RenaissanceHumanism and Language by John Monfasani

- It has long been fashionable indeed, the Renaissancehumanists themselves began the fashion - to view the Renaissancein general and humanism in particular as revolutionary movements marking a decisive break with the medieval past. In point of fact, the Renaissancewas not the undoing of the Middle Ages, but its culmination; and Renaissancehumanism representednot a rupture but a completion of a cultural enterprisethat startedwith the Carolingian Renaissance. In the eighth cenfury, when Europe was being created,Carolingian scholars were the first to deliberately seek to revive classical Latin; nine hundred years later, when the Renaissancewas giving way to the Enlightenment, Renaissancehumanists were the last to seekto maintain classical Latin as the common literary and scientif,rclanguage of Europe. The failure of the humanists in this rearguard action on behalf of Latin meant the end of the Renaissance,and, with it, of the Middle Ages. It was only fitting then that in 1771 Girolamo Ferri, an Italian pedagogue consciously working in the tradition of Renaissanci humanisrrl directed what was perhaps the last grand defense of Latin, the Pro Linguae Latinae usu Epistolae, against one of the great figwes of the French Enlightenment, Jean d'Alembert. In point of fact, the Latin of the Renaissancehumanists illustrates how much the Middle Ages culminated in (and therefore ended in) the Renaissance.We can start with grammar. One might view the history of the Middle Ages as a series of transforming developmentswith certain thematic unities. This is certainly true in Latin studies. The Carolingian Renaissancefell prey to the crises of the ninth and tenth centuries. The Renaissanceof the Twelfth Cenfiuy, however, restoredLatin classicism in the guise of the auctores and the cathedral school culture of Northern France as a central components of education. As is well known, in the thirteenth century, Scholasticisnl the scientific and philosophical culture of the universities, transformed medieval culture once again. Latin studies evolved as well. Alexandere de Villedieu produced his extraordinarily successfulverse grarnmar, the Doctrinale, precisely as an efficient, up-to-date means of masteringLatin without havrng to waste time studying the auctores. This anti-classical bias also explains the successof another contemporarynew grarnmar, Evrard de B6thune's Giaecismus. The Italian teacherof rhetoric (ars dictamims) Boncampagno da Signa evinced the same utilitarian attitude inhis Rhetorica Novissima of 1235,in which he promised to discard uselessclassical rhetorical theory and teachonly what is of practicalvalue. In empirical confirmation of this attitude, Robert Black has recently conhrmed the collapse of classical authors in Italian schools in the thirteenth century first suggestedby Louis Paetow. In the fourteenth century, of coruse, there began the great turn-around, the Italian Renaissance,with classical studies coming roaring back. But this transformation did not mean the disappearenceof the older French grammars.Alexandre de Villedieu's Doctrinale erSoyedenorrnous success in Italy and northern Europe well into the sixteenth century. The last of the 266 Renaissanceeditions of theDoctrinale appeared,in Bressanonein 1588 to serve the school of "the 'Renaissance the Italian humanist Iacobus Britannicus. As W. Keith Percival has remarked, expression Grammar' amounts "the almost to a contradiction in terms" for study of grammar had been in a perfectly healtfry state in the Middle Ages." To be sure, the humanists massively recovered classical style and lexiographicalprecision and reestablishedclassical usage(asas) as the final arbiter of grammatical correctness.Lorerzo Valla's frequently printed Elegantie is exemplary here. But though the humanist grammars, such as those Niccold Perotti, Antonio de Nebrija, Ioannes Despauterius, and Peter Ramus eventually monopolized grammatical instruction, they themselves did not decidedly innovate on the classical heritage of Donatus and Priscian whiih they sharedwith the earlier medievaigrammars, save for making more effectiveuse of Varro's De Lingua Latina.Indeed,their success and concentrationon descriptiveanalysis of classicalLatin meanta loss, namely, of the philoiophical approachpioneered by medieval speculative grammars.Julius CaesarScaliger tried to make good this