Drawing on philosophy of mind, cognitive studies and recent scholarship in Classics and cognitive theory, Popkin and Ng ground the present volume in 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive and extended) distributed cognition. The volume's contributors thus participate in a much larger conversation taking place in both the sciences and the humanities about brain and mind and on how the latter emerges from the former in various physical, environmental, cultural, social and literary contexts. The editors richly detail key concepts and situate the volume with other works of classical scholarship taking a particular interest in cognition and cognitive theory. While ‘cognitive Classics’ is a relatively new field, this volume and others that have a narrow theoretical focus should be situated not only among similar theory-based scholarship, but also within established inter- and intradisciplinary studies. The volume's interest in ‘future thinking’ calls for it to be situated not only with scholarship interested in cognition in ancient contexts, but also with intra- and interdisciplinary scholarship taking an interest in time and temporality (e.g. G. Forsythe, Time in Roman Religion [2012]; R.M. Rosen, Time and Temporality in the Ancient World [2004]).
Applying a particular methodological approach on wide-ranging material, Popkin and Ng have done a noteworthy service to readers by curating a dialogue between the chapters, which are unified by an interest in prospective memory, that is, the future-oriented nature of memory, as the primary function of memory is to aid its possessor in more successfully predicting and navigating their physical and social environment. The editors present the volume as a response to B.D. Shaw's 2019 definition of ‘a complex future’ that is autonomous, supplied with valuable resources, broadly accepted as a notional thing and towards which present behaviour is oriented (JRS 109 [2019], 22). Not taking issue with the definition, but rather with Shaw's selection of evidence, the editors’ primary concern is the class-inclusiveness necessitated by the term ‘broad acceptance’, and the volume is attentive to muted voices.
The chapters dealing with literary texts face a particular challenge. Straightforward philological methods can be used to interrogate texts about the role of future thinking at the level of both character and author. The onus is thus on the scholars to demonstrate the unique ability of cognitive theory to illuminate texts. Their attempts are more successful than not, making interesting claims that add to existing discussions of intertextuality and narrative framing. J. Latham puts forward the idea that the description of the pompa circensis, attributed to Fabius Pictor by Dionysios of Halikarnassos, was a ‘historical simulacrum’ – an idealised element of cultural memory forged with the future in mind. Looking to Pierre Bourdieu, the work of D. Nelis and scholarship asserting the reasonable claim that to imagine the future one must have past memories upon which to draw, Latham argues that intertextual references to the procession can be fruitfully explored as a form of future thinking rather than treated only as a preoccupation with the past. Latham's approach to intertextuality is exciting, though the historian's passage about ‘a procession as it could have or even should have been, not necessarily how it actually was’ (p. 27) is not situated within the context of similar historiographical practices. Speeches, for example, have a point beyond the extent to which they can be reduced to facts (for an embodied perspective on this point, see J. Devereaux, ‘Embodied Historiography: Models for Reasoning in Tacitus’ Annales’, in: W.M. Short [ed.], Embodiment in Latin Semantics [2016]).
A. Seider's conceptualisation of predictive processing as a means of schematically organising narrative frames in Tacitus’ Annales is slightly problematic. A reader well trained on the cognitive literature bristles at statements that suggest agents make executive use of processes that are in fact automatic (p. 38). Similarly, citing ‘predictive challenges’ (pp. 38, 48) without identifying the significance of entropy (or stasis) does not inspire confidence. Intensifying the sense that the theory being leveraged hermeneutically is not well understood are zero-net-gain analyses that merely recode expectation as prediction (pp. 45–6). Discounting neither Seider's philological skill nor the value of a new heuristic analogy and the explanatory models it generates, one notes that this model, as presented, results in the emphasis of a core cognitive process at the undue expense of the behaviours in which it plays a constitutive part (e.g. cost-benefit analysis [p. 42], norm monitoring [p. 45] and prestige imitation [pp. 51–2]). The insights predictive processing can provide into how ancient historians understood and depicted human behaviour are numerous, and Seider deserves credit for pursuing this point. However, predictive processing – even when used as a framing device – should be situated in terms of the behaviours in which it plays a constitutive part, rather than stood in their place.
E. Orlin bridges literary and material culture, providing a model for situating evidence within 4E discourse when comparing Augustan and Severan inscriptions pertaining to the Ludi saeculares. Following the work of L. Malafouris to provide a sort of intertextuality specific to inscriptions, Orlin argues that the future-orientation of inscriptions is key to appreciating the nature of their agency: used not only to shape but also to maintain collective identity, the inscriptions play distinct, complementary roles in the Roman identity project. Orlin is attentive to descriptive details and their significance to the contexts in which they were produced and displayed, affirming that the offloading of memory into the environment is fundamentally prospective.
