Tropes cannot be dismissed as “mere” formulas, for they indicate the values of a society and the way in which it conceives of its literature. The choice to train one’s memory or not, for the ancients and medievals, was not a choice dictated by convenience: it was a matter of ethics. A person without a memory, if such a thing could be, would be a person without moral character and, in a basic sense, without humanity. Memoria refers not to how something is communicated, but to what happens once one has received it, to the interactive process of familiarizing – or textualizing – which occurs between oneself and others’ words in memory.