"This is less a novel than a guided tour of ancient philosophy all held together through the tenuous threads of one (fictional) man’s life. Cyrus Spitama is a Persian in service to the king of kings of Persia, where he encounters many of the most famous men of the age. The fifth century BC was an amazing time in world history. In Greece you have Socrates, Anaxagoras, Democritus; in Persia there is Zoroaster (at least possibly, though I suspect he was much earlier); in India you have Mahavira, Gosala, the Buddha; in China there is Lao Tzu and Confucius. All of these men changed the course of their civilizations and it is incredible to think that they were contemporaries.

Unlike, say, Forrest Gump, these encounters are more than just cameos and impossible coincidences. Cyrus is a great lover of wisdom. He seeks out these men, which makes the coincidences feel much more plausible than if he’d just run into them in a pub. Cyrus� obsession is the search for the answers of creation. Although a devout Zoroastrian (his grandfather was Zoroaster himself) he feels that something is missing in the greater truth. How did the universe begin? And so as ambassador to India and China he seeks out the wisest men around to answer this question.

The depiction of all these figures is supremely well handled. Intellectually, they are exactly where they should be, keeping in mind that it is impossible to state with certainty which elements of the existing accounts are accurate and which are later additions/interpretations. Hearing philosophies articulated by the people themselves is a delight. We hear the importance of the rejection of desire from the Buddha’s lips himself. Lao Tzu lectures Cyrus on Taoism and the virtue of nonaction. Confucius waxes rhapsodic on the importance of tradition. They all have personalities too. The Buddha is austere and single-minded to the point you kind of want to strangle him. Democritus is curious and more accepting of foreign wisdom than most Greeks, even if he feels the need to defend them. Confucius is a warm and ethical man who loves fishing. They all work.

Cyrus Spitama is a great narrator. By which I mean he isn’t perfect. We’re familiar enough with the nature of mankind to be suspicious about perfect narrators. It means they’re lying. It means inauthenticity. But Cyrus the narrator is a blind old man of 74, and like most old men he’s prone to rambling digressions and losing his train of thought. Reminds me of my grandfather actually. He’s always good for a story or two, but last time I was up there he told me the same story three times. It was all about driving at night and driving along the white line in the center of the road. He really shouldn’t be driving at night.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Cyrus� digressions. As with most narrators of this sort the illusion isn’t perfect. It’s not trying to be. At 1,000 pages long it’s longer than all but the most universal of histories. And Cyrus is prone to reproducing entire conversations and everyday social matters in a way no ancient author would. Even a memoirist today couldn’t reproduce their life in as much detail and accuracy as this old man with no access to diaries or records. But this sort of inauthenticity is usually for the best in historical novels. You want the illusion of authenticity, not the reality of it. Too much reality and you end up with something like Pericles the Athenian or Memoirs of Hadrian.

Cyrus is also a tremendous grump. It’s a good thing I’ve a fondness for grumpy old men. More than a grump, he’s Gore Vidal. Bitter, cynical, caustic, and full of contempt for anyone who has the audacity to disagree with him. And he’s eminently quotable. Just a few examples:

Hereditary priests usually tend to atheism. They know too much.
Like Greeks, Indians are better at questions than at answers.
Nothing, he declared, would make him happier than to see the Cathay dragon rug in the house of his favorite daughter. But we never got the rug. This was the sort of happiness that he tended to deny himself.
The Buddhists accept the world as it is, and try to eliminate it.

This book is also a look at the Greco-Persian wars from a unique viewpoint. Cyrus, despite his Greek mother and the Greek grand-nephew he’s narrating to, is very much a loyal Persian. So to him, there’s very little noble about the Greeks taking on first Darius then Xerxes. The Greeks basically start the mess through their ceaseless feuding, and then they blow their actual achievements out of all proportion, all the while jockeying for the Great King’s favors. This also includes a wonderful account of life in the Persian court. Cyrus is a close childhood friend of Xerxes and Mardonius, so he’s in the perfect position to say what goes on behind closed doors and why. Possibly the most interesting element of this is how much focus is given to the women of the harem. As per this account, the empire is basically administered through the wives of the kings, since they stay in the palace and are close to the administrative offices and the eunuchs who serve the throne. Harem intrigues determine the course of empires. Queen Atossa (daughter of Cyrus the Great, wife of Darius) is a master at these and one of the book’s most engaging characters.

