caesar set off a second civil war, each in pursuit of his own absolute power. Out of this struggle the Roman Empire was born. Rome would never again be a republic. Working through a front man in the Senate, Caesar soon put Cicero at risk of execution. And so, in 58 B.C., Cicero fled into exile to Thessalonica, Greece.

Once in exile, Cicero fell into a deep depression. The only thing that seemed to keep him from suicide was his regular letters to his lifelong friend Atticus, whom he’d first met as a young lawyer. These passionate letters, because of their great detail about politics and daily life, are today considered among of the great treasures of Rome’s “Golden Age.”

Cicero returned from exile after just a year—and was given a hero’s welcome. But as he quickly learned (as Sir Francis Bacon would fifteen centuries hence), navigating through a treacherous age at the top of the political world required not just genius and talent but also an ability to overcome one’s own personality flaws. In Cicero’s case, this weakness was a lack of consistency—being a great lawyer, he was easily swayed by the next good argument. And so, over the next dozen years, even as his public popularity grew, Cicero managed to regularly align himself with the wrong side—not least the vainglorious Pompey—while at the same time losing most of his traditional supporters. In the end, Cicero returned to Rome a second time (he had again deserted the city when Caesar’s legions approached), gained a pardon from his old enemy, and tried unsuccessfully to keep a low profile.

Though Cicero wasn’t a party to the assassination of Caesar in 47 B.C., he was generally perceived as both an inspiration for the act and a supporter of its aims. It didn’t help that Brutus, the most famous of the assassins, called on Cicero to restore the Republic even as he brandished his bloody knife over Caesar’s body.

Perversely, as leader of the Senate, it fell upon Cicero to execute Caesar’s last will, a task he shared with the young and ambitious Mark Antony, and which made the two men the most powerful figures in Rome. When Cicero accused Antony of shady deals he made himself a very dangerous enemy—especially when Antony rose, with Julius Caesar’s son Octavian and patrician Marcus Aemilius Lepidus to create the Second Triumvirate, the officially sanctioned dictatorship that legally ended the Republic.

To try to stop Antony’s ascent, Cicero—no doubt armed with the art of memory—embarked on a series of fourteen speeches, the Philippicae, that are among the most famous in the history of rhetoric. But for all of their power, Cicero’s Philippics were no match for the combined might of a newly aligned Octavian (soon to be Augustus) and Mark Antony. Almost immediately Antony called for the punishment of all enemies of Rome, with Cicero at the top of his list. Octavian reportedly argued for two days for the removal of Cicero’s name, but in the end acquiesced.

Cicero tried to run, and so great was his reputation as a friend of the Republic, that many people harbored him during his escape. But Antony was relentless, and within a year (December 7, 43 B.C.) he was caught trying to reach Greece and was executed. His death, as reported by Herodotus, was like an image out of one of Cicero’s own memory sessions:

Cicero heard [his pursuers] coming and ordered his servants to set the litter [in which he was being carried] down where they were. He … looked steadfastly at his murderers. He was all covered in dust; his hair was long and disordered, and his face was pinched and wasted with his anxieties—so that most of those who stood by covered their faces while Herennius was killing him. His throat was cut as he stretched his neck out from the litter …8

Reportedly, Cicero’s last words before his throat was cut were to tell the soldier wielding the knife, “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly”—a beautifully balanced line of prose (the epimonic doubling, with a twist, on “proper”) one might expect from a great orator. He was sixty-three years old.

Not only was Cicero’s head taken back to Rome, but on Mark Antony’s orders, so were the hands that had composed the Philippicae. All three pieces were nailed to the great speaker’s rostrum in the Roman Forum, facing the Senate building. And it is said that Antony’s wife, Fulvia, repeatedly visited the site in order to pull out Cicero’s tongue and stab it with a knitting needle in revenge for the Philippics and their orator.*

AN EMPIRE OF MEMORY

The death of Cicero marked the final gasp of the republican dream for Rome. But Rome, as a vast and powerful continental empire under the Caesars, would dominate Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa for another five hundred years. And though the most famous practitioner of the art of memory was now gone, the discipline itself would grow and become more refined in the generations of orators and storytellers to come.

