classical rhetoric Archives

The Method of Loci, or ‘Mind Palace’—and the Gruesome Story Behind It

Roman orator memorises a speech outside the Senate House — 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.

Essay 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.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

I Came, I Saw, I Conquered

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.

Three is an oddly persuasive number. If I tell you that I have one reason for believing something, you may think I’m impressionable. If I have two reasons, you may suspect that I couldn’t think of a third. But if I tell you, ‘Here are my three reasons,’ the argument feels intelligent and complete.

The same pattern crops up everywhere. Genies grant three wishes, the newborn Jesus was visited by three magi, and Goldilocks had to contend with three bears. Not one, nor two, nor four, but exactly three.

For all D’Artagnan’s heroism, Alexandre Dumas did not entitle his novel The Four Musketeers. If asked, ‘How many ghosts visited Ebenezer Scrooge?’ most people will answer, ‘Three’—completely overlooking the fourth ghost, that of Scrooge’s partner, Jacob Marley.

Trilogies and trinities are a lot more common, and popular, than tetralogies and quaternities (I had to check this word even exists).

The Rule of Three in Rhetoric

Writers and speakers have long understood the peculiar power of three. In rhetoric, three parallel words, clauses, or lines make up a tricolon, a particularly effective type of isocolon, or parallel construction.

Some of the most memorable lines in history are tricolons:

I came, I saw, I conquered. —Julius Caesar upon crossing the Rubicon
Government of the people, by the people, for the people. —Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. —The United States Declaration of Independence

Similar to tricolon is hendiatris, which involves the juxtaposition of three words to express a single idea or total concept, for example, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (the national motto of France) and ‘wine, women, and song’ (or, nowadays, ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’).

Winston Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister is remembered as Blood, Sweat, and Tears, even though he said, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ As prime minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair did not make his top priority ‘education’ or even ‘education, education’, but ‘education, education, education’.

When asked a question, Joe Biden often responded by making just two points (“Number 1… Number 2…”), leaving everyone wondering what happened to Number 3.

Number 3 does something that Number 2 cannot: establish a pattern. Once the first two beats have created an expectation, the third fulfils it, giving a tricolon both rhythm and a sense of completion.

Sometimes the third element is also the longest or strongest of the three, creating a rising effect traditionally called a tricolon crescens.

Three is a Pattern

Why is three so much more engaging, satisfying, and memorable than one or two or four? ‘Here are my three reasons.’ ‘I’ll give you three examples.’ ‘These are the three lessons I learnt.’

One is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Four is one too many—to the extent that if you must have four, it may be better to present them as two linked pairs, and then maybe add a third pair.

Three, however, is the smallest number required to create a pattern and rhythm.

Triple goddesses or deities in groups of three are common in world myth: the Holy Trinity, the Tridevi, Hecate, Artemis, the Fates, the Furies, the Graces, the Graeae, the Morrígan, the Norns… and, I believe, originally stood for fate and the passage of time—the past, the present, and the future.

In Greek myth, when Demeter discovered that her daughter Persephone had been kidnapped by her brother Hades, she abandoned her divine duties and wandered from city to city, bringing by her absence a blight onto the land. Arriving in Eleusis in Attica, she took the form of a crone by the name of Doso and fell upon the good King Celeus for sanctuary.

Persephone, Demeter, and Doso may be regarded as the three aspects of a triple goddess—the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone—that stand for the phases of the moon and the stages of life.

No wonder, then, that the number three is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche.