Scipio. Ross Leckie

me closely, please,’ Festo said. ‘The crowds will be thick, and we mustn’t get separated.’ He was always earnest, Festo. And he looked so odd, thin and stringy like a bean, with dull, lank hair that lay across his forehead like a tent flap, a pinched head and pock-marked skin. But if a worrier, he was a kind and faithful servant.

      ‘Now, if we do lose each other, let’s meet at your Uncle Cratinus’ house, young master Publius. Ask anyone, but listen, both of you. You go through the Forum, past the temple of Castor and Pollux, turn left, go straight up the street, past the temple of Diana, then turn right, then second left. Before you come to the city gate just by the pond there’s a small flour mill. The drive up to your uncle’s house is just beside it …’

      ‘Do you honestly think he expected us to remember all that?’ Laelius asked me as soon as we’d set off, Festo well in front.

      ‘I thought you would. You could make a picture,’ I replied. In the end, far from being separated, the crowds pushed us so close together we couldn’t part. It wasn’t bad at the beginning, as we walked down the Palatine and along the path through the waste ground at its foot.

      As we followed it, Laelius asked me, ‘Why does no one build on this ground? In other parts of Rome, you’d find a thousand people living on a space like this.’

      ‘You don’t know?’

      ‘Know what?’

      ‘Why this ground is empty?’

      ‘No, I don’t. Tell me.’

      ‘About a hundred years ago, a general called Vitruvius Vaccus had a huge house here, and a big garden. But he committed treason. He was fighting some northern tribe and was surrounded. He surrendered, on condition that his life be spared.’

      ‘Which it was?’

      ‘Which it was. But his men were massacred. When he got back to Rome, the senate had his house here demolished, and decreed that the site should stand empty for ever in memory of his shame. But––’

      ‘Come on, you two!’ Festo chided from ahead. ‘Keep up, or we’ll be late.’

      What I read in Aristotle itself triggered a memory. I hunted for perhaps an hour, until I found it, a passage in Plato’s dialogue the Theaetetus in which Socrates assumes that there is a block of wax in our souls – the quality varies – and this is the ‘gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses’. Whenever we hear or see or think of anything, we hold this wax under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them on it, ‘just as we make impressions with rings’.

      I have been thinking how best to do this. It seems to me that using this villa – or any largish house – is one good way. Say I want to remember the names of the planets. Yes, I could memorise a written list – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. But how much easier simply to place the five planets in five different rooms of this villa. So I stand, in my mind, at the front door. I walk in. I place Mercury in the portico. On the table in the tablinum I place Venus, and so on. When I want to remember the names, I simply walk round the house in my head.

      I wonder if this would work with a much longer list? The towns of Italy, for example? I suppose I could use up the outhouses, and the stables. I would just have to formulate a very obvious route for my mental walk. I must try.