How did the ancient study a text?
After reading a text, it's so easy to forget what I've read. This made me wonder, how did the ancient Greeks and Romans deal with this issue? I know that they had superior memories since they trained their memories from a young age. But even with that, a single book has so much information it's difficult to even capture 10% of what I read after a couple week pass. I'd assume they would've dealt with this problem too. And since they had less copies to go around so books had to be borrowed instead of owned, a lack of papyrus to take extensive notes on since it was so expensive, how would they have tackled a text without being able to go back to it once returned, and a very limited amount of notes taken? How would ancient scholars be able to get the most out of a text while having a limited time to borrow it? When asked, I get hit with "they reread it alot, they read slow and thoughtfully" and "they used the method of loci to store info into their memory". Ok, but that really doesn't explain how they read the text thoughtfully, and how they could remember verbatim so many passages. People like Plutarch, Athanasius read so many works and could quote so many random passages verbatim, it seems implausible that they took the "slow and thoughtful" rout. It seems they had a system where they could rapidly read and digest texts and churn out passages from memory. Has anyone here actually read any works regarding how the ancients studied texts and could explain how they did it?