Roman Columns

In Rome today, the tour guides at the ruins of the Roman Forum tell of how Cicero and his contemporaries spoke for hours on end without any notes. Paper — which would not be invented until two hundred years later in China — was not available to the Roman orators, so they used the marble columns of the forum as memory triggers. Each column represented a single subject and its related ideas. As the orators delivered their speeches, they strode from column to column and subject to subject, using the visual prompts to remind them of a group of related ideas. -A Presenter's Guide to Remembering What to Say

Could've done with heeding that advice this afternoon when I was trying to navigate my way through a 30-minute talk at the John McIntyre Conference Centre.