One vital reason for both the vitality and durability of Imperial Rome is that it enjoyed an unprecedented access to multiple forms of memory. First, there were two recognized categories of human memory: natural, which we think of as the common form of information storage in the brain (in other words, a random collection of stories, images, sounds, and so on) and artificial, which to the ancients meant the kind of disciplined and precisely organized memory “files” produced by practicing the Art of Memory.

Today, when the memorized content of our minds most likely consists of a few song lyrics and poems, and perhaps a few mnemonics (“i before e, except after c”), the notion of such a schism in memory architectures seems both alien and arbitrary. But the ancients, especially the Romans, took it very seriously—and awarded artificial memory with supreme importance. To the educated Roman, having a head full of memorized and stored knowledge was the equivalent of carrying around a large, yet portable, private and quickly accessible library—or a laptop computer loaded with reference material and manuals—inside one’s skull.

To this natural and artificial memory, Romans could also add the now long-established forms of external or synthetic memory, including papyrus scrolls and parchment codices (long-term) and cerae wax tablets (short-term). This portfolio of memory tools gave Romans the kind of access to memories and knowledge that was unprecedented in human history. It gave the average Roman a level of erudition heretofore impossible. But it also enabled Roman society to easily build upon existing knowledge with new discoveries … and then disseminate those discoveries quickly throughout the empire.

The result is obvious in the astounding feats of Roman engineering and design that survive to this day. Only a culture that remembered the glory of Greece and yet was also armed with the latest discoveries regarding arches, concrete, and metallurgy could have built the Pantheon, the Coliseum and the Pont du Gard aqueduct. We may look upon the Roman Empire as a bloodthirsty tyranny, but Romans saw themselves (not without reason) as the most enlightened and capable people who had ever lived. And given all that had been wrong with the empire for centuries, some of its durability at least may be accredited to its preservation, management, and distribution of information—that is, its collective memory.

FALL AND DECLINE

The cause (or causes) of the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century is still the subject of speculation, mainly because the event was so catastrophic that many of the records of the era were lost in the process. Did the empire rot from within, a victim of its own success as generations of decadence and wealth among Roman citizens made them unwilling to defend themselves and ever more dependent for protection on the same barbarians they fought? Was it the inevitable decline, as with all dictatorships, in the quality of the Caesars who ruled the empire and the legions that served them? A weakened and diminished population due to periodic plagues? Or was it just the historic inevitability of the barbarian tribes, whose birth rate, energy, and ambition could no longer be denied? The use of lead in Roman water pipes? Imperial overreach that extended beyond the era’s communications technology? The limitations of a plunder-based economy? The destruction of natural resources from one end of the Mediterranean to the other? The shift in economic power from Italy to Byzantium, thanks to the latter’s greater access to China, India, and the rest of the Far East?

Probably all of them, to one degree or another. But for our purposes, a far more important question is not why Rome fell, but why it did so when it did … and why so completely?

The traditional date, designated by historian Edward Gibbon, for the fall of Rome is A.D. 476, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, himself a Roman general, marched on Italy and captured Rome.9 He then turned on Ravenna, where he deposed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus on September 4, 476, and declared himself king.* As the first Germanic king of Italy and the Western Empire, his sword-backed coronation makes for a convenient end date.

But there is another, very good reason for setting the fall of Rome on this date. The Imperial City and its surrounding empire had already been successfully invaded a number of times before, of course. The Visigoths, fleeing the Huns, had invaded in 378 and destroyed a Roman army in battle before accepting settlement inside the protection of the empire. And on New Year’s Eve, 405, in one of the most unforgettable images of the age, a giant mob of Vandals, Suebi, and Alans exploded across the newly frozen Rhine River near what is now the city of Mainz, Germany, and swept through Gaul (France), down the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and into North Africa.

Then, in 410, the mistreated Visigoths again rose up, and under the command of Alaric, captured and sacked Rome for the first time. The city recovered, but it would never again be the same, and the shift of power to Constantinople and the Eastern Empire accelerated.

After that, the disasters began to pile on. In the 440s, the most terrible scourge to date, the Huns under Attila attacked the Balkans and Gaul and threatened both of the empire’s capitals. In 455 it was the Vandals’ turn to sack Rome. They abandoned the city and moved on to capture the major Roman cities of North Africa. A crushing blow came in 461 and 468 when Rome attempted a pair of naval counterattacks against the Vandals, only to be defeated both times.

