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Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari.

A Short History of Rhetoric in Rome

The first Roman orator of whom we can form a distinct impression is Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BCE), also known as Cato the Elder or Cato the Censor—known, ironically, for his austere conservatism and staunch opposition to Hellenization [Greek influence]. Despite his high senatorial rank, Cato rode a packhorse laden with saddlebags. He made a point of writing his history of Rome and his treatise on agriculture in Latin instead of the more usual and scholarly Greek. ‘The words of the Greeks’ he said, ‘are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts.’ Today, his De agri cultura [On the Cultivation of the Fields] is the oldest extant work of Latin prose.

Cato wrote a kind of encyclopaedia for his son, which includes a part on rhetoric. In it, he says, ‘An orator, son Marcus, is a good man skilled at speaking.’ Cato is reputed to have ended every speech in the Senate with the words, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam [‘Moreover, I think Carthage should be destroyed]—often abbreviated or simplified to Carthago delenda est. His speech, On His Own Expenses, is remembered for mentioning the topics that he will not mention, a figure of speech known as apophasis, paralipsis, or praeteritio—a classic example being, ‘No point saying that I told you so.’ Or Monica from Friends: ‘Chandler, you know, the old Monica would remind you to scrub that Teflon pan with a plastic brush. But I’m not going to do that.’

The Gracchi

The most notable orators of the late second century are the aristocratic grandsons of Scipio Africanus, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, also known as the Gracchi brothers.

In 133 BCE, as tribune of the plebs, Tiberius introduced a land reform to benefit the poor. When he met with opposition, he persisted with his reform and was beaten to death.

Some ten years later, Gaius in turn became tribune of the plebs and took up the mantle of his late brother—and ended up either being killed, or committing suicide to avoid being killed.

His most famous words, spoken on the last day of his life and recorded by Cicero as an epitome of delivery, brought even his enemies to tears:

Whither shall I, unhappy wretch, betake myself? Whither shall I turn? To the Capitol? But that is drenched with the blood of my brother! Or to my home, that I may see my afflicted mother in all the agony of lamentation?

Cicero

The greatest of all Roman orators is, of course, Cicero himself.

The name of Cicero is regarded not as the name of a man, but of eloquence itself. Let us, therefore, fix our eyes upon him, take him as our pattern, and let the student realize that he has made real progress if he is a passionate admirer of Cicero. —Quintilian X, 2.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinium, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. He began practising the law in around 83-81, and, in 80, made his name on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. He climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just 42, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve as a consul 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. As praetor, he made his first big speech in the senate, in favour of conferring upon Pompey the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his career came in his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he put down the Catiline 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 (the Stoic great-grandson of Cato the Elder), but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.

Cicero was not a party to Caesar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-soaked dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. Cicero 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 Caesar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Caesar’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 backfired when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.

Estimating that Caesar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription [the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals], not seen in Rome since the time of Sulla. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed but, it would seem, did not insist or prevail. On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman [former slave] of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiae, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to his son in 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 manner of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. 235 CE), Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed at it with her hairpin.

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.’

Atticism vs Asianism

In his 12-volume Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian contrasts the style of Cicero to that of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whom both Cicero and Quintilian held in the highest esteem:

Demosthenes is more concentrated, Cicero more copious… from Demosthenes’ speeches nothing can be taken away, to Cicero’s nothing can be added…

In the Orator, one of his latest works, Cicero paints a picture of the ideal orator, and responds to criticisms, from Brutus and other so-called Atticists, of his abundance and elaboration of style.

The Atticists, so called because they took for models the Attic writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE (Lysias, Demosthenes, Hyperides…), argued that the spread of Greek into Asia in the wake of Alexander had led to a degeneracy of style, and called for a return ad fontes [to the sources]. This unadorned plain speaking chimed with the Stoicism or Stoic leanings of many Atticists, including Brutus himself.

Hortensius

The orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus (114-50 BCE), second only to his friend Cicero, and more florid, had the good fortune of dying a year before Caesar crossed the Rubicon—of dying, if you will, with the Republic that had afforded him the freedom to speak. A noted piscinarius [‘fish-fancier’], Hortensius bred fish (possibly lampreys, eels, or mullet) in pools, and may have introduced the peacock to the Roman table. As an orator, he so perfected the swish of the toga that actors came to watch and learn from him. Cicero entitled his invitation to philosophy, the Hortensius, after him, and dedicated his history of Roman oratory, the Brutus, to his memory.

Rhetoric After the Republic

Fortunately, rhetoric, unlike Hortensius, did not die with the Republic. Au contraire, as if to compensate for its newfound impotence, it rose into the pinnacle of education.

