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Simonides, wisest of poets.

Polydore Vergil, On Discovery 1.1.8

The idea of memory is the necessary companion to the idea of wisdom. Without memory there cannot be knowledge. Cicero says: “Wisdom [sapientia] is the knowledge [scientia] of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them” (Tusc. 4.26.57). There can be no learning without memory and no wisdom, for wisdom brings what is learned together into a whole. Eloquence (eloquentia) is to put the whole of a subject into words. To put the whole into words requires a knowledge per causas. In his little treatise On Memory, Aristotle says that to recollect “one must get hold of a starting-point. This explains why it is that persons are supposed to recollect sometimes by starting from ‘places’ [topoi]” (452a).

In his work On the Orator, Cicero relates the discovery of the connection between memory and places (topoi, loci) by Simonides of Ceos, who was known not only for the wisdom of his poetry but for his greed, being perhaps the first poet to charge a fee for his compositions. Simonides was commissioned by Scopas, a wealthy nobleman in Thessaly, to present a lyric composed for a banquet at his house. Simonides devoted a long passage of his poem to the twin gods, Castor and Pollux. After his presentation Scopas told Simonides he would pay him only half the agreed sum, and if he so wished he could seek the balance from Castor and Pollux.

As the banquet proceeded, a message was delivered to Simonides that there were two young men at the door who wished earnestly to see him. Simonides left the banquet hall and went out to meet the strangers, but found no one. In the interval, the roof of the hall fell in, killing Scopas and all his guests. The next day, when their friends and relatives came to bury them, they were unable to tell the corpses apart, as they were so severely crushed in the ruins. Simonides was able to identify them by recalling the places where each was reclining at table.

His ability to do so suggested to Simonides that the best aid to memory is orderly arrangement, such that persons wishing to train themselves in memory should select localities and associate with each place a mental image of what they desired to remember. The arrangement of these places will act as an internal writing, analogous to that on a wax tablet, allowing the speaker to bring forth in a single, orderly speech all that the speaker intended to say. Simonides’ mnemonic became the basis of the art of memory (De orat. 2.86.352–55). But who were the two young men who called for Simonides? Were they Castor and Pollux? Also, why did Simonides choose Castor and Pollux to include in his panegyric.

In Quintilian’s account, the poem was a victory ode for a boxer who had won the crown (Inst. orat. 11.214–17). Simonides’ digression into an encomium for Castor and Pollux is appropriate, given that Pollux was the great boxer. But Quintilian raises the question as to whether the poem was written for Scopas or for several other possible persons. He says it is agreed that Scopas perished at the banquet. If Scopas hosted the banquet in honor of a boxer, he may have withheld the fee because he concluded that Simonides padded his poem with praise of Castor and Pollux and did not make the effort to address the achievement of the honored guest, or to honor himself as host. Simonides violated a business agreement. Given his reputation for greed, Simonides would have taken the abridgement of his fee especially hard.

The mnenomic discovered by Simonides is that of “artificial” memory—memory that is the result of training in the selection and use of places to organize images to achieve proficiency in elocutio—to speak on a particular subject, to put thought into words. In 1550, near the end of his life, Giulio Camillo dictated, on seven mornings, in Milan, a little work, L’idea del theatro, published at Venice and Florence. Camillo was one of the most famous figures of the sixteenth century, known to his contemporaries as the “Divine Camillo,” but he has been forgotten by posterity.

Camillo realized that the mnemonic of artificial memory could be transposed from a method of rhetoric to a method of metaphysics. From the idea of the Theatrum mundi he formed the idea of the Theatro della memoria. The artificial memory allows for making a speech on a subject within the theater of the world. The theater of memory allows for making a complete speech of the world itself. Instead of arbitrarily selecting places with which to associate images or mental places, Camillo arranged a theater of master images. These pitture represented the components of mythology upon which culture is based and from which thought originates. Camillo unites Hebraic, Greek, and Roman images. These are the topoi of human memory, those sources from which knowledge is brought forth. They are the metaphors, the archai of the human world itself.

Representations of these were arranged in tiers of seven grades, divided by seven gangways proceeding upward from a stage. Versions of the theater were constructed in France and Italy. The spectator entered on the stage as an actor, facing the audience of the pitture. The entrant faced the contents of the treasure-house of human memory. The unstated secret of the theater was the principle of proportion, the principle of the just soul of Platonism. In this way the theater gave access to the Forms, for the images were imitations of the real order of things. To know all there was to know and hence acquire wisdom, whoever entered the stage of the theater needed to contemplate each of the figures on the seven grades, aided by the writings of Cicero, the greatest of orators, kept in drawers or coffers in the theater. The mind of the individual could thus be aligned with the divine mens.

Only those who were prepared to engage in this process of contemplative alignment could accomplish the purpose of the theater, as Camillo states in the first sentence of his little treatise. The rest of the treatise describes only the contents and arrangement of the theater. It does not explain it. Camillo says: “The most ancient and wisest writers have always had the habit of entrusting to their writings the secrets of God under obscure veils, so that they are not understood except by those who (as Christ says) have ears to hear, namely who by God are chosen to grasp his most sacred mysteries.”1

Those “who have ears to hear” are mentioned in Matthew (11:15), Mark (4:23), and Luke (8:8). Warning not to present lofty themes to the many are to be found in Plato’s Letters (2.314a), in the prologue to the Asclepius, in the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus, and in the Zohar of the Cabala. Camillo’s art of memory is a work for the neo-Platonic Friends of the Forms, an extension of the Academy. It is the means to attain the wisdom that the philosopher seeks, the means to produce the complete speech.