Now there was little left to save. The final straw came in 493, after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, when the Eastern emperor, Zeno, concerned that Odoacer’s kingdom was becoming too powerful, convinced the Ostrogoths to attack Italy. They defeated Odoacer but instead of pledging their fealty to Zeno, they established their own kingdom under Theodoric. The schism between the Eastern and Western Empires was now complete and permanent.

So why, in light of all of these misfortunes, choose 476? The answer is that before Odoacer’s attack, Rome still had a memory of itself. The Imperial City and its environs may already have been attacked and sacked several times over the previous century, but the attackers had always left. The scrolls, the codices … the memories and acquired knowledge of the preceding millennium of Greco-Roman history were still intact. They could be relied upon as the empire rebuilt itself. And as long as this memory was accessible, Rome could recover from almost any insult.

There is a famous description of Mongol tribesmen, having breached the Great Wall and attacking the great cities of Imperial China, roaring down the streets grabbing chickens and cooking pots and horses … and riding right past valuable treasures that they were unable to recognize. The same was likely true of the Vandals, Visigoths, and especially the Huns, who probably knew enough to steal the gold plating off the doors of Roman libraries but were oblivious to the real treasures that lay inside.

The reason 476 proved to be such an important date for Rome is that this time the invaders stayed. The last Caesars may have been weak or degenerate shadows of their predecessors, but culturally they maintained a continuous line that led back five hundred years to Julius and Augustus. At the time, for the average Roman citizen, the powerful and decisive Odoacer may have even seemed a welcome change from the weak and vacillating child who officially ruled their lives. But this short-term gain came with appalling long-term loss. Rome was now ruled by Germanic barbarians—people who, for all their bravery, artistry, and tribal cohesion, nevertheless had no tradition of literacy and oratory, much less scholasticism. Inevitably, those traditions—including the art of memory, being no longer valued and rewarded under the new order—slowly faded away.

This may explain the apparent contradiction between the seeming near indifference by Romans to the fall itself—life for many people just seemed to go on as before, which has led some historians to argue against the notion of a “fall” at all—and the growing sense in the years that followed that a great catastrophe had occurred.

DARKNESS FALLS

Only a few of the most visionary men and women—most of them strong believers that God would never abandon them—could see what was coming and set out to preserve the memories of their time. In Spain, Isidore wrote his Etymologiae. In what is now Algeria, the bishop of Hippo, Augustine, having already written the Confessions, history’s first great autobiography, next turned to writing The City of God to console his fellow believers in the face of what was to come. The preeminent father of the Western Church, Augustine was murdered by the Vandals in 430.

These three works, among the glories of Western civilization, survived the fall. So did Cicero’s De Oratore, Philippicae, and other works, not least because of the awe they produced among later, less-erudite readers. But much was lost, and much of what did survive had been sequestered in other parts of the world before the fall or spirited away just after. And there, written in strange tongues, describing impossibly complicated practices and describing worlds long since forgotten, these texts soon became forgotten as well.

By the time the new barbarian rulers of Europe had become sufficiently civilized and cultured to want to take advantage of the vast wisdom of the ancients, it was already long gone. The papyrus scrolls, with their regular need of copying, had long since rotted away. So had the wax tablets. Only the parchment sheets survived—and they, too, were often abandoned as worthless in a world without writing. What texts did survive—in Africa, the Middle East, and Spain—were in the hands of enemies, and thus were as inaccessible as if they had been on the moon. Even Roman paintings, most done as murals, faded and collapsed with the walls that bore them.

Only the massive and magnificent architecture remained. But without the memories, texts, and tools that brought forth these engineering technologies they could not be duplicated or even repaired. Even the all-important recipe for Roman concrete, the miracle construction medium of the empire, was lost for the next thousand years.

And so the glory of Rome soon was reduced to such astonishing ruins from Britain to Persia that the locals who lived at the feet of these great, crumbling edifices looked upon them as having been created by a race of superhumans.

We call this era, the five hundred years following the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, although historians tend to wince at the term because of its negative connotations. And there is certainly some truth to that concern, especially the older use of the term to describe the entire Middle Ages from A.D. 500 to 1500. Today, we know too much about the second half of those thousand years—the lively and creative “Late” Middle Ages of A.D. 1000 to 1500—to still consider them as having been lost in the darkness of ignorance.

