{"id":1448,"date":"2015-10-10T19:14:47","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T19:14:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oriolfontdevila.net\/es\/tanit-plana-a-journey-as-a-flock\/"},"modified":"2015-10-11T08:21:49","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T08:21:49","slug":"tanit-plana-a-journey-as-a-flock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oriolfontdevila.net\/es\/tanit-plana-a-journey-as-a-flock\/","title":{"rendered":"Tanit Plana: A Journey as a Flock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Cicero and Quintilian tell the story of a feat that led to Simonides of Ceos being acclaimed as the inventor of the art of memory, ars memoriae. In around 500 BC the athlete Scopas asked Simonides to write a lyric poem to celebrate his victory in a sporting contest. The panegyric was not to his liking, though, since Simonides dedicated two-thirds of it to Castor and Pollux\u2014twin divinities who were heroic boxers\u2014and only a third to Scopas himself. The incensed athlete told Simonides to collect two-thirds of the commissioned fee from the twins, for he would only pay the remaining third.<\/p>\n

At the celebration banquet Simonides received word that two young men were waiting outside to see him, only to find that the two young men were nowhere to be found. At that very moment the dining hall collapsed behind him, crushing Scopas and all his guests. Castor and Pollux had punished Scopas\u2019 vanity and rewarded Simonides in gratitude for his poem by saving his life.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, the bodies were so badly disfigured that they couldn\u2019t be identified for proper burial. Simonides, though, was able to recall where each of the guests had been sitting at the table and was thus able to identify them. This prodigious feat of memory stands as the founding myth of the art of memory. And the fact that the poet had remembered where the guests had been sitting by locating them in space meant that in the ancient and medieval worlds, the art of memory was seen as an art of space rather than time, as topography rather than chronology.<\/p>\n

Harald Weinrich, whose account of the story we have draw on here, suggests that the story of Simonides led to the development of a didactic technique for memory artists, above all rhetorical artists. When a speaker had to remember a speech, they would first lay out a constellation of places familiar to them in their mind. They would then convert all the things they wanted to remember into pictures and place each picture in one of the places they had thought of. When they came to give their speech, all they had to do was to call to mind the series of places and the pictures associated with them. According to Weinrich, \u201cThis art is always practised in a memory space in which everything that must be remembered has its own specific place.\u201d (1)<\/sup>Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 11.<\/span>