The most ancient mnemonic device, and the gruesome story behind it.

Although mnemonic devices far predate the written word, both Cicero and Quintilian name Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BCE) as the first teacher of an art of memory.

This is the same Simonides who composed the epitaph for the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylae:

Go tell the Spartans, passerby
That here, by Spartan law, we lie.

According to Plutarch, Simonides once dismissed the Thessalians as ‘too ignorant’ to be moved by poetry. Yet, after the assassination of Hipparchus in Athens, he found himself in the patronage of the Thessalian aristocrat Scopas.

One day, at a banquet, Simonides sung a lyric poem in honour of Scopas. But the poem contained so many references to Castor and Pollux (the Dioskouroi, or Gemini) that Scopas told Simonides that he would only pay him half the agreed fee, and he could go claim the other half from Castor and Pollux.

A little later, Simonides was called out of the banqueting hall to meet two young men who had just arrived and were asking for him. When he went out, he saw no one, but when he turned around the banqueting hall collapsed, killing Scopas and everyone within it.

Their bodies were so mangled as to be unrecognisable. But because he remembered everyone’s position around the table, Simonides was able to identify them. This experience led him to develop a system of mnemonics based on images and places called the method of loci.

How it works

The method of loci, also called the journey method or memory palace, involves placing a mnemonic image for each item to be remembered at a defined point along an imaginary route. 

First, choose a very familiar environment, for example, your house or garden or favourite walk. This is your backdrop: it is fixed, and you can reuse it for talk after talk.

Within this setting, there will be a number of distinct locations, or loci, such as your front door, the doormat, the entrance hall, the stairway, your study to the left and the snug to the right… You do not have to have a mansion with many rooms, like Jesus’ father. Instead, you can think of the snug as, say, three separate loci: the fireplace, the sofa, and the alcove. But you must always make the same journey through your memory palace and come to the loci in the same sequence.

Then, in each locus, place a mnemonic image that represents the thing to be remembered at that point in your talk, for example, a goose, to trigger your story about visiting a goose farm in Extremadura.

Once you’ve furnished your memory palace, keep on running through it until you’ve memorised your talk.

Neel Burton is author of How To Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.