But the Early Middle Ages, from A.D. 500 to 1000, are a very different story. It was Plutarch who named them the Dark Ages and, great poet that he was, he nailed something essential and resonant with his use of the term—so much so that despite several generations of historians refusing to use the phrase, it still is the term of choice used by average folks.

They may be right to do so. Western Europe after the fall of Rome remains the most terrifying example in recorded history of what happens when a society loses its memory. It has become a tired truism that it only takes a single generation to fail to transmit its culture to the next generation to bring about the end of civilization, but that is exactly what happened in the decades after A.D. 476. What is especially tragic is that all of the memories were still technically there, in the minds of a handful of aging men and in the thousands of scrolls and books moldering away in unused libraries. But those who could use this knowledge, the rulers, were largely illiterate or indifferent, and those who could understand it were powerless. Western Europe was sinking into a dark abyss of chaos, violence, and ignorance.

There was a bright moment midway through the Dark Ages: the coronation of the Frankish king Charles, “the Great”—Charlemagne—who ruled from 768 to 814. Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel (the general who ran the Muslim invaders out of southern France at the history-turning Battle of Tours in 732), conquered most of Europe and then set out to restore the glory of Rome and the Caesars in his own Carolingian Empire.

Enlightened, and a dedicated supporter of learning and the arts, Charlemagne was a ray of light in the Dark Ages. But his goals were impossible: Too much had been lost, and even his long reign wasn’t long enough to reinvent an entire civilization. It proved to be only a half-century-long interregnum, a brief arc of illumination bookended by two halves of the Dark Ages, each two centuries long. When Charlemagne died, the empire fell apart under the rule of his descendants, and the glow of enlightenment didn’t return until the dawn of the new millennium.

LOOKING EAST

It goes without saying that even as Western Europe and North Africa were lost in the Dark Ages, elsewhere in the world other civilizations were surviving, even thriving. In Byzantium, the Eastern Empire, the rhythms of old Rome continued apace, albeit with an increasingly Oriental flavor. Rich, dedicated to diplomacy over conquest (it bought off the Huns, for instance), and ruled from the mighty (and mightily defended) capital of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire looked as if it might last forever. And it nearly did: When it fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it had survived another one thousand years.

The Eastern Empire (still calling itself the “Roman Empire”) enjoyed the unique advantage of being ruled by a brilliant and ruthless emperor, Justinian, just as the Western Empire collapsed. Seeing the power void in Rome, Justinian ordered his legions to recapture most of the Western Empire in Italy, southern France, and North Africa.

He largely succeeded, but in the face of endless counterattacks by the barbarian tribes in Europe and devastating plagues at home, Justinian was never able to consolidate his gains—likely missing the very last chance to salvage something of the remnants of the Western Empire and stave off Europe’s Dark Ages.

What the Eastern Empire did save of the West’s collected memory was all of those things already embedded into its culture: art, architecture, military science, key texts, and the Christian liturgy. With its immense riches—and despite a political system that gave its name (Byzantine) to the complex, devious, and scheming—the Eastern Empire produced some magnificent works of art. Perhaps the most famous are the Hagia Sophia cathedral (later a mosque, and currently a museum), completed in 537 and one of the world’s greatest buildings—fittingly, the Hagia Sophia was dedicated to the Word—and the beautiful mosaics (including a portrait of Justinian) in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy.

In terms of the history of memory, and thus of civilization, Justinian’s greatest achievement was to convene a ten-man commission to revisit all of the surviving Roman legal codes, transcribe them, collate them, and condense them into a workable document. It took five years. The result was the Codex Justinianus. Ultimately, the commission, led by a court official named Tribonian, produced four texts: a compilation of Roman law (the Codex), a collection of extracts from Roman jurists (the Digest, one of the first encyclopedias), a textbook for students (the Institutes), and a list of new laws created by Justinian (the Novels).

Together, they became known as the Corpus Juris Civilis (The Body of Civil Law). It is the seminal work of jurisprudence in the Western world and the heart of most modern (including papal) law.

Still, in part because it sat within a complex nexus of languages and cultures, in part because it dismissed the past achievements of the Western Empire as symbols of failure, and not least because it seemed to manifest some of the larger cultural exhaustion of Imperial Rome, the Byzantine Empire is not known for its larger intellectual achievements. That includes writing: Byzantine literature, though extensive, is known for either being a pastiche of older styles or plain, unemotional recitations of facts. The latter can be useful, especially in Byzantine histories, but it doesn’t make for fun reading.

