Scipio looks down upon the Earth from the Milky Way. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.
Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.
By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.
The First Citizens of the World
This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India.
As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.
Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.
‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.
Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’
The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism
Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we, too, each have a role to play in society—even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.
‘Kindly remember,’ said Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’
To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.
Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.
What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. —Marcus Aurelius
From Rome to Europe
In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.
After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.
The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.
Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.
The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.
The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.
Continue Exploring
If this article spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, a comprehensive account of Stoic philosophy presented through its greatest stories.
Did Rome’s Greatest Orator Live Up to His Own Ideals?
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Who was Cicero? Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) has been hailed as Rome’s greatest orator. Lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of prose, he shaped not only the Latin language but the ideals of rhetoric, public service, and civic education for centuries to come. More than any other Roman, he sought to unite wisdom with eloquence.
But can someone understand virtue without consistently practising it? Cicero wrote brilliantly about virtue, duty, and the public good, yet struggled with ambition, anxiety, and political compromise. Admired by saints, humanists, and the American Founding Fathers, he remains one of the most influential—and most contradictory—figures in Western intellectual history.
A Frail Body for a Formidable Mind
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in Arpinum, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ (cicer), by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores (‘Oh the times, oh the customs’). Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89–88 BCE, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory.
In 87 BCE, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of Plato’s Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scaevola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline. Scaevola also served as Pontifex Maximus (High Priest of Rome) before falling victim to the power struggle between Marius and Sulla. In 82 BCE, he was murdered in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins.
Cicero began practising the law in around 83–81 BCE and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, meeting with several leading philosophers, including Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens. While in Greece, he asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness (priestess of Apollo) replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’
Pater Patriae
In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75 BCE, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just forty-two, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve in the office in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic.
As quaestor in western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. While in Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the forgotten tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinum to remember their most illustrious citizen.
As praetor, Cicero made his first great speech in the Senate, arguing that Pompey should be given the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his political career came during his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he exposed and crushed Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt (‘They lived’). For ‘saving the Republic’, as he liked to boast, he received the honorific Pater Patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’) from his ally Cato the Younger, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.
Exile and Return
In 62 BCE, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ (in conspectu prope totius urbis), had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces.
When Julius Caesar pressed him to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus—the First Triumvirate—Cicero refused, believing that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also declined Caesar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving himself exposed to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had made.
When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58 BCE, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who had executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero. He fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiae and Tusculum.
Writing to his friend Atticus, he lamented:
I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.
It is difficult to imagine Socrates—or indeed Cato—ever saying such a thing. In his Life of Cicero, Plutarch put his finger on the discrepancy between the man and his learning:
He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.
In the event, Cicero’s exile lasted little more than a year. In 57 BCE, he was recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by cheering crowds all the way from Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) to the Capitol, and his destroyed properties were rebuilt at public expense.
Caesar and Civil War
He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting the triumvirs, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53 BCE, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51 BCE, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been hoping for.
Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking between putative tyrants, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar.
He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.
The Philippics and Death
Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-stained dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’
Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.
Estimating that Cæsar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription, the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’
On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to Greece.
He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task.
After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.
Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.
Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate.
Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’
Cicero as Philosopher
Was Cicero a Stoic, as is sometimes claimed? The answer, as with all things Cicero, is complicated. He studied, at various times in his life, under philosophers from all four major schools: Academic Skeptic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean. But he saw himself primarily as a statesman, and his philosophical output, prolific though it is, mostly owes to those periods in which he was unable to partake in the cut and thrust of politics.
Cicero subordinated philosophy to public life because he believed that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten political action, not least by encouraging virtue in political actors and the population at large. (He even subordinated philosophy to rhetoric, arguing, in essence, that an orator is a philosopher with the benefit of style.) Thus, his overarching project outside of immediate politics was to bring Greek philosophy to a Roman audience by writing expository works in Latin and, to a lesser extent, translating Greek texts into Latin. By coining Latin equivalences for specialised Greek terms, he enriched the Latin language and endowed it with an abstract vocabulary which is at the root of modern English words such as appetite, essence, humanity, individual, infinity, image, instance, moral, notion, property, quality, quantity, science, species, temperance, and vacuum.
