Hypomnēmata

Hypomnēmata (Greek: ὑπομνήματα; singular: hypomnēma) translates to reminders, notes, drafts, or memoranda. In ancient Greece and Rome, these were personal notebooks used by the intellectual and philosophical classes to record quotes, anecdotes, and observations from their daily lives and readings.

From Henrik Karlsson:

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation,1 in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

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The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.