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Distant Mirrors, Dimly Lit: Memory
Friday August 29, 2003
at 2.30
 Listen Real Media
Memory is extraordinarily important to us, it helps us define our identity. The Greeks and the Romans saw memory in a completely different way. They wanted to reenact the past, so that through memory (or better, through memorialisation) they could make the present part of the past.
We can tell how important memory is to us by the number of books and magazine articles with the word memory in their titles. What might drive us is our fear of loss of memory, and with it the loss of a sense of self. Hence our anxieties in the face of Alzheimer’s Disease, of recovered memory syndrome, of the loss of indigenous rights, even of the loss of wilderness areas. We define our identities by these things and their loss as a loss of self. What happens to the future? And, can we say it was a healthier way to deal with the passing of time?
Transcript:
Joe Gelonesi: Hello, Joe Gelonesi here, with the final in our six-part series on the modern condition in an ancient light.
During the series, we’ve explored family, depression, boredom, leisure, privacy and anger. Some aspects seem eternal, others distinct to a time and place.
This week, modern and ancient perceptions of memory.
Personal memory is extremely important to us. In fact you could say memory and identity are inseparable.
In early antiquity, memory was seen in a completely different way. It was collective, not individual. Yet somewhere along the way, something changed to give us the understanding of memory we have today.
Looking into the distant mirror has been the life work of Professor Peter Toohey. He’s the Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary in Canada.
Announcer: Episode 6: Memory.
Joe Gelonesi: Here’s Peter, with his final reflection.
Peter Toohey: We live in the 21st century, yet our perceptions of who we are, are shaped in our memory of the 20th century. We’re afraid of losing that memory, because if we do, we’ll lose our identity.
Hence our anxiety surrounding recovered memory syndrome, the loss of indigenous rights, even the loss of wilderness areas, and especially our fear of Alzheimer’s disease.
But today, we define our identities through memory of these things, and their loss is very easily registered for us as loss of self. In their heyday, the Greeks and Romans wanted to be remembered, but we don’t care much about that, we’re terrified of forgetting.
The ancients were terrified of being forgotten.
Memory is almost an emotion. I do realise that when I make this claim, I’m subjecting the idea of emotion to considerable violence.
Perhaps I could put it this way: Memory represents a kind of an emotional register. I mean this in the sense that our perceived capacity for memory provokes in us the registration of emotion.
Our capacity to remember provides us, through recollection, with pleasure, sorrow, guilt, pride and so forth. The Greeks and the Romans knew this just as well as we do.
Their fear of being forgotten represents as surely as lust itself, a palpable emotion.
Being forgotten is perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a person in the ancient world. Song and poetry provide immortality by allowing the renown of an individual to extend beyond their death and even beyond their narrow community.
The job of the poet was to back up the exploits of a hero, or a very prominent person, and give them a type of immortality by talking about them in memorable verse.
Through this renown an afterlife would be gained. To our eyes, it is however, only a type of an afterlife. There’s no personal post mortem survival or sensation here.
But you need to remember that early Greeks had no really clear understanding of the afterlife, let alone personal survival after death. They were therefore, by default, much more concerned with their survival post mortem, within the register of their own community. Poetry and song could provide this, the mouths of other people kept you alive.
Sappho the Greek poet from Lesbos who composed sometime in the 6th century before our era, has a very nice take on this. She makes this idea of post mortem survival through song quite clear, when she threatens one of her opponents with complete oblivion.
Sappho makes it plain, when she speaks of the ‘roses of the Muses’, but what she is threatening the addressee of her poem with is total post mortem oblivion.
THUNDERCLAP
Reader: You’ll lie in your grave and no-one ever will remember you later on. You won’t share the roses of the Muses, but unnoticed in the Underworld, you’ll mix with the obscure dead.
Sappho.
Peter Toohey: This hankering for the immortality through memory that great renown can bring is dramatised most famously in Homer’s Iliad. Achilles, the hero of this poem, is offered two choices: either to grow old comfortably but to remain obscure, or to live a short and glorious life and enjoy post mortem renown through the memory of his community.
VOICE
Peter Toohey: Achilles opts for a short and glorious life.
CHEERS
Reader: For my mother, Thetis, the Goddess of the Silver Feet, tells me I carry two sorts of destiny towards the day of my death. Either if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans my return is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting.