failure with his De CausisLiiguae Latinae of 154d, which establishedgrammar as a science based on the Aristotelian four causes(actually three causessince final causedoes not play much of a role in the De Causis).Scaliger's argument is not notably convincing, but in 1597 FranciscusSanctius expticitty emulatedhim with his Minet-va:De CausisLinguae Latinae.Modem linguistshave seenin Sanctius'sdiscussion of ellipsisand his distinction between ratio and vox an understanding of the distinction between hnguistic deep structure and surface structure that recalls the medieval modistaeand anticipatesmodern modes of linguistic analysis.Be that as it may, the successof Sanctius's work was post-Renaissance,with a secondedition not appearinguntil 1664, follo'wedby eighi more eFlorence. Although the expanding knowledge of Hebrew and Semitic languages in the Renaissance inspired these linguistic schemes,so alien to modern thought but not surprising in a medieval world view, the language other than Latin that was most -was important for hr:manist linguistic thought unquestionabiy Greek. Tiris was so not only because Greek texts provided an immense mass of lexiographical,grammatical, iiterary, and historicaldata, but also becausethe need, or, better, the desire,to translateGreek texts provoked the most serious discussionof translationtheory in West since Antiquity. Horace, Cicero, and St. Jerome had all condemnedthe word-for-word tanslation practiced by what they called thefidus interpres- They called for the translation of the vls and not the mere verba of the Greek text, with St. j".ome making an exception "is for SacredScripture, where the very word order a mystery." Nonetheless,at the end of Antiquity, Boethius t"u"rr"d this advice and establishedas standard for the Middle Ages the practice of verbum-cle-verbotranslation. Boethius gave as his justification for incurring what he called the culpa, the blame, of a fidus interpres the fact that he was translating a philosophical text where exactnessand content and not literary elegancemattered. Ironically, 300 years later, John Scotus Eriugena, in translating pseudo- Dionysius, apologized for translating some composite Greek terms such as homoousionwith more than-oneword; that is to say, the culpa had now become not translating verbum-de-verbo. As is well know, leading medieval translators such as William of Moerbeke solved the problem of compound and technical Greek terms by simply transliteraring rather than translatingthern. It is significant the fust humanist criticism of medieval hanslating technique came from someone wtro dla not know -93, Greek. In 1392 or Coluccio Salutati rewrote in more elegant Latin withoui any knowledge of the Greek text Simon Atumanus's translation of Plutarch's De Cohibenda 1ra. Salutati said he was remedying the obscuritas and.horridus stilus of Atumanus's translation. In other words, what mattered to Salutati was not the accuracy of Atumanus'translationbut its Latinity. Not long after, in 1397, the Byzantine teacher Manuel Chrysoloras,the arrived in Florence. Although Chrysolorasused word-for word translationsas a teaching tool, he taught that translations should be ad sententiam, not ad verbim. Noi surprisingly therefore, Leonardo Bruni, Chrysoloras's pupil and the first major translator of the Renaissance,put that principle into practli and, most controversially, sought to make Aristotle in Latin the aureumflumen of eloquencethat Bruni believed he was in Greek. Not all humanist translatorsfollowed Bruni's lead. In the mid-QuattrocentoGeorge of Trebizond, for instance,adhered much more closely to the Greek text within the bounds of Latinity when translating Aristotle. In a polemical work against a rival, Theodore Gaza, who, in fact, took extreme liberties in translating Aristotle, Georgi arguedthat the competent translator neededto take into account the genre of the text to be translated in determining how literal or free he would be in rendering it. Hence, an oration should be franslatedquite freely in order to capture its tone and literary qualities whereasscientific and sacredtexts require literal renderings within the bounds of Latinity since in their case accuracy and fidelity to the author's words are the main concerns.Giannozzo Manefti, the sole Latin translator of the Bible in the Quattrocento,made a similar argument in defending his hanslations.In effect, George of Trebizond