Although mnemonic devices far predate the written word, both Cicero and Quintilian name Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BCE) as the first teacher of an art of memory.

Simonides is perhaps best known for composing the epitaph for the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylae:

Go tell the Spartans, passerby
That here, by Spartan law, we lie.

According to Plutarch, Simonides once dismissed the Thessalians as "too ignorant" to be moved by poetry. Yet, after the assassination of Hipparchus in Athens, he found himself in the patronage of the Thessalian aristocrat Scopas.

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