Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
we shouldn't be astonished that every town had a person who could recite "The Odyssey" from memory after hearing it a few times.
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FWIW, most scholars think that (i) the Odessey was very likely originally composed, and isn't a "transcript" of an actual oral epic, as it is usually understood to be in undergraduate lit classes, or even if it was based on one or more oral versions of the story that were floating around, someone went through on writing it down and thoroughly rewrote and edited it, and (ii) generally epics, poems and stories in oral traditions were probably never recited the same way twice, though they are all rife with mimetic tricks to remind the tellers what came next.
This is largely based on observations of both pre- and post- literate cultures that have surviving oral literary traditions, but also has significant support in the actual transcribed oral texts we have, where the mirroring or doubling of events and characters indicate that people were changing things all the time and others were trying to make sense of having heard differing versions, all without too much success.
Certainly "memory" was understood pre-enlightenment (at earliest) rather differently than it is today, and the same value wasn't placed on getting things exactly right. In fact, memory was usually thought to have a creative, generative aspect to it, and rote memorization had little value because it did not generate new ideas. I'm not sure that it is so much a matter of "reading/writing degrades innate memorization abilities, so widespread literacy has decreased our great feats of memory" as "the ancients weren't literate so they developed quite sophisticated formal methods of encouraging memory which we don't bother with any more (ever tried building a memory palace? It's a fucking chore), and had rather different ideas about what was meant by "memorized" and/or "the same."
edited to add: sorry to bring my pedantry to yet another board, but, hey, atticus mentions these subjects and I just can't resist!
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