In epistemology (theory of knowledge), Cicero favoured the Academic Skeptics, which afforded him the fluidity and flexibility to practise law, and, in politics, to privilege conciliation and expediency over principle or dogma. In his writings, he often imitated Plato in adopting the dialogue form, in which each speaker represents a different philosophical outlook and the reader is left to make up his or her own mind. For example, in On the Nature of the Gods, he pits an Epicurean spokesman and a Stoic spokesman against the Academic Skeptic Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Similarly, in On Ends, he expounds and critiques, in dialogue form, the central tenets of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. (The ubiquitous Lorem ipsum placeholder text, used to demonstrate the visual form of a template or typeface without imputing meaning, is a corrupted extract of On Ends.)
But Cicero felt that such relativism and amoralism would not do for the Senate and People of Rome, so that when it came to the spheres of ethics and political philosophy, he turned instead to the Peripatetics and especially to the Stoics, who emphasized virtue and offered positive doctrines.
Stoic or not, books such as On the Nature of the Gods, On Ends, On Duties, and Stoic Paradoxes make Cicero one of our most important sources on ancient Stoicism.
Cicero as Rhetorician
At the age of just sixteen or seventeen, Cicero wrote a handbook of rhetoric entitled On Invention, which in later life he dismissed as youthful work. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard textbook of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which also came to be attributed to Cicero.
Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that ‘wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’. Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.
Cicero’s mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator were little known until the Renaissance. Eloquence, he argued in these works, is not merely a gift of language but the culmination of a broad education. The ideal orator has a good grasp of philosophy, history, literature, and law, and speaks not merely to persuade but to guide the state.
His ideal of the educated citizen-orator shaped Western education for centuries. Rhetoric formed one of the three subjects of the trivium, alongside grammar and logic, and generations of students learnt to think, write, and speak by reading Cicero.
The rediscovery of his letters by Petrarch in 1345 sparked a search for other lost classical texts that helped kindle the Renaissance. Later, his writings profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. John Locke, for instance, owned no fewer than nine editions of On Duties.
His influence endured well into the twentieth century, and it was not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation (entry) requirement for an O level in Latin.
Did Cicero Live Up to His Own Ideals?
In an age that often prizes confidence over judgement and persuasion over truth, Cicero’s ideal of the orator as a philosopher and statesman remains as relevant as ever. But how well did he himself live up to that ideal?
Cicero had studied under and corresponded with the greatest minds of his day and written countless books on oratory and philosophy. Yet he seemed quite unable to control his passions, seeking always after fame and fortune, and coping poorly with adversity and hardship. Clearly, he did not need to have so many villas. His villa at Tusculum did not need to have two exercise areas. And these exercise areas did not need to be called the Academy and the Lyceum. Such grandeur, and his boastfulness, debased him, his learning, and his achievements.
The extraordinary oratory that had made him also unmade him. He loved to make an impression, so that he spoke more, and more forcefully, than he needed to, and often fell to attacking the person rather than the problem. As a result, he had not just adversaries but enemies.
In mitigation of the man, he lived through troubled times. The Roman Republic was collapsing around him, and political moderation had become almost impossible. His repeated reversals, compromises, and hesitations were not always signs of weakness, but sometimes the price of trying to preserve a constitutional order that others had already abandoned.
As a novus homo, or self-made man, he might also have harboured a deep-seated inferiority complex, explaining his need for achievement and affirmation.
Seneca once observed that Cato seemed more virtuous than wise. The converse might be said of Cicero: he could seem more wise than virtuous.
Unlike Cato, Cicero may not have met the standard of a Stoic sage. But for all his failings, the people loved him, because they knew him, at heart, to be a good man.
19th century cartoon of Cicero denouncing Catiline
When and how to use them, and how to defend against them.
In rhetoric, an ad hominem (“to the man”) is an attack, not on the argument itself, but on the person making it. It is, in simpler words, an attempt to shoot the messenger.
When Winston Churchill called Mahatma Gandhi “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir,” he was attempting to undermine Gandhi’s character, or ethos.
Ad hominem, which is essentially an attack on a speaker’s ethos, is older than the books. It was not beneath Churchill, or even the Roman orator Cicero, who used it often, and went so far as to call Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, a “most foul and inhuman monster” (inhumanissimum ac foedissimum monstrum).
The first and most famous line of the most famous speech in all of Latin literature, Cicero’s First Catilinarian, is no more than an extended ad hominem:
When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?
