ABSTRACT
It is commonplace among rhetoricians to open their discussion of the fourth (or fifth) canon of rhetoric, memory, with a review of Rhetorica Ad Herennium, the oldest Latin treatise on rhetoric preserved whole. Dating from perhaps the second decade in the first century BCE, the treatise addressed to Gaius Herrenius is known as a handbook. The sustained discussion (Kaplan III.28–40) of a visual theory of mnemonics, whereby orators are urged to invent pictorial systems to help them remember details and attitudes, is interesting and as modern as the most recent offer to train your memory pictorially in three days. Interesting or not, however, it lacks an intellectual problematic that can engage rhetoricians.
