MEMORY AND RHETORIC IN THE ANCIENT AGE

ABSTRACT

This essay aims to present reflections on memory and rhetoric in ancient times. This is a bibliographic study, based on analytical hermeneutics. As a methodology, for the accomplishment of this study, the analyzes were carried through researches in books, considering the main aspects and approaches on the rhetoric and the influence of the memory in the ancient period, in terms of politics and religion. It was not about speaking well, it was something far beyond that, the speaker should sing the sacred songs and hymns, the prayers obeying the same original phonetic metrics with which they were created. It was a mnemonic discipline that had never been seen and experienced, with such rigor and obedience to canonical principles at any other time in human history. Memory was linked to rhetoric by the fact that there was a whole cult directed to the gods, to the dead, and they complained that all discourse followed a very straight line, in terms of phonetic and linguistic ordering. Memory and rhetoric have always been together, because every good orator and rhetorician must automatically possess a high degree of mnemonic capacity, which he generally possesses, because when preparing for an oral exposition, a rigorous argumentation, he must memorize, not just excerpts, but a whole collection of works and the respective contexts [semantic, epistemic, philosophical, sociological, syntactic] in which they are found, as well as how they can weave a decent concatenated dialogue with the present reality.