As far as diagrammatics is concerned with mediations between images and concepts, it presupposes a genuinely modern epistemological problem which did not occur in pre-modern orders of knowledge. Topical inventio in the sense of pre-modern rhetoric may lean on concrete spatial models like diagrams, but in these specific cases the concept of topos in ars memorativa is used as a method of inventio. Cicero’s topics of persons and actions, however, are operating with lists of abstract concepts and not with spatial models. Topical inventio of actions can neither be based on diagrammatic models nor can it subsequently be displayed in diagrams without serious loss of information, because action is not an exclusively spatial concept and cannot be reduced to spatiality.