Works
- The banquet story of the method of loci, as told in Cicero's De Oratore, 55 BCE
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A Greek lyric poet to whom tradition credits the method of loci. In Cicero's telling, Simonides left a banquet hall moments before its roof fell and then identified the crushed guests by recalling where each had sat, which led him to an art of memory built on ordered places.
Caveat: The story is a legend recorded centuries later; Quintilian, retelling it, doubted it, noting that the poet himself nowhere mentions the event.