and Giannozzo Manetti had grasped the logic of St. Jerome's theory of translation. For the rest of the Renaissancehumanist translations ran the gambit from literal to irresponsibly free. In the sixteenth century, for instance,the Swiss translator Ianus Cornarus was notoriously literal in his renderings while the French humanist Joachim P6rion was notoriously free in his. Pdrion, however, soon found himself defending his method against those who demanded more literal translations. The Renaissancedestroyed verbum-de-verbo as the single model of translation, but far from ushering in an era of exclusively free translation, it unleashed a wonderfully active market place for translationsin which humanists competed with each other on the basis of accuracy as well as sfyie. One of the most important pattems documentedby the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorumbegun by Paul Oskar Kristeller in the late 1940s and now in its eighth volume is the appearanceof an extraordinarily high number of multiple translations of the same Greek works in the Renaissancecompared io the preceding centuries of the Middle Ages. In completing the task set by the Carolingians to recover the full range of classical literature, thi Renaissancefrnished with a flourish. Now I wouid to dedicate the second part of my talk to the one aspect of humanist linguistic concerns I have not yet touched upon, namely, sfyle, and, to be more precise, to tire issue that dominaiedhumanist sfylistrc controversies,Ciceronianism. I shalldiscuss the debateup to the appearanceofErasmus's ciceronianusin 1528. As I have said elsewhere,the deepestfault line separatingRenaissance Ciceronians from their critics was ultimately not a questionofstyle, but oflanguage. But as Horacefamously pointed out, languageconstantly changes and it is thereforeusage (aszs) which determinesthe standard of linguistic correctness(norma loquendi). Since Latin in the Renaissancewas a dead lunguage, Iearnedfrom books,the Renaissancedebate over Ciceronianismreally revolvedaround the questionofwhat constitutesusus for a deadlanguage. As the formal language of leaming. religion, and literah:re, Latin continued thrcughcut the }"{iddle Ages. The educateci - never ceasedto use it and to change it. In vocabulary, morphology, and even s)mtax, the medievals altered classicalLatin. If such change is a sign of life, then what we call medieval Latin was a living artificial language. The fust great humanist, Francis Petrarch,grasped how different his literary and linguistic world was from that of Antiquity. But his ideas on the lustory of the Latin languagewere contradictory. Furthernore, though he adulated Cicero as the supremeembodiment of Latin eloquence,Petrarch's own Latin was more Senecanthan it was Ciceronian,and was, to boot, still burdenedwith medievalisms.Petrarch had, however, clearnotions about stylistic imitation, which, as was hue for the rest of the Renaissance,he never clearly separatedfrom linguistic imitation. The Latin classicsofferred conflicting advice on imitation. The Rhetoricaad Herennium recommendeda single good model, as did Antonius in Cicero's De Oratore. Cicero himself claimed that Demostheneswas his single model. But Horace, Senecathe Elder, Seneca,and Quintilian ail advocatedeciectic imitation. Quintilian even made it a point to mock imitators of who Cicero anxiously inserted Cicero'spet rhythmrc phraseesse videatur at the end of sentences. Petrarchshared Quintilian's hostility toward slavishimitators and he camedown decisivelyon the sideof the eclectics. He liked Seneca'ssimile of the author as the bee who goes fi'om flower to flower gatheringnectar. The problem was that the classicaleclectics were talking about a living languageand Petrarchabout a deadone. By the f';rn of the fifteenth centuri', however, the irewest generaiionof humanistshad a dift'erentperspective. They criticized Petrarch'sLatin as insufficiently classical. More importantiy, the leading stylists and teacherswere predominantly Ciceronians. Whether they actually achieved their goal or not, Antonio Loschi, Gasparino Barzizza, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Vittorino da Feltre, FrancescoFilelfo, and George of Trebizond all sought to model their Latin on Cicero's. By the middle of the century the historian Flavio Biondo, no Ciceronian stylist himself, almost naturally equated the progress of humanism with