Future Thinking in Roman Culture

New Approaches to History, Memory, and Cognition

Maggie L. Popkin, Diana Y. Ng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000515558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Future Thinking in Roman Culture is the first volume dedicated to the exploration of prospective memory and future thinking in the Roman world, integrating cutting edge research in cognitive sciences and theory with approaches to historiography, epigraphy, and material culture.

This volume opens a new avenue of investigation for Roman memory studies in presenting multiple case studies of memory and commemoration as future-thinking phenomena. It breaks new ground by bringing classical studies into direct dialogue with recent research on cognitive processes of future thinking. The thematically linked but methodologically diverse contributions, all by leading scholars who have published significant work in memory studies of antiquity, both cultural and cognitive, make the volume well suited for classical studies scholars and students seeking to explore cognitive science and philosophy of mind in ancient contexts, with special appeal to those sharing the growing interest in investigating Roman conceptions of futurity and time. The chapters all deliberately coalesce around the central theme of prospection and future thinking and their impact on our understanding of Roman ritual and religion, politics, and individual motivation and intention.

This volume will be an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of classics, art history, archaeology, history, and religious studies, as well as scholars and students of memory studies, historical and cultural cognitive studies, psychology, and philosophy.

1

Introduction

New approaches to future thinking in the Roman world

Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139027-1

‘Wise man’ is the intended meaning of Homo sapiens, but … our name is not a description, but only an aspiration. … If it is not wisdom, what is it that Homo sapiens actually does so well that no other species even approaches?

Seligman et al. 2016: ix; emphasis in original

A group of psychologists, philosophers, and psychiatrists asked this question recently, and the answer they settled upon was prospection (Seligman et al. 2016: ix). Prospection—the ability to imagine future scenarios and use those mental simulations as guides to future action—so aptly and uniquely describes the human species that we would, they argued, be more accurately named Homo prospectus (Seligman et al. 2016: ix–x, passim). Other animals have the capacity to respond to events that have not yet occurred based on prior experiences of pleasure, pain, or fear (for example, a mouse hides before a cat enters the room). However, as Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson argued in a groundbreaking 2007 article in Science entitled “Prospection: Experiencing the Future,” humans have far greater powers of foresight than other animals. Remarkably, we can “pre-experience” not only events we have already experienced (hence the adage “once burnt, twice shy”), but we can also pre-experience future scenarios we have not personally encountered by imagining them—by simulating them in our minds and then pre-experiencing the predicted hedonic consequences of the scenario (Gilbert and Wilson 2007).

From Gilbert and Wilson to Seligman and colleagues, numerous scholars today would argue that future thinking constitutes at least part of what makes us human. Prospection, however, does not just separate us cognitively and evolutionarily from other animal species; it also, arguably, has defined and shaped human experience, both personal and social, throughout history, including in classical antiquity. Indeed, as ancient authors make clear, future thinking was on the minds of Romans, at least some of whom considered the relationship between past and future and the ways in which posterity would remember the present. For example, in a letter to Caesar, Cicero wrote of a monument (monumentum): “It should pay regard to the memory of posterity rather than the approval of the present day” (ad memoriam magis spectare debet posteritatis quam ad praesentis temporis gratiam) (Cic. Epist. ad Caes. fr. 7).¹ Quintilian had much the same to say of history writing, which he viewed as designed “to preserve a memory for future generations” (ad memoriam posteritatis … componitur) (Quint. Inst. 10.1.31). For both Cicero and Quintilian, memory and the future were fundamentally connected. Artifacts we tend to associate with remembering the past—whether a physical monument or a written history—exist, in fact, for posterity; that is, they fulfill their primary function insofar as they shape future memory.