As with the West and Charlemagne, the Eastern Empire had its own unlikely “middle” age of light and learning. This was the Macedonian (or Armenian, because that was the ethnicity of the rulers) dynasty, which began in 867 and lasted nearly two hundred years. The Macedonian dynasty not only marked the era of greatest power (if not size) for the Byzantine Empire, but it also reached such heights in culture and the arts—and ultimately in influence—that it is sometimes described as the Macedonian Renaissance.

Exquisite works of art were created during the Macedonian dynasty. But for our purposes, the single most important change that occurred during this era was that the West began, fitfully, to regain its memory. This occurred in two ways. First, a new interest in collecting started to grow. Suddenly, after four centuries of disinterest, classical studies and antiquarian scholarship became all the rage. Happily, given their declining state, old manuscripts were gathered, scrutinized, copied, and taught. And the more the Byzantines learned about not just ancient Greece but also the long-gone Western Empire, the more impressed they became with what they read … and the more anxious to learn more.

The greatest of these collectors was Photios, patriarch of Constantinople. Photios so loved old manuscripts that he sponsored searches for them, paid to have them copied, and ultimately established the greatest library of the age. It was a lucky moment for civilization.

The second important intellectual trend of the Macedonian dynasty was (not entirely independent from the new fad for collecting) an intense interest in compilation and categorization. Over the course of these two centuries, scores of major historians and chroniclers arose to produce endless volumes recording the past. As a result, the tenth century A.D., propelled by manic collector Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, was the first Age of Encyclopedias. With an intense desire to organize and catalog not seen again until the eighteenth century, Byzantine academics set out to organize the known world and all of human memory, in the process creating vast encyclopedias of political science, epigrams, ancient writings, and physical science.

The most important of these encyclopedists was arguably also the greatest figure of his age. A monk, philosopher, teacher, writer, and historian, Michael Psellos was born at the beginning of the eleventh century and dominated its end. Psellos, like Cicero before him and Bacon after, was one of those wide-ranging maverick geniuses who manages to rewrite his world even as he reaches the highest levels of ruling it: In Psellos’s case, he became prime minister to the emperor. Like the others, he, too, fell from grace at court (the reasons are obscure, as is much of his personal life other than the fact that, given the meaning of “psellos,” he probably stuttered), and in his case he found sanctuary in a monastery. But not only did Psellos return to glory a few years later, he even managed to stay there: Psellos spent the rest of his life as a trusted adviser to a succession of emperors.

Like Photios before him, Psellos was an avid collector and scholar of antiquity. But unlike his predecessor, Michael Psellos was a man of great imagination and strong opinions. He didn’t see the texts he collected as being of equal value, nor their contents deserving of equal reverence. On the contrary: When Psellos sat down to write his history of the Byzantine emperors, the Chronographia, he gave unprecedented emphasis to the characters of his subjects over the dry recitation of battles and monuments.10

But it was in his philosophical histories that Psellos’s personality really came to the surface. Just as the Elizabethan research scientist William Gilbert accused Francis Bacon of writing science “like a Lord Chancellor,” so, too, did Psellos fill his works with his own thoughtful judgments on historical figures normally considered beyond criticism. For example, he placed Plato in the supreme position above all other philosophers—including Socrates and Aristotle, the pre-Socratics, and the Roman and Byzantine philosophers—an opinion that not only put him at odds with his peers but even led Psellos to the brink of being charged with blasphemy. A skilled politician, he survived that scandal (he took an oath to the gods) and went back to work. He even had the courage, as perhaps the first such writer since Augustine, to fill his writings with autobiographical passages.

With his combination of wide-ranging genius, academic discipline, ambition, and ego, Michael Psellos can sometimes look like a man out of time—four centuries before his time. And it was precisely his singular position and personality that enabled Psellos to take the restoration of Western memory to the next level, from collecting and collating to actual discernment and application. It was an achievement as great as Isidore’s was five hundred years before, but because it was much more subtle and personal, it has never been as celebrated.

THE GOLDEN LIBRARY

The memories of Western civilization weren’t only in libraries and schools in Constantinople. Elsewhere, around the fringes of the former Western Empire, there were other, equally important caches of memories being carefully preserved by different groups, and for different motives.

