ABSTRACT
Memoria, according to Cicero, is “the firm mental grasp of matter and words” (Cicero 1976: 1.7.9).1 The end of rhetoric concerns the orderly marshaling of words, and yet images set everything in motion. Classical oratory teaches us to “encompass the record of an entire matter by one notation, a single image.” Further, we are advised:
to remember this first point, we shall in our first background form an image of the whole matter. We shall picture the man in question. . . . In like fashion we shall set the other counts of the charge in backgrounds successively, following their order, and whenever we wish to remember a point, by properly arranging the patterns of the backgrounds and carefully imprinting the images, we shall easily succeed in calling back to mind what we wish.
