Chapter I
T H E THREE LATIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY 1
banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric poem in honour of his host but including a passage in praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the poem. A little later, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to 1
The English translations of the three Latin sources used are those in
the Loeb edition of the classics: die Ad Herennium is translated by H. Caplan; the De oratore by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham; Quintilian's Inuitutio oratorio by H. E. Butler. When quoting from these translations I have sometimes modified them in the direction of literalness, particularly in repeating the actual terminology of the mnemonic rather than in using periphrases of the terms. The best account known to me of the art of memory in antiquity is that given by H. Hajdu, Das Mnemotechnische Schriftum des Miitelalters, Vienna, 1936. I attempted a brief sketch of it in my article 'The Ciceronian Art of Memory' in Medioeve e Rinascimento, Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi, Florence, 1955, II, pp. 871 ff. On the whole, the subject has been curiously neglected. C—A.O.M.
I