Romans were not concerned only with preserving the past for future generations; more prosaic yet equally important was the ability to remember to do things in the future. A monitor in Rome was a person whose role it was to remind somebody else of something, whether that meant a counsellor who fed legal tidbits to an orator (e.g., Cic. Div. in Caecil. 16.52), a teacher of youth (e.g., Hor. Ars po. 163), or a prompter in theatrical performances (e.g., Paul. ex Fest. p. 138 Müll). The figures of the mnemon in Greece and the nomenclator in Rome were slaves tasked with helping their master remember to do (or not do) certain actions in the future, to speak certain names, and so on (e.g., Cic. Att. 4.1.5; see Bettini 2011: 31 on monitores and nomenclatores). While the figure of the mnemon/nomenclator might seem banal, these human aids for remembering were critical actors in Rome’s social networks, for the social and political ramifications of forgetting a client’s name or of failing to connect on a personal level with potential voters could be significant. Of course, as Seneca notes (Ben. 1.3.10), if a nomenclator ever forgot a name, he could just invent one, demonstrating that memory aids are not infallible! Indeed, the figure of the mnemon in Greek mythology, charged with helping a hero remember not to do something, often fails at this prospective memory task. Achilles’ mnemon fails to prevent Achilles from killing somebody from Apollo’s line (Tenes), while Hector’s mnemon does not stop Hector from killing somebody dear to Achilles (Patroclus) (Bettini 2011: 33–34). Many people living in the Roman world would have grown up learning a mythological corpus that lays bare the consequences of not remembering to remember, that is, of failing at prospective memory.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that we hear from ancient authors many examples of people employing particular strategies to remember to remember in the future. In Greek myths circulating in the Roman world, one finds prospective memory aids, such as Ariadne’s string. The mnemon/nomenclator/monitor is, of course, another such strategy—a truly embodied memory aide.² At least some Romans located memory even more specifically in the human body. According to Pliny, memory sits in the earlobe (est in aure ima memoriae locus, HN 11.251). Romans could, therefore, jog their memory by tugging on their ear. Seneca, when writing of remembering to keep his word and fulfill a promise, says he shall give his ear a twitch (aurem mihi pervellam, Ben. 4.36.1; see also Sen. Ep. 94.55). Pulling an earlobe could also serve as a warning to do something, that is, to remember to fulfill one’s obligation. Thus, Vergil (Ecl. 6.3–5) recounts that Apollo plucked Vergil’s ear to remind him to sing a slender song instead of chasing ambitions of epics of kings and battles (cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit: “pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ovis, deductum dicere carmen”). As Maurizio Bettini has argued, “touching and pulling the ear was a gestural translation of the verb admonere” (2011: 38).

If the Roman monitor and nomenclator demonstrate the importance of prospection for the careers of individual politicians, Vergil demonstrates elsewhere in his oeuvre that entire civilizations could depend upon future thinking and prospective memory. In book 4 of the Aeneid (4.220–77), Jupiter instructs Mercury to appear to Aeneas in Carthage and remind the errant Trojan of his destiny to reach Italy. Here, Aeneas must fulfill in his immediate future a promise made by his mother, Venus, in the past. In abandoning Carthage and Dido for the shores of Italy, the passage makes clear, Aeneas will ensure the future destiny of his son Ascanius and also of Rome itself. Jupiter’s words leave no doubt that Aeneas must look to his son’s future, lest Aeneas, “the father, grudge Ascanias the towers of Rome” (Ascanione pater Romanas invidet arces) (4.234). “What,” Jupiter asks, “is his [Aeneas’] plan?” (quid struit?) (4.235), a demand that Aeneas not only envision his future but also devise and follow through on a plan to actualize that future. When Mercury confronts Aeneas, Aeneas heeds Jupiter’s commands and immediately begins planning how to leave Dido: “he casts his swift mind this way and that, takes it in different directions and considers every possibility” (atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc in partisque rapit varias perque omnia versat) (4.285–86).