the progess of Ciceronian studies. What looked like a sea change between the late Trecentoand the early Quathocento was, in fact, an evolution drawing out the consequencesof two fundamental Petrarchan premises: fust, that classical Latin was true Latin; and, second, that Cicero representedthe piruracle of classical Latin prose. Petrarch seemsto have denied that Latin changed during Antiquity, and he actually discouraged a friend from immersing himself in Cicero. But Petrarch was himself a conspicuousrepresentative of the surging cult of Cicero in fourteenth-century Italy. By the end of the century, as Flavio Biondo tells us, the itinerant teacher GiovanniConversiniofRavennaachievedfameprimarilyasanapostleofCicero.Indeed,in138l-s2FilippoVillanicouldthink of no better compliment to pay Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, than to call him "an ape of Cicero." Neither Conversini's nor Salutati in fact wrote especially Ciceronian Latin. But Salutati understood the consequenceof Petrarch's premises. He recognized that Latin prose must have developedover time, culminating in Cicero and the authors of Cicero's day before suffering a decline thereafter. Salutati shrank from the corollary implied by these premises. But the corollary was obvious ar;Ld,pace Salutati, younger humanists drew it out. If classical Latin had reacheda high point in Cicero, then it would be foolish for those reviving classical eloquence to imitate anyone but the best classical author or, at the very least, to imitate classical authors indiscriminately. By the early sixteenth century, the Roman cwial official Adriano Castellesi gave exact historical expression to this evolutionary understanding of Latin by dividing classical Latin into four periods: a tempus antiquissimum. up to Livius "perfect Andronicus; a tempus antiquum, up to Cicero; a tempusperfectum, the age" of Cicero, which Castellesifurther qualified as the golden age (tempus aureum); and a tempus imperfectum, which ran to the end of antiquity. We today heat the authors in the "perfect" cenhrry after Cicero as belonging to a Silver Age; but Castellani'ssharp division between and "imperfect" ages conveys exactly the conception he and his fellow Ciceronians had of the the development of the Latin language. Castellesi'smain target was the Apuleians, i. e., the contemporary humanists who in imitation of the third-century Latin author Apuleius cultivated a prose style featuring archaic and unusual words, poetic diction, and highly artificial constructions. But Castellesi'sunderlying pnnciple was more profound: if one defines proper Latin as classical Latin, then an eclectic Latin produces improper Latin since it coheres with any no period of classicalLatin; and if Cicero'sage was the classicalage of Latin p ar excellence,then neoclassicalLatin must coherewith Cicero'sLatin. Fifteenth-century humanists were also led to Ciceronianismbecause of a practical difficulty. If classicalLatin was a dead language,then, as Paolo Cortesi put it at the end of the fifteenth century, the humanists were in the position of pilgrims in a foreign land. They needed a sure guide in a world that was not their own. Even when Lorerzo Valla, the enfant terrible of Quattrocento humanism, swam against the Ciceronian tide and designatedQuintilian the prime touchstone of correct classical Latin, he only confirmed Cortesi's main point: one neededa pilot to navigate the foreign waters of classical Latin. The clearestexpression of this historical view of Latin is Giulio Camillo Delminio's Della Imitazionewritrenabout1530 in responseto Erasmus' Ciceronianus two years earlier. Significantly, as we shall see later on, Delminio had no compunction to defend Latin Ciceronianism by writing a treatise in Italian addressedto King Francis I of France. He beganby noting that Latin, iike all things of this world, had its rise, its midday zenith, and its setting. Since Latin was not spoken any more in the sensethat French is spoken,but is rather shut up in books and since he had available to him the Latin of its perfetto secolo, what right had he, a straniero, to mix the languageof the perfect age with that of other times and languagesand substitute hrs linguistic judgment to that of Cicero's, the most authoritative judge (gravrssimo giudico) of the language, least of all when Cicero was born into the language and lived when its greatesttalents flourished? Would