Here is where Cyrus� few problems as a narrator come in. How reliable is he really? When in the East we seem to be expected to regard him as flawless. Is the same true in the West? Much as I agree with the idea that the punitive campaign would have been seen as accomplishing its main objective (they did manage to burn Athens to the ground after all) I struggle a little with the idea that the battles of Salamis and Plataea could be written off as inconsequential. Unlucky losses to an unworthy foe sure, but a substantial part of the Persian army was lost in Greece. Similarly, the dismissal of Greeks as poor soldiers (while nice in the face of the gross eurocentrism usually displayed) hardly seems fair. And (an admittedly young) Socrates as a mere “splitter of hairs�? Is Cyrus letting his contempt get in the way of his good sense here? If so, why doesn’t he in the East? He reproduces the beliefs of the Buddha faithfully, despite despising all that he stands for. Same goes for the political situation. It feels like there’s a bit of conflict between being true to the character and telling an accurate story.

The book’s big problem though, and for a book this ambitious of course there’s a problem, is that it tries to do too much. The book is split between two narratives: Cyrus seeking wisdom while traveling to foreign lands as an ambassador and Cyrus observing the Persian court and its growing involvement in Greek affairs. At first this split isn’t too bad. The first sage, Zoroaster, blends in easily enough since he is connected with the Persian kings and therefore Cyrus� journey. But the whole Greco-Persian Wars from a Persian angle gets derailed once we travel to India. And then we’re back again for Xerxes� rise only to head off for five years in China. And then we’re back to the culmination of the wars and the journey to a lonely exile in Athens. If you accept the wars as the main plot then visiting the sages is the sideline. If you see the sages as the main plot then the wars are the sideline. Worse still, Cyrus� visits to the sages in no way affects his storyline in the Persian court, just as political events back in Persia have no relevance to his experience abroad. The stories simply aren’t connected to each other.

The book is flawed in conception (ironically) and tries to take on too much by giving equal focus to two unlike and unrelated narratives. Normally this large a structural issue would automatically rule out perfection (five stars), but I am floored by the book’s vision(s) and the depth of its world. This is a book that truly understands the ideas of which it speaks and is able to represent theologies and philosophies in scenarios that come from the author’s imagination rather than just reproducing their existing statements. It is also a book that seeks to understand a marginalized and oft-maligned culture by placing it at the center of events rather than viewing it as a pale reflection of nationalistic Greek sources. Ambition is the central requirement of great literature, but it must be supported with insight, wit, and thoughtfulness. This book has all that in droves. Highly recommended if you have the patience."

"One thing that is impossible to fully grasp about the past is the fact that hundreds of years ago people had significantly different mental worlds to our own. Popular histories tend to entirely sidestep this in favour of drawing parallels and contrasts with current habits of life, while more academic history often struggles with the unwieldiness of explaining it. ‘The Art of Memory� confronts the issue head on by telling the story of memory techniques used in classical, Medieval, and Renaissance times. The art of memory essentially consists of teaching systematic ways to improve the performance of recall. What makes this art so hard to grasp now is that memory was the main reference at the time. Before the printing press, books were scarcely available and contacting other people very time-consuming. As has been recognised since classical times, the performance of human memory is partially innate (some people have better memories ‘naturally�) and partially a matter of use and training. To veer into anecdata, the memorisation of phone numbers has become a lost art since the advent of mobile phones. If there is no active need to remember strings of eleven numbers, you’re unlikely to do so. Likewise, if you don’t need to remember entire areas of academic knowledge because you can refer to books, why would you? Academic learning in the 21st century is still about memorisation, yes, but also a substantial amount of recalling key names, locations, and signposts. You need to know where to find the details, rather than remembering them all.

