Detienne is tracking something precise here: in the archaic Greek religious world, memory is not storage but salvation. The soul that drinks from Mnemosyne at the threshold does not merely remember — it terminates the cycle. It escapes the wheel. This is the pneumatic ratio in its purest ancient form, older than Plato's explicit argument for it, already operative in the Orphic gold tablets buried with the dead: *if I remember enough — if I hold the formula, drink the right water, speak the right words — I will not have to return to suffering*.

The double power Detienne names is worth pressing. Memory-as-religious-power and memory-as-intellectual-discipline move together in the archaic imagination, and the joining is diagnostic. When remembering becomes *salvation* rather than simply witnessing, something has shifted: the soul is no longer interested in what the past contains but in whether holding it can purchase release. The discipline of recollection becomes, at the limit, a flight from embodied time — not toward truth in the Homeric sense, where truth (*aletheia*, the un-hidden) was encountered in the flux, but away from flux entirely. The goal is victory over time and death. It is a breathtaking ambition. And the soul that organizes itself around it is no longer quite listening to what the cycle was actually saying.