The future orientation of memory and attempts to generate and preserve it in quotidian contexts is the focus of the rest of the volume. M. Swetnam-Burland examines prospective memory by focusing on private religion and graffiti associated therewith. Swetnam-Burland suggests that the autobiographical dimension of ritual, evinced by graffiti in household shrines, signals both intention and simulation, which are simultaneously oriented towards the past and the future. This bifocal orientation, Swetnam-Burland reasonably suggests, may thus be characteristic of the cognitive state(s) associated with rituals that pertain to socially structured stages of identity. A central criticism of Shaw (2019) in the introduction is the extrapolation from the behaviours of a limited sample of powerful elites to a ‘Roman’ concept of time, the validity of which criticism this chapter well demonstrates (see esp. pp. 83–5). While not addressed as such here, Swetnam-Burland does a fine job of bringing autonoetic consciousness to the fore.
Drawing similar conclusions about external memory representing a concern for the self in the future, K. Stern looks at the public-facing nature of synagogue inscriptions and the coercive tactics employed by inscribers, setting up a careful definition of future memory (pp. 96–8) that is used to re-construe inscriptive behaviours that might otherwise be considered in terms of mimesis and exempla (pp. 101–2). Stern suggests that inscribers invoked divine threats to ensure that their inscriptions would be vocalised in the future because vocalisation was believed to sustain one's memory before an ever-present divine audience. Essentially conscripted into the role of nomenclator, passers-by were instrumentalised to bring to mind those whom the divine might otherwise forget. It is a reasonable argument that is well situated among related practices. Notably, the chapter is not about any ‘real’ form of memory: future readers would not have a memory of the inscriber to activate. This mental trick situates the chapter within cognitive religious studies (e.g. T. Tremlin, Minds and Gods: the Cognitive Foundations of Religion [2006]; E. Eidinow, A.W. Geertz, J. North [edd.], Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience [2022]).
Popkin considers mental time travel in terms of the movement of votive objects through space, arguing that those inscribed with itineraria represent the prospective memory of their owners. Dealing with handheld items, Popkin brings embodied cognition to bear in the analysis of engraved beakers, which appear to have been transported over great distances before their deposition in the waters of Aquae Apollinares. Providing a number of ways in which physical engagement with such objects might have constituted their unique biographies, Popkin introduces the term ‘embodied prospection’, which seems to represent a nuanced interpretation of extended cognition. Through this term Popkin persuasively suggests that mental time travel was facilitated by physical interaction with the objects. While autonoetic consciousness is not addressed as such, it comes through as key to the fulsome evaluation of material objects deliberately transported through space.
S. Ludi Blevins nails the brief when discussing the enactive affordances that repurposed gold glass vessels supplied to visitors in the Christian catacombs. Following Popkin, Ludi Blevins draws on object biographies to forward the appealing hypothesis that the lifetime use of the vessels was central to their commemorative function. Ludi Blevins's suggestion that repurposed gold glass, representing the lived life of the deceased, was combined with uniform portrait types in order to evoke and enact martyr veneration is convincing. All the more so if one situates the Christian practice among similar mimetic traditions, like imperial portrait imitation, in which individual features were likewise suppressed in favour of ‘depersonalized formulas expressing dignity and moral worth’ (P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus [1988], p. 295).
Ng summarises, synthesises and prospects future directions, while also engaging directly with Shaw (2019), whose arguments are largely grounded in a particular set of economic principles. Readers familiar with Shaw's article will notice implicit refutations to various facets of his hypothesis throughout the volume, but will have to wait for Ng's chapter for the implicit to become explicit. Ng engages with Shaw by demonstrating that the future prospection involved in honouring state benefactors with statues on inscribed bases (see also Ng, ‘Thinking with Statues: the Roman Public Portrait and the Cognition of Commemoration’, in: The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory [2019]) incentivised benefaction, which functioned as a prospective fiscal strategy governed by institutional instruments, like contracts, financial endowments, and penalties. Ng makes a case for Romans, rather than lacking a complex concept of the future, simply responding to it differently (see esp. pp. 160–4).
The volume provides a service to the field by supplying an impetus to reconsider the relationships historical agents had with the past, as well as a framework within which to reflect on how and why historical agents externalised memory and thereby extended their cognition into the world. Attending to the top of the social hierarchy on down, it makes clear that viewing texts and inscribed objects in a Janus-like fashion, looking at once to the past and to the future, adds richness to our understandings of human behaviour in ancient contexts. Introducing new models of investigation is not easy, and all the contributors have risen admirably to the challenge. Two points of criticism have been raised. The first is that there is occasionally a perceptible lack of mastery in regard to the theories brought to bear on the interpretation of texts and objects, which manifests itself in both the injudicious application of terminology and its omission. The second, which is that neither the volume nor a number of the materials under study within it are situated within existing discourses, should stimulate further study. This is an innovative body of scholarship that will surely profit discussions related to memory and prospection in Classics and related fields.
