Stoicism's Leaky Memory Problem

How to remember what makes you invincible

“He had thus made books superfluous — he used to say he wrote in his mind.”
— Seneca the Elder, Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores

Modern Stoics don’t understand what “remember” means.

• In the short handbook, the Enchiridion, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus told students to remember various precepts 14 times, by my rough count.

• Writing to his friend Lucillius and various acquaintances across hundreds of pages of letters and essays, the Stoic Seneca the Younger tells correspondents to remember or memorize things on at least 50 occasions.

• Writing fifty years after the death of the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, Aulus Gellius informs us he memorized — perhaps verbatim — one of Rufus’s precepts as a child and was able to reproduce it in his book decades later, preserving it for posterity.

Modern people bring our decayed conception of memory to bear on Stoic memorization commandments and assume we’re being told the following:

“Go play memory roulette dozens of times with this idea. With enough tries you might manage to get it into long term memory, and that will be good.”

We balk at the scale and futility of this project. We remember our dreaded school years, when we struggled to remember test information with endless rote repetition and afterward quickly forgot everything we’d learned.

Lucky for us, I’m fairly certain modern assumptions are wrong. This is not what Epictetus or Seneca expected students to do, and it’s foolish to take this approach to learning the philosophy.

I think what the ancient Stoics were saying is something like this:

“Remember to engrave this in the mental storehouse of information you’ve been curating since you were a child, in the section you’ve set aside for practical philosophy, in the subsection on Stoicism, so it can serve you when you need it most.”

That’s a bold claim that doesn’t line up with how we think of human memory. It sounds more like a computer’s file system than grey matter. But I consider the evidence for this to be pretty convincing. I would be more shocked if Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Monsonius Rufus didn’t have location-based information depots in their brains that could unleash reservoirs of important information on command.

The reason for my confidence is simple: we have a lot of ancient books telling us most people educated in the Artes Liberales could do something like this, though levels of proficiency varied. It was considered unremarkable that a child of ten could both understand and reel off whole books from the Illiad or the Aeneid verbatim. But this was antiquity’s version of mnemonic child’s play.

Writing On The Mind

“…those who’ve learned mnemonics can set in backgrounds what they’ve heard, and from these backgrounds deliver it by memory. For the backgrounds are very much like wax tablets​ or papyrus, the images like letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like reading.”
— Rhetorica ad Herennium, 80s B.C., author unknown

Marcus, Seneca, and Rufus were trained orators. They knew how to sway the senate, a jury, or a class of young students and make their arguments land hard. In fact, Marcus and Seneca were renowned and praised for their rhetorical flair, and given that Rufus was known as “The Roman Socrates,” he was probably an effective communicator.

In ancient Greece and Rome, every rhetorical teacher taught some version of the ars memoriae. Orators often spoke for more than an hour without notes, so they needed to have whole arguments memorized. Some apparently memorized verbatim while others just memorized the key points and impactful statements. We’ve got several ancient manuals and works of rhetorical theory, and they all mention how critical the memory arts were for holding necessary information in mind. Some explain how mnemonic techniques were executed in detail.

Some surviving rhetorical books include:

• Aristotle’s Rhētorikḗ (300s B.C.)

• Rhetorica ad Herennium (80s B.C.)

• Cicero’s De Oratore (55 B.C.)

• Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (95 A.D.)

They weren’t focused on one memory technique but a variety for different tasks. But the one popping up in most works is called “method of loci,” by the Romans, or the journey method or mind palace technique by ars memoriae practitioners today.

“Loci” is the plural of “locus,” or place/location, and hints at the underlying innovation almost all these techniques utilize. They seek to sidestep humanity’s limited verbal and theoretical memory and tap our almost limitless visual and spatial memory instead. The Greeks and Romans recorded and systematized techniques utilized since prehistory. In her book, “The Memory Code,” Lynne Kelly documents aboriginal visual/spatial mnemonic techniques in societies around the world. If she’s right, we’ve been using variations of these techniques for millennia. They’re one of humanity’s oldest technologies.