In the Hellenistic period, a distinction had been drawn between the elementary teaching of the grammarian and the more advanced instruction of the rhetorician, which boys of a certain background might begin between the ages of 12 to 14. Even before Cicero, who listed them, rhetorical instruction consisted of five parts, or canons: invention (what to say), arrangement (how to lay it out), style (how to say it), memory (how to commit it to memory), and delivery (how to convey it with more than just words).

For centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, rhetoric remained the cornerstone of Western education. Five of the major Latin fathers of the Church had been teachers of rhetoric prior to their conversion: Tertullian (d. 240 CE), Cyprian (d. 258), Lactantius (d. c. 325), Arnobius (d. c. 330), and Augustine (d. 430). In 425, to train administrators, the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II founded the Pandidacterium, the first incarnation of the University of Constantinople, with 31 chairs—of which ten in Greek grammar, five in Greek rhetoric, ten in Latin grammar, three in Latin rhetoric, two in law, and one in philosophy.

During the Middle Ages down to Shakespeare’s time at school, boys began with the study of grammar, dialectic (or ‘logic’), and rhetoric. Having completed this so-called trivium, they could progress to the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These seven ‘liberal arts’ were regarded as ‘thinking skills’, and distinguished from practical arts such as medicine and architecture.

Cicero’s On Invention

At the age of just 16 or 17, Cicero had written a handbook of rhetoric, On Invention, which contains the first recorded use of the term ‘liberal arts’. During the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard text for the teaching of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which benefited from being attributed (or rather, misattributed) to the great Cicero. Cicero himself regarded On Invention as superseded by his mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator, but these were little known after the classical period, until the Renaissance.

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.

Rhetoric Today

Cicero’s influence perdured well into the twentieth century, and it is not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation [entry] requirement for an O level in Latin.

Speaking at her old school in 1982, Margaret Thatcher, by then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, recounted her struggle to learn Latin to apply for chemistry at Oxford:

Well, there you are, I was taught Latin and I must tell you—anyone who wishes to do an O level in Latin can do it in ten weeks flat.

A decade later, in a 1991 KERA interview, the journalist Lee Cullum challenged Thatcher on the benefits and relevance of a classical education:

I read several years ago in the Sunday Times that a classical education, for which Oxford and Cambridge are so famous, is fine for running an empire, but not so good for running an economy. Do you think there is any truth in that?

No, I don’t. If you excel at a classical education, Latin and Greek, not only at the language but at learning the literature, you will have learnt a great deal about the philosophy of life, about democracy, about fundamental principles, and you will have a very good mind … Heaven knows, these days, we are still up against human nature rather more than anything else.

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

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Exploring the Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece

The Embassy to Achilles. Phoenix and Odysseus seek to persuade Achilles to return to battle. Attic red-figure hydria by the Kleophrades Painter, c. 490 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.
The Embassy to Achilles. Phoenix and Odysseus seek to persuade Achilles to return to battle. Attic red-figure hydria by the Kleophrades Painter, c. 490 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.

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

We often think of rhetoric as a dark art: the ability to make weak arguments appear strong, manipulate emotions, and persuade people of things that aren’t true.

The ancient Greeks saw things differently. They did not invent rhetoric because they wanted a bag of tricks for getting their way. Rather, they invented it because their new political order created a need for it.

When people must decide together, they must first learn how to persuade one another.

In democratic Athens, citizens had to argue in assemblies, defend themselves in courts, and persuade their peers on matters of war, law, and public policy. Words, then as now, had become a form of power capable of rivalling shields and spears.

The study of rhetoric would grow into one of the foundations of Western education—and raise one of the deepest questions in philosophy:

Is persuasion a path to truth, or merely a way of gaining influence?

Speech Before Rhetoric

From the earliest times, the Greeks had known about the power of persuasive speech. In Homer’s Iliad, Phoenix teaches the young Achilles to be both ‘a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’. In the heroic world, the ability to speak was inseparable from the ability to act. A great leader needed not only courage but the words—almost incantations or spells—to counsel, deliberate, and inspire.

For this reason, Homer describes his hero Odysseus as polymetis (‘man of many devices’) and polytropos (‘man of many twists and turns). Unlike his other hero, Achilles, who triumphed through brute force, Odysseus succeeded through cunning, guile, and an ability, in every situation, to find the right words—to cast the right spell.

In Homer’s largely oral world, stirring speech was often imagined as something breathed into the speaker by the gods (this is the origin of our word, ‘inspire’). Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, was also the god of cunning, exchange, and communication. His wife, Peitho, personified persuasion itself. Even the ability to seize the right moment for speech had its own god: Kairos.

But eloquence was not simply a gift of the gods—or Phoenix would not have troubled to teach Achilles. Already in Homer, an art of persuasion was beginning to emerge.

Democracy and the Birth of Rhetoric

The formal study of rhetoric arose in fifth-century BCE Greece, especially in Athens. This was no coincidence.

Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and voted on matters of war and peace. For the first time, political influence depended not only on birth or wealth, but on the ability to persuade.

