Excerpts. De Oratore.

  "Oh, as for ath," said Anthony, "the amount I shall have left to you will be for you to decide; if you want complete candour, what I leave to you is the whole subject, but if you want me to keep up the pretence, it is for you to consider how you may satisfy our friends here. But to reutnr to the subject, he constinued, "I am not myself as clever as Themistocles was, so as to prefer the science of forgettint to that of remembering; and I am greateful to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have first invented the science of mnemonics. There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honour of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poet by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas w/ excessive meanness told him he should pay him half the fee agreeed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndareus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simondes to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of hall where Scopaas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simondes was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, w/ the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it. But what business is it of mine to specify the value to a speaker and the usefulness and effectiveness of memory? of retaining the information given you when you briefed and the opinion you youself have formed? of having all your ideas firmly planted in your mind and all your resources of vocabulary neatly arranged? of giving such close attention to the instructions of your client and to the speech of the opponent you have to answer that they may seem not just to pour what they say into your ears but to imprint it on your mind? Consequently only people w/ a powerful memory know what they are going to say and for how long they are going to speak and in what style, what points they have already answered and what still remains; and they also can remember from other cases many arguments which they have previously advanced and many which they have heard from other people. And consequently for my own part I confess that the chief source of this endowment, as of all the things I have spoken of before, is nature; but the efficacy of the whole of this science, or perhaps I should say pseudo-science, of rhetoric, is not that it wholly originates and engenders something no part of which is already present in our minds, but that it fosters and strengthens things that have already sprung to birth w/i/ us; though nevertheless hardly anybody exists who has so keen a memory that he can retain the order of all the words or sentences w/o/ having arranged and noted his facts, nor yet is anybody so dull-witted that habitual practice in this will not give him some assistance. It has been sagaciously discerned by Simonides or else discovered by some other person, that the most complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the sense, but that the keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and that consequently preceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained in the mind if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes, w/ the result that things not seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a sort of outline and image and shape so that we keep hold of as it were by an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought. But these forms and bodies, like all the things that come under our view require an abode, inasmuch as a material object w/o/ a locality is inconceivable. Consequently (in order that I may not be prolix and tedious on a subject that is well known and familiar) one must employ a large number of localities which must be clear and defined and at moderate intervals apart, and images that are effective and sharply outlined and distinctive, w/ the capacity of encountering and speedily penetrating the mind; the ability to use these will be supplied by practice, which engenders habit, and by marking off similar words w/ an inversion and alteration of their cases or a transference from species to genus, and by representing a whole concept by the images of a single word, on the system and method of a consummate painter distinguishing the positions of objects by modifying their shapes. But a memory for words, which for us is less essential, is given distinctness by a greater variety of images; for there are many words which serve as joints connecting the limbs of the sentence, and these cannot be formed by any use of simile - of these we have to model images for constant employment; but a memory for things is the special property of the orator - this we can imprint on our minds by a skillful arrangement of the several masks that represent them, so that we may grasp ideas by means of images and their order by means of localities. Nor is it true, as unscientific people assert, that memory is crushed beneath a weight of images and even what might have been retained by nature unassisted is obscured; for I have myself met eminent people w/ almost superhuman powers of memory, Charmadas at Athens and Metrodorus of Scepsis in Asia, who is said to be still living, each of whom used to say that he wrote down things he wanted to remember in certain 'localities' in his possession by means of images, just as if he were inscribing letters on wax. It follows that this practice cannot be used to draw out the memory if no memory has been given to us by nature, but it can undoubtedly summon it to come forth if it is in hiding.