Memory and Delivery

I wrote a perfect speech. Then I stood up, looked at the audience, and forgot every word.

The Romans counted five tasks of the speaker. You did three: finding, ordering, wording. You forgot the last two: memory and delivery.

The Romans told a story about the Greek poet Simonides. He was singing at a banquet when he was called outside. While he was gone, the roof of the hall fell in and killed everyone inside, so crushed that their families could not recognise them. But Simonides remembered where each guest had been sitting, and so he could name them all.

From this, the story goes, he discovered the art of memory: imagine a building you know well, and place each thing you want to remember in a different room, in order. To remember a speech, walk through the building in your mind and collect each point from its place. This is the method of places, sometimes called a memory palace.

Aristotle wrote little about memory, but he said that delivery (in Greek, hypokrisis, the word for an actor’s performance) is a matter of the voice: how loud, how high or low, and in what rhythm. Speakers who master it win prizes, he says, just as actors do; and audiences are often moved more by the delivery than by the speech. The story below is about the most famous case of a speaker who taught himself to deliver.