When and how to use ad hominem
In academic circles, the ad hominem is regarded as a logical fallacy and frowned upon. It is uncivil, it stifles debate, and it is a tacit admission that you are losing the argument. It is forbidden in formal debates, and there has been a petition to ban it from the U.K.’s House of Commons.
But in rhetoric, anything goes, and an ad hominem can be legitimate if it serves to undermine the ethos, or pro hominem claims, of your opponents.
Even so, when attacking an opponent, it is better to put one’s words into the mouth of some third person, or to use paralipsis (mentioning something by saying that you will not mention it), as Cicero did in his speech Pro Caelio:
Clodia, I am not thinking now of the wrongs you have done me. I am putting to one side the memory of my humiliation. I pass over your cruel treatment of my family when I was away. Consider that nothing I have said has been said against you.
While debating Ron DeSantis, former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum succeeded in doing both at the same time, to great effect:
I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist; I’m simply saying the racists believe he is a racist.
Such is the power of rhetoric that, had it not been for this single sentence, I may never have heard of Andrew Gillum. Often, when all is said and done, all that remains of a life is one or two sententiae, if even that.
How to defend against ad hominem
If you find yourself on the receiving end of an ad hominem, you can respond in one of four ways:
Ignore it.
Call it out as an ad hominem, e.g. “Instead of attacking me, could you please return to the argument, which you seem afraid of losing.”
Own it.
Bite back with an ad hominem of your own.
Which strategy to use depends on the context and the available material (so always do your research). But in the absence of a killer riposte, it is best and easiest to ignore the insult while looking slightly dismayed.
Finally, if returning an ad hominem, consider accompanying or accenting it with some gesture—the rhetorical device known as mycterismus. If the audience laughs, which it probably will, your opponent will not recover from it.
Learn the Six Classical Parts of Discourse Used by Cicero
Cicero (106–43 BCE), Rome’s greatest orator and one of the principal architects of classical rhetoric.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Every good speech and essay has a structure. Yet few students are ever taught one.
For more than two thousand years, great speakers have relied on a simple six-part structure—a framework that stretches from Cicero to Churchill and remains just as useful today. Many Oxford students have told me that no one had ever taught them these six parts of discourse, despite years of essay writing. Yet, until surprisingly recently, they formed part of every educated person’s rhetorical training. Today, few people have even heard of them.
The six parts of discourse are, of course, just as useful for structuring essays as they are for composing speeches.
Introduction (Exordium)
The exordium introduces your subject and purpose. It may also establish your authority for speaking or writing.
Above all, it should capture your audience’s attention. You might begin with a striking fact, an intriguing question, or a sense of urgency—but whatever your approach, make your audience want to hear more.
Keep it brief and clear. Never bore, confuse, or test your audience, and certainly not in the opening lines.
Winston Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister begins:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
In just twelve words, he captures attention, establishes the gravity of the moment, and prepares his audience for what is to come.
Narration (Narratio)
The narratio provides the background your audience needs to understand the issue.
How did the problem arise? Why does it matter? What has already been tried? What does the evidence suggest? Have similar situations arisen before?
Important: Although the narration appears objective, it is also your first opportunity to frame the debate. The facts you include—and the order in which you present them—shape everything that follows.
Consider the difference between saying, “Taxes have risen by 2%” and “Investment in schools and hospitals has increased by 2%”. The facts may be identical, but the way you present them shapes how your audience understands them.
Division (Divisio)
The divisio is the turning point in your speech.
In effect, the division says:
This is the issue. This is why it matters. And this is how I intend to address it.
Like the introduction, the division should be brief. If it becomes too elaborate, it begins to feel contrived.
The rhetorical handbook Ad Herennium (c. 80 BCE) illustrates division with this dilemma from Greek mythology:
Orestes killed his mother, Clytemnestra; on that everyone agrees. But was he justified in doing so? That is the real point in dispute.
Proof (Confirmatio)
The proof is the heart of your speech. Here you present your arguments and support them with examples and evidence.
Aristotle distinguished between technical proofs, such as logical arguments (logos), and non-technical proofs, such as laws, contracts, witnesses, and authoritative testimony.
In the Rhetoric, he observes that ‘witnesses’ need not be living people. Homer, Hesiod, Solon, proverbs, and received wisdom can all serve as ‘ancient witnesses’. Today, we do much the same whenever we quote recognised experts or respected authorities.