not the French laugh at me, a straniero, if I went about creating a new Frenchvocabulary? Quite early on, interest in written classical Latin brought the humanists to the question of spoken classical Latin. Sicco Polenton, one of the earliest of the humanist commentators on Cicero's speeches,denied that the common folk could understand the complex Latin of the orator. Leonardo Bruni denied that they even spoke Latin. He believed that the educatedspoke Latin anLatins,both the Vulgar Latin of the proles andthe educatedcolloquial Latin of the elite. To be sure,we have many indicationsof what that speechwas iike, but we can never really duplicateit. The Latin of Plautus'and Terence'splays, for instance,is a literary constructand not a replication of ordinary Lath speech. Genuine spckenclassical Latin is dead,permanently. Bembo, the leadingCiceronian theorist of the early sixteenthcentury, followed up the implicationsof Filelfo's logic. On the -- one hand' he cultivated literary Italian indeed, he played a major role in regularizing it - and, on the other, he avoided speaking Latin. Consistent with that practice, he argued at the start of his Prose delli volgar lingua that just as the Romans had two languages, their native Latin and the Greek they leamed in school, so too Italians had two languages:one was ltalian, which was propria e naturale e domestica, the other Latin, which was istrana e non naturale, gotten out of books in school, and used exceptionally. It was impossibleto recovercolloquial classicalLatin, which, as Bembo noted in theprose, even in its educated form was not identical with the Latin of the preserved classicaltexts. Many Italian humanists disagreedwith Bembo about Italian as a literary language. Among contemporaries, Ciceronians such as Lazzaro Bonamico, Romolo Amaseo, and Bernardino Parthenio as well as the non-Ciceronian FrancescoFlorido led the fight to preserve Latin as the dominant literary and learned language.In the secondhalf of the century, Marc-Antoine Muret, Carlo Sigonio, and the Ciceronians Umberto Folieta, Quinto Mario Corrado, and AnastasioGermonio continued the struggle.yet, though some tried to speak Latin Cicerone, i. e., as Cicero would have done, most Ciceroniansseem to have concededgembo's point that Italian was the only viable colloquial languagethe Italians had. When Erasmuspilloried the Italian Ciceronians for their reluctance to speak Latin, his chief opponent, Etienne Dolet, acknowledged the fact. -into seventeenthcentury, in what effectively had become a rhetorical topos, the Ciceronian Andreas Schottuswas still defendingthe Italian Ciceronians against the chargeofbeing slow in sermofamiliaris. In contrast, Erasmus first wrote his Colloquia at the end of the fifteenth century in Paris precisely to promote facility in Latia conversation, which he believed could be made properly classical. Other humanisis wrote manuals of Latin conversationin the course of the sixteenth century, but not one was an Italian Ciceronian. Ciceronianism had consequencesfor how one viewed the vernacular, but, contrary to corffnon belief, in the caseof many Ciceroniansit meant embracing t6e vernacular as the ordinary language of discourse and also as a literary language. Ciceronians from Bembo and Delminio in the frst half of the sixteenth cenhry to Paolo Manuzio in the middle of the century to Carlo Beni in the early sevententhcentury wrote extensively in Italian. Far from being linguistic dinosaurs, many Ciceronians were in fact quite perceptive in their approach to language,and, in some instance,evenpartof theavant-garde. In the later sixteenthcentury, the Jesuit scholar and Ciceronian Edmund Campion updated Adriano Castellesi's four agesof Latinity by tacking on a fifth age. Campion placed the start of this new fifth age in the 1480s and traced its successthrough a seriesof Ciceronian authors down to his own day. eut the humanists Campion named at the start of his modern ciceronian heroes,Angelo poliziano, did not quite fit the mold. For all intents and purposes,Poliziano began the Renaissancecontroversy over Ciceronianism. About 1488, he attacked the Ciceronianism of the young humanistPaolo Cortesi. Cortesi had the courageto respond and the battle was joined. Sixty years earlier, in his lost De Comparatione Ciceronis Quintilianique of 1428, Loreruo Valla had challenged the reigning Cicerolatry. But we do not know exactly -- how Valla framed the comparison he may have merely arguedthat euintilian was a superior teacher ' In any event, his Quintilianism provoked no substantiveresponse apart from ,o111,irr.onrrquential grousingby Poggio Bracciolini who accusedvalla of being an enemyof cicero. At the end of the 1480s,however, Poliziano's rejection of Ciceronianismprovokeda consideredresponse. Seekingthe great man's blessing, Paolo Cortesi had sent Poliziano a collection of contemporaryCiceronian letters which he had gatliered together as a handbook of style. Poliziano returned the manuscript with an insulting letter, telling Cortesi that he had wasted his time. Far from being the Ciceronian that Cortesi had imagined him to be, Poliziano described Ciceronians as apes and pathetic beggars who could write only by sfringing together crumps they collected from the writings of their master. bonfident of his classical Latin, Poliziano issued his famous pronouncement: non sum Cicero; me exprimo. His Latin style was an original creation and not to be measuredby any Ciceronian yardstick. As is clear from his quarrelswith the Florentine chancellor Bartolomeo Scala a few years later, Poliziano bridled at suggestionsthat his Latin did not comeup to Ciceronianstandards. Earlier, about 1480,he had recommendedeclectic imitation to his students. When he refuted Scala'scriticism in L492,he explarnedthe languagetheory which undergirded his eclecticism. He argued that since Latin was a dead language,there was no current usageto blnd htm and he was free to employ any word or phrase he found among the classical authorsno matter how rare. He thus viewed contemporary wriften Latin as an artificial construct the working vocabulary was of which encompassedall Antiquity. No one moment rn Antiquity could provide norrnativeusase. Ironically, only a few yearsearlier, in 1485, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,whom Polizianopositively dotedupon, had arguedthat Latin could still be seenas a living language with a normative contemporaryusage. In an exchangewith the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, Pico made the observation that if languageis the product of hurnan convention and not nature, then all linguistic groups, including the medieval scholastics,could legitimately shapetheir languagesto suit their needs. If Barbaro .the refused to recognize scholastic Latin as conforming to the norms of Latin, then let him call it something else -- French, English,Spanish, or what people commonly call it, the Parisian[norm of Latin]." In other words, medievalicholastic Latin could legitimately departfrom ciassicalnorms becauseit was the expressionof a living linguistic community which was free to set its own linguistic standards.This sophisticatedview of languageenjoyed currency in Italy. It closely approximatesthe theorywhich inhis Dialogo delle lingue of 1542 SperoneSperoni attributedto his former teacher,the celebratedscholastic philosopher pietro Pompanazzi(d. 1525). But such a view of languagethat did sit well with the humanistssince it destroyedthe basis of their criticism of medievalLatin. Both Polizianoand Cortesiignored it. Instead,as we haveseen, Cortesi argued that modernsneeded a guide if they were to use classicalLatin in an authentic,coherent fashion. Exploiting a simile of the classicaleclectic Seneca, Cortesi further argued that the Renaissanceimitators of Cicero were not apes,but sons who, while remaining true to themselves, captured in their person something naftrral and characteristic of their parents. That is why Ciceronians could be the same in their model.but distinctli,'diffeient and iiidividuaiistic in tircir resuits. Not to pracriceimitation is to write Latin which is like a Jewish pawnbroker'shouse, filled with the goodsof othersplaced about in no coherentorder. Cortesi eloquently voiced the Ciceronian concern for a neoclassicalLatin that was coherently classicaland not a jumble of classicalvocabulary and usageswhich could never be found together at any one time in antiquity. Sh'angeto say, later in life Cortesi gave up Ciceronianism fJr Apuleisr4 the other competing school of imitation in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. The switch obviously reflected a change in Cortesi'sliterary tastes,but not necessarilya changein his theory of imitation sincehe was still following a classicalguide, in this case,Apuleius insteadof