Cicero, Quintilian and the anonymous author of the ad Herennium each describe the art and practice of using an artificial memory system to help aid remembrance. Each of the authors’ respective treatises offers an exploration of how both loci (places) and imagines (images) were used to facilitate remembrance of both res (things) and verba (words). The methods delineated by each author provide valuable insight into the visual process, used by educated Romans to retrieve and recall information stored in their memories. The goal of this paper is to look at the rhetoricians’ discussions of the art of memory and posit that Virgil uses the artificial memory system features of sequential order, discriminability, and distinctiveness when describes the way his characters look at various images in the Aeneid.

Cicero, Quintilian and the anonymous author of the ad Herennium each describe the art and practice of using an artificial memory system to help aid remembrance. Each of the authors’ respective treatises offers an exploration of how both loci (places) and imagines (images) were used to facilitate remembrance of both res (things) and verba (words). The methods delineated by each author provide valuable insight into the visual process, used by educated Romans to retrieve and recall information stored in their memories. The goal of this paper is to look at the rhetoricians’ discussions of the art of memory and posit that Virgil uses the artificial memory system features of sequential order, discriminability, and distinctiveness when describes the way his characters look at various images in the Aeneid.