Ancient witnesses can be appealed to indirectly, as when Barack Obama echoed Martin Luther King, who in turn echoed Abraham Lincoln, who echoed the King James Bible in the opening line of the Gettysburg Address of 1863:
Four score and seven years ago [i.e. 87 years ago] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Refutation (Confutatio)
A persuasive speech anticipates objections.
The confutatio acknowledges opposing arguments before answering them. Ideally, it does so fairly and convincingly, though in practice speakers often exaggerate or caricature an opponent’s position.
Modern political campaigns often do exactly this. Terms such as ‘death tax’ or ‘dementia tax’ deliberately reframe an opponent’s proposal before it can be considered on its merits.
One particularly effective technique is concession (concessio). By conceding a limited point, you appear reasonable and fair while strengthening your larger argument:
Yes, that’s true. But the real question is…
Far from weakening your case, a well-judged concession often makes it more persuasive.
If your proof is weak, you might instead begin with a forceful refutation in the hope that no one notices the lack of argument. It is a trick as old as rhetoric itself—and one that is still surprisingly common.
Conclusion (Peroratio)
The peroratio brings your speech or essay to a memorable close.
It usually summarises your main arguments before ending with an emotional appeal or call to action.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Day of Infamy speech, delivered the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, ends with precisely such a peroration:
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.
When to Break the Rules
Many great speeches follow this six-part structure, whether consciously or intuitively. But the framework should never become a formula.
Once you’ve mastered its principles, they can also be broken.
Cicero himself ignored his own advice in the opening of the First Catilinarian, launching immediately into a passionate attack:
When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?
Nor must every speech contain every part. Aristotle regarded only two as essential: statement (narratio) and argument (confirmatio). Everything else is optional.
The six parts of discourse are not rules but tools. They provide a framework within which clarity and originality can flourish.
The aim is not to sound methodical but natural. Techniques such as using simple language, expressing uncertainty (dubitatio), or correcting yourself aloud (epergesis) can all help create the impression of sincerity and spontaneity.
Craft is something that you learn; art, that you unlearn.
The Method of Loci, or ‘Mind Palace’—and the Gruesome Story Behind It
The Mind Palace is simple—and fun too.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Article substantially revised on 11 August 2026.
Before autocues, slides, and even paper, an orator had to be able to stand before an audience and deliver an elaborate speech from memory. The Romans accorded such importance to memorisation that memoria became one of the five canons of rhetoric, alongside invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.
Fortunately, they had a simple and effective technique for remembering almost anything in sequence. More than two thousand years later, the same technique is still used by actors, public speakers, memory champions—and anyone who would rather connect with an audience than read out a script.
Simonides of Ceos and the Banqueting Hall
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.
Simonides is perhaps best known for composing 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 northern Thessalians as ‘too ignorant’ to be moved by poetry. But after the assassination of the tyrant Hipparchus in Athens, he had to swallow his words and work for the Thessalian aristocrat Scopas.
One day, at a banquet, Simonides sang a lyric poem in honour of Scopas. But the poem contained so many references to the gods Castor and Pollux (the Dioskouroi, or Gemini) that Scopas told Simonides that he would only pay him half the agreed fee, adding, “You can go and 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 as he turned around the banqueting hall collapsed, killing Scopas and everyone within it.
Their bodies were so mangled as to be unrecognisable. But because Simonides remembered everyone’s position around the table, he was able to identify their remains. This gruesome experience led him to develop a system of mnemonics based on images and places called the method of loci.
The Method of Loci, or Mind Palace
The method of loci, also called the memory palace or ‘mind palace’ (as popularised by Sherlock Holmes), 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. The more striking the image, the easier it will be to remember. If your next point is about inflation, don’t picture a graph or a number: picture an enormous loaf of bread swelling until it bursts through your kitchen ceiling.
Once you’ve furnished your memory palace, just keep on running through it until you’ve memorised your talk.
The method works because it turns an abstract sequence into a journey through familiar space. Instead of trying to remember one thought after another, you simply walk through your house, garden, or favourite street and ‘see’ each thought waiting for you in its appointed place.
Because the images represent ideas rather than sentences, the method encourages you to speak rather than recite. You remember the structure and substance of your speech while remaining free to tailor your words to the moment.
Try it out on something small, and see how well it works.
You must be logged in to post a comment.