But if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.
Homer.
Peter Toohey: Achilles chose the glorious and short life, and he was completely justified in his choice. He’s become immortal, thanks to the poetry of Homer. His memory has indeed become everlasting.
Dr Chris Mackie is Head of Classics at the University of Melbourne, and he’s been working for a number of years on Homer and his poetry.
Chris Mackie: Achilles to me is somebody who wants to live life to the fullest, and not to compromise in any way. If I can give you a comparison, there was a Nigerian footballer who had a heart condition; he was playing for A.C. Milan, and he was given the choice between stopping playing or continuing to play football, but if he continued to play he could die at any point.
And he continued to play. So it’s a kind of an Achilles parallel at the local level there.
I often describe Achilles as somebody of extremes and total commitment in everything that he does. So he’s extreme in his loves, in his hates, in his compassion, in his brutality, everything that he does is extreme.
And the idea that such a person would compromise his life and his fate is unthinkable. And I think that’s what makes him such a great epic hero. That’s why his name is renowned today, because there is the sense that there is no compromise in his action and to compromise his fate, compromises life.
And so this choice that he has really goes to the heart of who and what he is, and he’s somebody who really is entirely uncompromising in his whole life.
Announcer: Distant mirrors, dimly lit. Contemporary concerns in an ancient light.
Chris Mackie: The whole corpus of Greek myth is a force for remembering human conduct. Memories are a critical factor, both at the social level and the individual personal level.
When I think about the idea of community memory in our own cultural context, and in Ancient Greece, I think of something like Anzac Day. In a way, that’s not really very different from the way that the Greeks of the classical period, or indeed earlier, tended to recall significant conflicts closer to their own time, and I suppose I think particularly of Marathon, because that was in some ways the heyday in Athenising the development of the city, the defeating of the Persians at Marathon, outnumbered and a great victory in our own terms.
And that is remembered in the same sort of collective community way it seems to me, that we remember Gallipoli and particularly I suppose the First World War, through monuments, through personal memories, through all sorts of things like that.
So in that sense, there’s not, it seems to me, a great difference. But in our cultural context, there’s no doubt that memory tends to be a much more personal thing. I can’t think of many other cases where we do that, what we do with Gallipoli.
For the most part that’s a pretty unique example I think I’m pretty right in saying. And so I think it is true to say that memory in a modern cultural context is a much more personal thing than in Greek antiquity, where it does have that collective sense to it.
Peter Toohey: Very close to the beginning of Thucydides, great history of the war between the Athenians and the Spartans, Pericles, the architect of the Greek Golden Age, gave a speech for the burial of the first of those who’d been killed in that war.
He does not single out individuals in the way Homer would have, he concentrates on the group. That makes sense in a democratic city-state built on co-operation, and two things are important for memory in Pericles’ famous funeral oration.
First, like Homer, he provides a life after death for these fallen citizens by praising their sacrifice.
Second, again like Homer, he places their exploits within a long chain of heroic exploits achieved within their society. And these men represent the latest link in that long chain.
Reader: I’ll begin by talking about our ancestors, since it is only right and proper on such an occasion to pay them the honour of recalling what they did.
In this land of ours, there have always been the same people living from generation to generation up till now, and they, by their courage and their virtues, have handed it on to us, a free country.
Even more so do our fathers deserve praise, but of the inheritance they had received, they added all the empire we have now, and we ourselves assembled here today, who are mostly in our prime of life, have in most directions, added to the power of our empire.
Peter Toohey: Of course, Pericles includes the dead amongst ‘we ourselves… who have added to the power of our empire’. Memory then for Pericles is situated firmly within his Athenian society.
It’s not his memory, but rather the memory of Athens, and the anxiety relating to memory within the world of Homer and Thucydides was not of forgetting but of being forgotten. This is a topic of particular interest to Ian Worthington, Professor of Greek History at the University of Missouri.
Ian Worthington: It’s just something that’s really interesting, and with Pericles’ funeral oration you’re absolutely right to talk about how he focuses on the collective, how he focuses on the people en mass, and he doesn’t actually single out a particular person to talk about, and that’s how it should be, because he’s drawing that fine line between fellows who’ve just died and those who have lived in the past and the fact that these people have just died not in vain, that they’ve died for the greater glory, which is the polis.