The future, it seems, was on Romans’ minds. In all the instances just cited, the actors were motivated by how people in the future would behave or would remember them—and they often manipulated their physical worlds and even their own bodies to ensure a certain outcome in the future. It is the aim of this volume to evaluate how people living in the Roman world envisioned and shaped their futures through writing and image-making—and how, in turn, texts, objects, and images exerted an impact on how people both perceived the future and remembered to perform actions in a time yet to be. The application of cognitive theories of future thinking and prospection and of the extended mind to ancient corpora of evidence produces new knowledge about intention and motivation in antiquity, the agency of sub-elite groups and individuals, and the future-oriented nature of Roman commemorations of the past. The chapters—which range from archaeology and art history to religious studies, literary studies, and history—present diverse sets of evidence and analytical methods to argue that concern for the future throws important new light on individual motivation and intention, power and politics, and religious and ritual practice in Roman antiquity. This introduction paves the way by defining some of the key cognitive and psychological theories and terms of prospection that undergird the volume, situating the turn to the future in broader trends in historical cognitive science and ancient memory studies and presenting the major themes that unite the chapters.

Relevant areas of cognitive research into prospection

Since Gilbert and Wilson’s seminal 2007 article on experiencing the future, cognitive and psychological research on human prospection has exploded. As the anecdotes mentioned earlier indicate and as the following chapters flesh out, many of these studies of prospection map onto Roman mentalities, which are not necessarily so dissimilar from ours. Nietzsche recognized the importance of remembering to keep promises to the fabric of societies (Nietzsche 1994[1887]: 38–71, esp. 39–50), but, long before Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, Seneca too opined at length about promises and the social contexts in which they must be kept or could in good faith be broken (Ben. 4.34.1–3). Although Romans’ imaginings of the future were culturally conditioned, it appears that they were responding to similar concerns to many people today and that their future-oriented cognition operated in ways similar to ours. For example, whether Jews living in the Levant or Romans residing in Iberia, people around the Roman world externalized prospection and intention into the world, adopting often strikingly similar strategies to simulate the future and to remember to remember, even as they operated in culturally and historically specific contexts. Though this volume does not argue for universalism in modes of future thinking and cognition, the evidence of future thinking as a phenomenon of coupled mind and environment presented throughout this volume demonstrates that astute applications of cognitive research can illuminate how texts, objects, and rituals functioned in antiquity in ways that both responded to simulations of the future and shaped the future. Here, we offer an overview of key areas of research that inform the following chapters in this volume.

Prospective memory

In the words of psychologists Jan Rummel and Mark McDaniel, prospective memory “can be broadly defined as the mental ability to remember to perform previously formed action plans (intentions) at an appropriate moment in the future” (Rummel and McDaniel 2019a: 1; see also McDaniel and Einstein 2007). It encompasses the encoding, storage, and eventual retrieval of these intended actions (Kliegel, McDaniel, and Einstein 2008: xiii). Remembering to perform actions in the future, banal as it may seem, is critical to our personal lives. Remembering to pick your child up from soccer practice on Tuesday afternoon may seem like no big deal—until you forget to do it. Failures of prospective memory can have fatal consequences; one would not want to be on a flight where the pilot has forgotten to adjust the wing flaps correctly for takeoff (Dismukes 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017)! The number of publications on prospective memory in recent years has increased exponentially (see Figure 1.1 in Rummel and McDaniel 2019a: 2), with literally hundreds of articles appearing just within the past five years. Much of this research into prospective memory has focused on how people form, maintain, and retrieve intentions, a topic that scholars have explored from neuroscientific, developmental, and applied perspectives. From a neurological perspective, prospective memory is supported by a network in the brain that includes structures in the rostral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and hippocampal complex; the prefrontal cortex areas are especially active when people engage in prospective memory tasks (West 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017: 21–39; Cona and Rothen 2019). Developmentally, prospective memory is crucial to people’s abilities to function autonomously and care for themselves effectively (Ballhausen et al. 2019). From an applied perspective, scholars have investigated how to identify and treat people with deficits in prospective memory and how prospective memory can improve healthy habits such as remembering to take medications correctly. Happily, several key volumes offer informative overviews of prospective memory and of recent theoretical, methodological, and applied advances (McDaniel and Einstein 2007; Kliegel, McDaniel, and Einstein 2008; Cohen and Hicks 2017; Rummel and McDaniel 2019b).

