The author’s remembrance of actors speaking in Shakespearean plays is one of loss but also of delight. Memory, as Virgil put it (‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’), may bring pleasure or benefit or help, depending on how iuvabit is translated. For Virgil, memory may be therapeutic and/or affective, as Shakespeare knew as he reworked Virgil’s phrase. But the pleasure of remembering Shakespeare is palpable in the voices of the people interviewed in Cecilia Rubino’s documentary film, Remembering Shakespeare (2016), and in the laughter memory generates in Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua (1607), the records of what Simon Forman wanted to remember of performances he had seen and in the diary comments on plays seen by Samuel Pepys.

An overview of Cicero’s engagment with Latin poetry with discussion of Cicero’s preferential interest in certain poets over others. Discussion of Cicero’s quotation of different Latin poets (Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Terence, Lucilius) and different genres of Latin poetry (epic, tragedy, comedy, satire), including Cicero’s aversion to the quotation of contemporary poets and neoterics. Discussion of Cicero’s own poetic compositions and practices of self-citation. An overview of Cicero’s quotation of Greek poets (Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Leonidas of Tarentum, Aeschylus, Callimachus, Hesiod, Menander, Pindar, Archilochus, Stesichorus) and proverbs. Discussion of Cicero’s Latin translations of Greek poets (Aratus, Euripides, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles). Discussion of Cicero’s quotations of poetry from memory versus from a book.

This chapter describes the various kinds of scribes, their societal status and organization, as distinguished by different terms in the Hittite texts: regular scribes, so-called wood-scribes, chief scribes, apprentices, elite scribes, and scholars. The latter would sometimes show off their learned status by deliberately using archaic sign shapes and rare expressions. To them are also ascribed the tablet catalogs or tablet inventories. These scholar-scribes seem to have engaged with the texts by memorizing them.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.