And this is what you would expect in a standard funeral oration.
Peter Toohey: Did Roman historians ever move away from simply offering memorialisation for the collective, and instead look to the needs of the individual?
Ian Worthington: Yes, I really do think that’s the case as well. Tacitus says he is not going to write with anger or bias, and then he goes on to write one of the most biased and angry works that there is.
I think he’s definitely putting the focus on the individual there, as opposed to the collective.
Peter Toohey: Ian Worthington.
Fear of being forgotten doesn’t really change in later ancient historical writing either. Take Livy for example, writing about 400 years after Thucydides, just before the time of the birth of Christ. Livy says remembering the past is important.
Reader: The task of writing the history of our nation from Rome’s earliest days fills me I confess, with some misgiving, and even were I confident in the value of my work, I should hesitate to say so.
I shall find satisfaction in contributing, not I hope, ignobly, to the labour of putting on record the story of the greatest nation in the world.
I shall find antiquity a rewarding study.
I shall be able to turn my eyes from the troubles which for so long have tormented the modern world.
I invite the reader’s attention to the kind of lives our ancestors lived. I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, as the old teaching was allowed to lapse.
Peter Toohey: As you can see, Livy is just as concerned to play Homer, as it were. He wants to preserve the great deeds of his nation’s past from oblivion. He sees himself as acting as the mouthpiece of contemporary society.
Interestingly, however, he sees himself as taking on one other role as well, by reminding contemporary society of the past by forcing them to remember, he aims to make his own society a better one.
The movement from praise to castigation is not such a great one.
Here again is Ian Worthington.
Ian Worthington: I think what Livy is doing is talking about the past so that his society, so that his time, knows about it, so that they have some sense of history, because let’s face it, it’s all make believe.
He’s out to talk about the greatest civilisation he’s known, and of course there aren’t any original records, so most of it’s make believe, so he wants the people of his time to know about the past, his past, but at the same time there’s this didactic function coming in, similar I think to Thucydides’ work, which is in learning about the past, we also have to recognise what went wrong, what mistakes happened, so that we don’t make them again, and in a way that’s a form of castigation, because you’re saying, ‘Well you people today are very similar to the ones in the past.
Look what you did wrong then, let’s not make sure we do it again.’
Peter Toohey: Ian Worthington.
It’s hard to pin down precisely when the socially orientated manner of looking at the past came to change, and with it, of thinking about memory. But it certainly did. At some point the focus moved away from society to the individual, from that which is outside to that which is inside.
Elaine Fantham, Giger Professor Emirita of Latin at Princeton University has some helpful observations on the sheer difficulty of incorporating private memory into ancient literature, and when this might be possible.
Elaine Fantham: Romans, I think, thought that they should use their memories to preserve for themselves and if necessary also for others, the achievements of their families and the good examples of historical figures, great generals, great statesmen of the past.
VOICES
Elaine Fantham: This was the kind of memory that you were encouraged to have and talk about.
PROCLAIMING
Elaine Fantham: Which of our sources would tell us about the private and personal memories that one cherishes? The person who comes to my mind is inevitably I suppose, a love poet, Catullus, looking back when his relationship with the beloved Lesbia has collapsed and she has rejected him, to the memory of that first time she came to the house that they had borrowed from a friend for an assignation, he heard her footstep on the door and she came to him and they were able to be together.
There is a case of a strictly private memory which the poet is still, you might also say milking, for the past joy that he can revive, even in sadness. But memories of one’s childhood, one might expect people to have memories of one’s childhood and talk about how we used to play in the duckpond by the villa and so on.
There’s relatively little of this. I think Romans felt that you should outgrow your childhood and be a serious adult as soon as you could.
A shame, really.
Peter Toohey: Elaine Fantham.
SINGING/WHISPERING
Peter Toohey: All that I think we can say with any confidence about this shift from collective to private memory is that it was complete by the time of the composition of the Confessions, by the great Christian writer, St Augustine.
Augustine lived from 354 to 430 CE, and memory, not social, but personal, is what Augustine makes so much of in his tenth book. It’s not a matter here of the past animating the actions of a single individual and providing it with meaning, that is, what’s outside animating the individual as was the case for Homer or Pindar, but rather for Augustine it’s all about what’s inside and how it can come out.