Particularly relevant to many of the chapters in this volume is research into the metacognition of prospective memory. “Metacognition” refers to our awareness, beliefs, and knowledge about our cognitive processes—it is, as commonly formulated, how we think about thinking (Beran et al. 2012; Fleming and Frith 2014). Metacognition includes “our ability to assess and control our current performance on a cognitive task,” including prospective memory tasks (Kuhlmann 2019: 60). Metacognitive processes apply to all stages of prospective memory: forming and encoding, retaining, and retrieving an intention. A person who makes a doctor’s appointment in April for two months in the future needs to assess whether they will successfully remember the appointment in June. If they are worried about forgetting it, they can employ various metacognitive strategies (Kuhlmann 2019). Our imaginary person, for example, might write the appointment in their daily planner. Here, they have made the cognitive decision to offload their intention (to go to the doctor in April) into the physical environment (a paper planner or, for the more technologically savvy, perhaps an e-calendar in a smartphone) (Gilbert 2015). In Rome, as we saw earlier, a person seeking to remember to do or say something in the future might offload their intention to a nomenclator or monitor, whose very presence attests to their master’s assessment that he will not otherwise remember successfully. In fact, people may underestimate their capacity to remember to remember (metacognitively undervaluing their memory abilities) and thus are biased toward using external reminders (Schnitzspahn et al. 2011; Gilbert et al. 2020). Some scholars have described prospective memory as inherently metaintentional, a view that positions intentions—forming them, retaining them, and acting upon them—as the crux of prospective memory (Smith 2016).

Episodic future thinking/future-oriented mental time travel

Prospective memory is one form of prospection or future thinking. Some scholars (Ward 2016; Cohen and Hicks 2017) have argued that it subsumes episodic future thinking, which refers to the capacity to simulate mentally—or imagine—scenarios and experiences that might occur in one’s personal future (Schacter, Benoit, and Szpunar 2017). When engaged in episodic future thinking, a person essentially projects themselves into a future event and “pre-experiences” that event and their affective reactions to it (Atance and O’Neill 2001). Episodic future thinking—also called episodic foresight or episodic future simulation (see Bulley 2018: 80 for an overview of the terminological debate)—refers specifically, as the terms suggests, to thinking about one’s personal future. As episodic memory refers to one’s autobiographical memory—that is, one’s memory for events one has experienced personally—so episodic future thinking (or foresight or simulation) refers to mental simulations of an event that a person might expect to experience in their future.

Studies of episodic future thinking tend to focus on episodic simulation (see Schacter, Benoit, and Szpunar 2017: 41), but simulation is just one form of future thinking, or prospection. People not only simulate the future but also evaluate those simulations and use them to guide future thought and action (Seligman et al. 2016: 6). Karl Szpunar and colleagues have created a quadripartite taxonomy of prospection:

simulation (construction of a detailed mental representation of the future); prediction (estimation of the likelihood of, and/or one’s reaction to, a particular future outcome); intention (the mental act of setting a goal); and planning (the identification and organization of steps toward achieving a goal state).

(Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2016: 21, emphases in original; see also Szpunar, Spreng, and Schacter 2014; Szpunar, Shrikanth, and Schacter 2018.)

A person might simulate or imagine a representation of a future in which they have lost ten pounds, predict that they will feel better about their appearance, set the intention to eat better and exercise more, and plan to join a gym and buy more healthful foods at the grocery store.

The example we have just given is episodic; it has clearly to do with the future that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of illustrations Page
• List of contributors Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• 1 Introduction: new approaches to future thinking in the Roman world
• 2 The future of the past: Fabius Pictor (and Dionysios of Halikarnassos) on the pompa circensis and prospective cultural memory
• 3 Remembering the future in Tacitus’ Annals: Germanicus’ death and contests of commemoration
• 4 Ad futuram memoriam: the Augustan Ludi Saeculares
• 5 Staging memories in the home: intention and devotion in Pompeii and Herculaneum
• 6 Synagogue inscriptions and the politics of prospective memory
• 7 The Vicarello milestone beakers and future-oriented mental time travel in the Roman Empire
• 8 Ancestors, martyrs, and fourth-century gold glass: a case of metaintentions
• 9 Prospection in the wild: embodiment, enactivity, and commemoration
• Bibliography
• Index