The basic idea is to encode information in the environment or our mental projections of environments. Entire storehouses of information can be packed with information critical for survival and flourishing in this way.

Educated Greeks and Romans used these techniques to write on the mind almost as permanently as they marked up wax tablets and scraps of papyrus. The most expert practitioners demonstrated memory feats that wowed their contemporaries.

Seneca’s Memory Feats:

“(Seneca) is constantly quoting poetry, especially favoring Virgil’s Aeneid but also including the Eclogues and Georgics, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Satires of Horace, and the Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Comparison with surviving texts of those authors suggests that he quotes from memory, for there are several instances in which he substitutes a word or splices together two similar passages.”
— A. A. LONG, Introduction to Seneca’s Letters on Ethics

One of our best sources of these feats is a book dedicated to the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger by his father, Seneca the Elder. The elder Seneca claimed to have written the book — which anthologizes speeches from his youth — entirely from memory. It’s called Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores, but only portions survive.

The remaining segments are anthologies of great speeches he’s heard, analyses of various orators, and commentaries on style. He frequently praises feats of memory, and describes some of his own from his youth, such as, “When two thousand names had been reeled off I would repeat them in the same order; and when my assembled school-fellows each supplied a line of poetry, up to the number of more than two hundred, I would recite them in reverse.”

These feats aren’t as improbable as they sound. Every year, competitors in the World Memory Championships do similar things.

Seneca insists natural memory must be supplemented by mnemonic techniques to achieve anything worthwhile. He praises an orator named Latro this way:

“…he had supreme technique for grasping and for retaining what he had to remember, so that he could recall all the declamations he had ever spoken…what he had mentally rehearsed he used to speak without his memory ever failing in a single word. He had vast knowledge of the whole range of history; he would ask someone to name a general to him, and then immediately detail his feats with fluency—so true was it that he had at his finger-tips whatever had once come his way.” — Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, 1

It seems incredibly improbable that Seneca the Younger, a talented orator in his own right noted for his ability to recall vast amounts of information, didn’t learn these memory techniques from his father and apply them to his philosophy and all other important parts of life. He and his fellow philosophers would have simply thought about remembering differently than we do.

And if we assume the Stoics had these curated memory storehouses, it changes our understanding of Marcus’s frequent mentions of his “inner citadel”:

"Men seek retreats for themselves—the country, the sea-shore, the mountains—but it is in your power whenever you shall choose to retire into yourself. For nowhere can a man retire with more quiet or freedom than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect ease."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.3

If we can retreat inside ourselves and find not only a record of powerful philosophical precepts and exercises to reframe our struggles, but also the ideals of our teachers and meaningful book, play, and poem excerpts, it’s a totally different experience. We’ve created something empowering, a palace for good times and bad.

I’m no memory savant. I’ve had no teacher, and merely learned a few things from old books. Undoubtedly, both Senecas would consider me a memory slacker. But even what little I’ve picked up has been enough to change my inner life, and the way I practice my life philosophy in the real world. It feels empowering and calming to know what I have stored away inside me, and it leaks into my everyday thinking, even when I’m not calling on it. I feel more because it’s there.

I’ve come around to believing that whether you’re an aboriginal remembering your great great-great-great-grandfather’s advice on finding food during a massive drought, or a modern westerner trying to recall sage advice in hard times, remembering is a big part of being human.

If we do what most modern Westerners do and own a slave called Google or Chat GPT and make it remember critical things for us so we don’t have to, we’ll forever be fragile and degraded, a shadow of what we could be.

Aristotle famously claimed, "All men by nature desire to know. But what if we’re like leaky buckets, spilling our precious knowledge, hard-won experience, and meaningful revelations into a vacuum? Our now cannot help but suffer for it.

You can’t be great if you can’t remember to be great, nor what being great consists of.

As Cicero said, “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.”

If you want to utilize your memory to easily embed your life philosophy — and everything else of importance — I’ve created a memory course to help.

Memorize for Meaning

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