Reader: Memory preserves all the perceptions which have penetrated us. These are in the vast hall of my memory.
There, sky, land and sea are available to me together with all the sensations that I’d been able to experience in them, except for those which I have forgotten.
There also I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it. There is everything that I remember, whether I experienced it directly, or believed the word of others.
Out of the same abundance in store, I combine with past events images of various things, whether experienced directly or believed on the basis of what I have experienced.
And on this basis I reason about future actions and events and hopes, and again think of all these things in the present. I shall do this, and that, I say to myself, within the vast recesses of my mind, which is so full of so many rich images, and this or that at follows.
I say these words to myself, and as I speak, there are present images of everything I’m speaking of, drawn out of the same treasure trove of memory.
Augustine.
Peter Toohey: One of the most striking aspects of this passage is its focus on the self: recollection, looking back into your personal memory allows you to come into contact with yourself.
St Augustine never really understood the idea of forgetting. It seems as if he thought that memory was all there, just awaiting recall. Freud seems to have thought something like this, too, though the memory was a little harder to get back.
Neither of them seems to have had any sense of brain damage as we do today.
The conclusion that can be made from all of this is a fairly simple one. The way that memory was conceived in antiquity changes dramatically at some point in its history.
As far as I can tell, this is most clearly registered in the writing of St Augustine during the 4th century of our era. I suppose in some way this stands to reason as the whole Christian way of looking at things puts the individual experience front and centre, in the understanding of things.
The triumph of Christianity seems to have brought in its train a movement from the outer or social to the inner. The movement anticipates the sense of memory that we have in the present.
This is a profoundly inner-directed one, and one that the Greeks and the Romans would have found as bizarre as repugnant. Memory for them plugged you into your community; memory for us unplugs us from the community.
It’s what provides us with a verifiable sense of self. We are, we like to think, our memories. Augustine’s vast hall of memory is the structure on which we construct our sense of self.
That is, of course, provided we’re not cursed by forgetting. If we don’t have access to that vast haul of memory, then who are we?
That’s where the fear of Alzheimer’s comes into play. In our inner-directed culture, our self-obsessed culture, the extinction of the self through the failure of memory is almost more terrifying than pain and death.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at anger, privacy, leisure, depression, family feelings and memory. The constant has been a shift in the way these emotions and emotional registers underwent change within the Greco-Roman world.
The movement was from the active to the passive, from anger to withdrawal and depression, from the social to the personal. By and large the emotions of the ancients were different to ours. But something changed during the 1st century of our era.
Emotions and their institutions moved to something much more similar to ours, something much more recognisable. Memory, for example, became personal. It’s hard to pin down the reasons for this change. I’ve tried to suggest that it happened when personal freedoms were considerable, and when public control and constraint was strong.
And that’s a situation very much like the one you and I find ourselves in today.
Joe Gelonesi: Professor Peter Toohey, Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary in Canada, with his final look at the modern mind in an ancient context: Distant mirrors, dimly lit.
And we thank the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary.
I’m Joe Gelonesi, I hope you’ve enjoyed the series. Goodbye.
Announcer: Distant mirrors, dimly lit, is a six-part series written and presented by Peter Toohey, Professor and Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. Series producer is James Carleton, with technical production by Stephen Tilley and Angus Kingston. Original music composed by Roi Huberman. Executive producer is Joe Gelonesi.
More information:
"The Greeks - Crucible of Civilization" PBS Series
Comprehensive site accompanying the United States Public Broadcastisting Service (PBS) television special on Ancient Greece.
"The Roman Empire in the First Century" - PBS Series
Comprehensive site accompanying the United States Public Broadcastisting Service (PBS) television special on Ancient Rome.
American Philological Association
Founded in 1869, the American Philological Association is the principal learned society for Classical Studies in North America.
Childhood in Antiquity
Bibliography of Childhood in Antiquity by Meir Bar-Ilan, Senior Lecturer, Talmud and Jewish History Department, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Feminae Romanae
Bibliography and links on women in Ancient Rome.
The Ancient Greek World - University of Pennsylvania
Ancient Greek World virtual gallery at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The Perseus Digital Library
Perseus is a an evolving digital library, edited by Gregory Crane at Tufts University.
Worlds Intertwined: Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans
Site accompanying the suite of four permanent classical galleries at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
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