[22]
It will be best to
give his words verbatim:1 “We must for this purpose employ a number of remarkable places, clearly
envisaged and separated by short intervals: the
[p. 225]
images which we use must be active, sharply-cut and
distinctive, such as may occur to the mind and strike
it with rapidity.” This makes me wonder all the
more, how Metrodorus2 should have found three
hundred and sixty different localities in the twelve
signs of the Zodiac through which the sun passes.
It was doubtless due to the vanity and boastfulness
of a man who was inclined to vaunt his memory as
being the result of art rather than of natural gifts.
1 De Or. II. lxxxvii. 358.
2 Of Scepsis, the favourite of Mithradates Eupator. See de Or. II. lxxxviii. 360. He used the signs of the Zodiac as aids to the memory, subdividing each into thirty compartments. Quintilian wonders on what principle he can have made such a division, necessarily purely artificial in nature.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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