On the northwest edge of Europe, often literally driven out onto the rocks in the Atlantic Ocean to escape the predations of barbarians and Vikings, Irish Catholic monks huddled in their cold barrows and copied, annotated, illustrated, and rewrote the sacred texts of Christianity on sheets of vellum. Of all of the saviors of civilization, theirs was the most miserable and thankless work of all. Forgotten by the rest of mankind, they labored on, generation after generation, waiting for the light to return to Europe. Their thankless sacrifice still haunts the modern world.

In Spain, Arab scholars were also poring over surviving memories of the ancient world. Arabic civilization, which began its expansion with the fall of Rome and the power vacuum left in the Middle East by the retreating legions, went into overdrive with the birth of Islam and the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Following Muhammad’s command to conquer and convert the heretics, Muslim armies swept south into sub-Saharan Africa, west across North Africa, north into Syria (and eventually into Turkey), and east toward India. They also attacked Europe in a vast continental pincer movement … only to be thrown back (temporarily) in the east at the walls of Constantinople and in the west (permanently) by Charles Martel and the Franks at Tours.

This era of rapid expansion by the Umayyad caliphate was turned into a five-hundred-year “Golden Age” of consolidation and empire by its successor, the Abassid dynasty. It wasn’t long before Arab scholars were following the train of the conquering Muslim armies, looking for their own intellectual plunder.

It was there for the taking. In Egypt, these scholars found the remains of and the successors to the Library of Alexandria. And in Spain, most famously in Cordoba, they found caches of scrolls and parchments that had been left by the Romans and preserved by the Byzantines. Unlike the Byzantines, the Arabs held no contempt for the long-gone Western Roman Empire, and so they were able to appreciate—two centuries before Constantinople—the treasure they had found:

Andalusia was, above all, famous as a land of scholars, libraries, book lovers and collectors … when Gerbert studied at Vich (ca. 995–999), the libraries of Moorish Spain contained close to a million manuscripts … in Cordoba books were more eagerly sought than beautiful concubines or jewels.11

No one understood this miraculous gift more than Abd ar-Rahman III, known as Emir Al-Hakam II. He was a pretty bloodthirsty character, having helped his father with a notorious massacre and spending much of his reign fighting everybody from Franks to Vikings. But Al-Hakam II was also celebrated for his public works, and none was more famous than that of the gigantic Royal Mosque of Cordoba. The sheer size and beauty of the place alone would have made it famous, but what Al-Hakam II did with it carved out his place in history: He added a library.12 And not just a small, personal library—Al-Hakam II built it big enough to hold all of the old volumes found in that part of Spain, as well as all of the new works he proposed to buy.

The city’s glory was the Great Library established by Al-Hakam II … ultimately it contained 400,000 volumes … on the opening page of each book was written the name, date, place of birth and ancestry of the author, together with the titles of his other works. Forty-eight volumes of catalogues, incessantly amended, listed and described all titles and contained instructions on where a particular work could be found.13

To give you some context, this library, which would have been about the size of the collection of a typical small liberal arts college, by the time it was installed in the Royal Mosque of Cordoba, probably held more total books than did all of the castles, private collections, and libraries in the rest of Europe. By comparison, the two other biggest libraries in Europe, in Avignon and the Sorbonne, didn’t have more than four thousand volumes between them.14

Interestingly, the man Al-Hakam II appointed as director of the library, named Talid, turned around and hired as his deputy a Fatimid (North African) woman named Labna. It was her job to tour the bookstalls and markets of Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad in search of the rarest texts to purchase. This is the first appearance of a woman in a key role in this history of memory—and Labna herself might be seen as the prototype of the intrepid Lady Librarian of modern movies and musicals. Eventually, the library would employ as many as 170 women translating copies of the Koran.

The new Arab obsession with books and learning soon intersected with a technological revolution taking place at the other end of the Muslim Empire. Far from the cares of Europe and its Dark Ages and endless wars, China had survived its own series of challenges to emerge as a confident Middle Kingdom.

FROM THE NESTS OF WASPS

Following the collapse, in 618, of the short-lived and tyrannical Sui dynasty, China embarked on its own brief golden age under the Tan dynasty. For most of the next three hundred years, China enjoyed considerable prosperity, technological innovation, and, unusual for that culture, extensive international trade. All of this would end in a bloody civil war that would throw the country into a century of chaos, but not before all of that innovation and trade would put one of the most important inventions in the story of memory into Arab hands.