Cicero. After Poliziano' we have to wait more than twenty years before anyone again challenged Ciceronianism in wnting. The critic this time was Prince GianfrancescoPico della Mirandola, the nephew of Giovanni Piio. provoked by a discussionon imitation with the ciceronian Pietro Bembo in Rome in 1512,Pico wrote down his thoughtsin the form of a letter to Bembo. As Bembo pointedout in response,Pico was not very consistent.In the beginninghe recommindedthe imitation of ai1gooo writers; at the end he argued that Cicero imitated many authors; and in between he condoned imitating a single author as long"as one did not imitate his faults' However, for most of the letter Pico condemned imitation, citing approvingly plato's condemnaiion of imitators and insisting that the best classicalauthors, including Cicero, owed little or nothing to i-itution. Since classicalauthors had tried and failed to imitate Cicero, he asked, how can we succeed?Pico also struck a modernist note. He asked why we should we slavishly follow the ancients when we know many things of which they were totally ignorant. If anything, he contended, there is more talent around today than there was then. Even the fact that we use Latin moderately well proves our greater talent since Latin is not our mother tongue. The logic of Pico's argument should have led him to call for the replacementof Latin with the vernacular as the ordinary language of literature and learning. That was the conclusion Speroni later put in pompanazzi's mouth. It did not Iead to that conclusionfor Pico because he was not interestedin the vemacularvs. Latin debate.Rather, he was merely tossing up arguments as they came to hand in order to combat what really concernedhim, namely, the restrictive and unnatural consequences of Ciceronianimitation. So, anticipatingErasmus instead of Speroni,Gianfrancesco Pico arguedthat completeimitation of Cicero was impossiblebecause we carurotreproduce Cicero's person nor his historical setting. However, for Pico the fundamentalreason for rejectingimitation was not historical,but philosophical. We eachhave an innate idea (ldea) of eloquence proper to ourselves,he believed. This innate idea of eloquenceis what we must follow rather than try to imitate earlier authors. In a second letter to Bembo, after the latter had respondedto his fust, pico began more coherently by basing his case on this notion of an innate idea of eloquence which should diclate how we write. In support, he quoted Cicero, Orator 8, on the existence of a Platonic idea of eloquence. The odd thing is that despite his terminology i"a citations, pico,slcleq was not really a Platonic idea. Plato's idea was a universal concept,Pico's an innei imperative peculiir to each individual. One might bettercompare it to the Romantic notion of individual genius. In the second letter, Pico made fun of apish imitators who become tongue-tied when they cannot consult their authority; he also listed the admirableclassical and modernauthors who were not Ciceronians. In both instances,he anticipatedarguments of Erasmus. Pico published this exchangewith Bembo as part of a collection of his writings in 1518, adding the secondletter which Bembo never answered. The exchange apparently atlracted little attention since Erasmus did know of it until after he himself had published his Ciceronianus, sive De Optimo Dicendi Genere in March 1528, which is surprising since it was put out by Erasmus, publisherin Basel,John Froben, at a time when Erasmuswas in Basel (May 1518) and in contactwith Froben.The next edition of the Pico-Bembo exchange appeared in 1530. But by then the situation had changed. Erasmus' Ciceronianus of l52g had transformed a modest literary debate into a major controversy. I obviously cannot foilow controversy here. So I shall close by making three points: first, that despite the scorn they have received in modern times, RenaissanceCiceronians were in fact quite thoughtful linguistic theorists; second, that despite the brilliant successof Erasmus's Ciceronianus, it is easy to show with statistical, documentary, and literary evidence that Ciceronianism in a moderate guise remained the dominu.rt ,tylirti" influence upon Latin authors throughout the Renaissance;and, third, that Ciceronianism ceasedto be an issue only when Latin had ceasedto be the main vehicle of literary and scientific discourse,that is to say,when the Middle Ages ended.