James J. O'Donnell,
Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 4-5:
Jerome once ran across a Greek word in a
text, and wrote to a friend that he remembered seeing that word only
twice elsewhere, once in scripture, once in an apocryphal religious
work. As it happens, he was correct: the three passages he knew are
the only places (still) where we know that word to have been used in
the written legacy of Greek literature. Hearing that story, I marvel at
the powers of Jerome's memory, knowing that as a modern scholar
with some similar interests in scripture and translation, I would never
dare to say such a thing. I attribute this to the distractedness of my
education, as well as my inability to read and retain everything that I
would like to, but, at bottom, I have a suspicion that in those days
people trained their memories to be better than ours are and that
weakling reliance on the printed word has sapped our powers of
memory.
Another way of looking at it is to say that Jerome's advantage over
me lies in the emptiness of his textual memory, not its fullness. He did
not have whole ranges of synapses cluttered with lyrics from popular
songs of thirty years ago, and other ranges filled with the commands
needed to use word processing software already a decade old and obsolete, nor yet again banks of memory taken up with a flood of paperback
fiction and nonfiction read on trains, in bed, and on idle Sunday afternoons. If you have read many fewer words in your life, and perhaps
read those fewer words over and over again, surely it is easier to remember more of them.
William M. Calder III, "C.M. Bowra on W.S. Barrett: An Unpublished Testimonium,"
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45 (2005) 213–217, at n. 6 on p. 215, quoting a remark by Joshua Whatmough to his students in a class on Greek dialectal inscriptions:
Forgive me if I do not remember your names. To remember them would cause me to forget something more important.