The memory of places, the places of memory

As I'm on holiday this week, I'll let Cicero lead today's rant. And he has a story about how the method of memorizing information by visually modelling it in the mind - the so called method of loci - once doubled as a forensic tool. It later became one of the features of the medieval art of memory.

Cicero tells the story in book 2 of the De Oratore.

There…