As noted, the Chinese already had a form of paper made, as did Mesoamericans, out of processed bark and wood fiber. A court eunuch named Cài Lun is generally credited with having invented this primitive form of paper in A.D. 105 during the Han dynasty.15 His crucial breakthrough was not the use of bark, but that he also tossed into the mix a veritable potpourri of other ingredients, including the “bast” (inner) bark of fibrous plants such as flax and hemp, old rags, and even fishnet. The stew was soaked in caustic solutions that broke everything down into its stringy components and then was poured through a screen and dried. Lin attributed his discovery to his careful observation of how wasps made their nests.

Interestingly, the first popular uses for this new invention ranged from wrapping paper to toilet paper to an actual writing medium. And in time, as is the case today, these different uses ultimately led to different grades and styles of paper. True writing paper was typically made with the finest materials, vegetable dyes, and even natural insecticides to protect them.

Paper offered so many advantages over its predecessors: It was inexpensive (and became even cheaper with economies of scale), soft, and pliant. It folded easily, which meant it could readily be bound into books, and by the year 300 the Chinese were doing just that. Paper also took ink beautifully, and so, by the middle of the Tan dynasty (c. 1040), Chinese publishers, most famously Bi Sheng, were experimenting with impressing carved and inked blocks of wood onto multiple sheets of paper—the birth of printing.

By then, paper was ubiquitous in daily life in China, from the shopowner to the emperor himself. And thanks to an explosion in trade supported by the government, the world got its first glimpse of paper technology—and coveted it. Japan got its hands on paper technology first, in about 610, from a visiting Buddhist priest.

REAWAKENING

It took the West another 140 years. Supposedly, China lost its monopoly on paper when it also lost the Battle of Talas (in present-day Kyrgyzstan) to a Muslim army in 751. As legend has it, two Chinese prisoners taken in the battle, after no doubt considerable inducement, gave up the recipe.

Within fifty years, huge paper mills were being constructed by the caliphate near the marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers outside Baghdad, and soon thousands of reams of fresh new paper were being shipped west. By the end of the millennium, thanks to the demand from places like the Royal Mosque of Cordoba, an estimated 60,000 compilations, books of poetry, and scientific texts were being produced per year. Meanwhile, an army of scribes and translators were kept busy converting the older Latin and Greek texts into Arabic. It helped that Andalusian Spain during this period enjoyed a long interval of peace while the rest of Western Europe was hit with a string of natural and man-made disasters, from plagues and poor harvests to the Viking predations.

But this scenario wouldn’t last forever. By 1100, Europe had finally emerged into the era of important artistic and scientific achievement known today as the High Middle Ages. It was the confident age of Gothic cathedrals, the beginnings of the scientific revolution, and the Crusades. Even the weather turned warmer.

Meanwhile, the Byzantine Empire, thanks to generations of reduced investment in its armies as well as the cultural stasis of an aged society, was now under assault from every side and would soon break with the West in the Great Schism of the Christian Church.

Even the Muslim Empire seemed to lose its vitality, especially in the West, during this era. Of particular interest to this story was the collapse of Muslim Spain into small competing kingdoms. This at last was the opening the Normans to the north in France needed, and in short order they drove the Muslims out of much of Spain.

Finally Europeans had access to the sum surviving total of their lost cultural and scientific memory. But it had been six hundred years since they’d last had it and so, even with the answers now in hand, even the brightest minds of a resurgent Europe didn’t really know what questions to ask. And so, for a century more, the exploration and dissemination of this long-lost knowledge was slow and confused.

Then, in 1203, the seemingly impregnable Constantinople was nearly destroyed from within by an alliance of Crusaders and the Venetian fleet. The Byzantine Empire was indisputably crumbling; and its best and brightest began to abandon it for safer harbors in the West. Soon, Greek and Eastern scholars could be found in the emerging new universities across Western Europe. These scholars knew what treasures were in the library in Cordoba and elsewhere, and they knew in which books their students should look—including the works of the Greek philosophers, Augustine, Isidore, and Cicero’s De Oratore.

It wasn’t long before the race was on across the Continent to be the first to recapture and put to work that regained knowledge. Europe was at last ready to remember.