A citizen who could not speak effectively risked being ignored. A defendant who could not argue his case risked conviction—and, in the gravest cases, exile or even death.

Unlike today, Athens had no professional politicians or lawyers. Citizens had to represent themselves. Citizens had to represent themselves.

This created an urgent demand:

Could the power of speech be taught?

The first professional teachers to answer that question were the Sophists.

Gorgias and the Discovery of Rhetoric’s Power

Among the Sophists, none made the case for rhetoric more dramatically than Gorgias. 

Born in Leontini in Sicily, Gorgias became famous throughout Greece for his extraordinary abilities as a speaker. He was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity.

According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: “Come, propose me a theme.” He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.

His Encomium of Helen is one of the most famous demonstrations of the power of rhetoric. Seeking to defend Helen of Troy for leaving her husband Menelaus and sparking the Trojan War, Gorgias argues that she would have been compelled to do so by one of four forces: the gods, physical necessity, love, or the power of speech. Whichever it was, she could not be blamed.

Gorgias compared the effect of words on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body:

Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.

Speech was not merely a vehicle for thought. It was a force capable of changing it.

But if words could be so powerful, who should police them—and for what purpose?

Plato’s Challenge: Persuasion Without Wisdom

The power of rhetoric fascinated and troubled Plato, who had seen his teacher, Socrates, put to death by words. In the Gorgias, Plato presents Socrates questioning Gorgias about the nature of his art.

Plato’s concern was not that rhetoric could be powerful, but that it could be, and was, so easily abused. A speaker such as Gorgias might persuade an audience without being right—or even understanding the subject.

Plato compares rhetoric without philosophy to pastry-baking without medicine, or cosmetics without gymnastics: something designed to please rather than to improve.

Even so, Plato did not outright reject rhetoric. In the Phaedrus, he concedes that truth is more persuasive when allied with rhetoric, and that dialectic and rhetoric ought to go hand in hand, since ‘he who would deceive others, and not be deceived, must exactly know the real likenesses and differences of things.’

The challenge, then, was not to abandon rhetoric, but to place it in the service of truth. It fell to Aristotle to show how this might be done.

Aristotle Makes Rhetoric an Art

It was Aristotle who transformed rhetoric into a systematic art. Rather than dismissing rhetoric as manipulation, Aristotle sought to understand how persuasion actually works.

In his Rhetoric, he defines rhetoric as the ability to discover the available means of persuasion in any situation.

He identifies three fundamental modes of persuasion:

  • Ethos — the character and credibility of the speaker
  • Pathos — the emotions of the audience
  • Logos — the argument itself

For Aristotle, persuasion was not opposed to reason. Human beings are rational creatures, but they are not purely rational ones. We are also influenced by trust, emotion, experience, and judgement.

Aristotle also identified three main branches of rhetoric:

  • Deliberative rhetoric — speeches about future actions, such as political decisions
  • Judicial rhetoric — speeches concerning accusation and defence in courts
  • Epideictic rhetoric — speeches of praise or blame, such as funeral orations

With Aristotle, rhetoric became not merely a collection of techniques, but a philosophical discipline. Although the earlier Sicilian rhetoricians Corax and Tisias had begun the tradition of rhetorical handbooks, it was Aristotle who gave the subject its philosophical foundation.

As he remarks in the Rhetoric:

It is not his ability that makes a man a sophist, but his moral purpose.

Rhetoric itself was morally neutral. Whether it served truth or deception depended upon the character of the speaker.

From Greece to Rome

The Romans inherited and expanded the Greek tradition of rhetoric.

For Cicero, the ideal orator was not simply someone who could speak beautifully. A true statesman needed both eloquence and wisdom: the ability to persuade, but also the judgement to know what he ought to be arguing for.

As he writes in De Oratore:

Wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of states, but eloquence without wisdom is generally highly disadvantageous, and is never of any benefit.

This ideal—the union of thought and speech—became one of the defining ambitions of a classical education.

Why Ancient Rhetoric Still Matters

More than two thousand years later, the questions the Greeks explored remain with us. We still debate political questions. We still have it out in courts. We still try to sway colleagues, customers, friends, and strangers.

And the same timeless principles continue to apply. People are persuaded not only by what is said (logos), but by who says it (ethos), what emotions it awakens (pathos), and whether it is said at the right moment (kairos).

The ancient Greeks understood something that modern communication often forgets:

Words do not merely express thoughts. They shape them.

Used wisely, rhetoric is not the enemy of truth but one of its greatest allies.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this introduction to the origins of rhetoric, you’ll find a much fuller exploration of the art of persuasion in How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero. The book examines the techniques of the great Greek and Roman orators, from ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos to the practical principles of clear thinking, compelling argument, and effective public speaking.

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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.

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I Came, I Saw, I Conquered

Julius Caesar on horseback

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.

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