By contrast, the classical art of memory involved the use of places (usually buildings) and ‘corporeal similitudes� (imagined human figures) as shortcuts to the memorisation of knowledge in great detail. The basic idea was to slowly walk around an actual building, transpose it fully into your imagination, and populate this mental construct with a carefully sequenced series of images that were stimulating enough to remember and associate with specific pieces of information. Each image in the sequence could represent a concept or, incredibly, a single word. The latter approach is admittedly acknowledged to be much more difficult. What really amazes the (post?)modern reader, though, is to contemplate the scale of these memory places. They were apparently used by practitioners of the art to memorise speeches, books, legal cases, and the like. This blew my mind in particular because I have a very visual memory. I’ve instinctively used this basic technique of remembering items in a room when doing a memory experiment for someone’s research, and it works. However, all my life I’ve relied on books, and latterly the internet, to elaborate on and confirm what’s in my memory. Having a meticulously arranged library inside your brain seems like it would change your entire mode of thought, in ways I can only speculate on. At times when reading this book I wondered if I waste my visual memory by daydreaming beautiful mansions without making any effort to store information in them. Again, though, is there any need to? There are so many external forms of memory storage these days, both more and less fragile than our brains.

Yates does not broach any of these issues, though, as the book was published in 1966 and concludes with Leibniz in the seventeenth century. It divides the art of memory into three broad eras, the classical, middle ages, and Renaissance. As I’m not at all familiar with the latter two periods, I found them more challenging and the concepts quite complex. Those chapters were richly rewarding, though, and Yates� writing style is consistently clear and thoughtful. The Medieval and Renaissance manifestations of the memory arts were intertwined with religion and magic in ways subtle and obvious. The differences between the two are neatly summarised as follows:

We come back here to that basic difference between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the change in attitude to the imagination. From a lower power which may be used in memory as a concession to weak man who may use corporeal similitudes because only so can he retain his spiritual intentions to the corporeal world, it has become man’s highest power, by means of which he can grasp the intelligible world beyond appearances through laying hold of significant images.

Perhaps the most striking chapters in the book concern Giordino Bruno’s extremely complex occult-suffused memory systems, which bring this mystical Renaissance tendency to apotheosis. Bruno is described by Yates as ‘the Magus of Memory� and was eventually burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. In his many books, memory systems are a form of magic. They include concentric wheels with 150 divisions, the full meaning of which Yates believes ‘we shall never understand in detail�. Think about the effort involved in memorising such a thing - not merely as a static view of 150 images, but such that the wheels could spin and allow myriad new combinations. Moreover, the images were not literal, they represented what Bruno believed to be the fundamental elements that reality was made of. About halfway through ‘The Art of Memory�, I put it aside for a few days to read a fantasy novel called A Darker Shade of Magic. The contrast definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the latter half of this book. Consider, if you will, holding in your memory a complete visual representation of the world’s constitutive parts, which you can rearrange and manipulate at will. Is that not magic? It certainly has a strong air of the fantastical. As Yates puts it:

Did [Bruno] intend that there would be formed in the memory using these ever-changing combinations of astral images some kind of alchemy of the imagination, a philosopher’s stone in the psyche through which every possible arrangement and combination of objects in the lower world - plants, animals, stones - would be perceived and remembered? And that, in accordance with the forming and reforming of the inventor’s images on the central wheel, the whole history of man would be remembered from above, as it were, all his discoveries, thoughts, philosophies, productions? Such a memory would be the memory of a divine man. [...]

Magic assumes laws and forces running through the universe which the operator can use, once he knows how to capture them. [...] The Renaissance conception of an animistic universe, operated by magic, prepared the way for the conception of a mechanistic universe, operated by mathematics.

This fascinating comparison brought to mind how Bruno’s systematisation of knowledge into interconnected categories prefigured the Enlightenment division of academic study into disciplines. These systems also seemed to invoke Borges - he was basically a Magus, so surely he must have been aware of them.

The final chapters then turn to the association between the art of memory and theatres, notably Shakespeare’s Globe. This is especially piquant to read if you’ve visited the rebuilt Globe, which is a beautiful and evocative place. Yates asks how books on memory can help with the reconstruction of the Globe and reviews the evidence of how it looked. As I recall, the layout in the rebuilt version is very close to that arrived at. Here the book intersects with architecture, but it is fundamentally interdisciplinary, as the conclusion emphasises. Theology, pedagogy, and literature are all critical, while psychology underpins it throughout. That is part of what makes the study so elusive yet fascinating, as we can only speculate about how these memory palaces were actually experienced by their builders.

I decided to read ‘The Art of Memory� after finding an article about it online somewhere and, ironically, can’t remember where. The combination of detailed explanations and well-chosen illustrations makes for a deeply thought-provoking book, well worth lingering over."