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Chapter 3 Speroni’s Practice of Sophistic

Speech is a powerful lord, who with the finest and most invisible body achieves the most divine works of Leontini. Encomium of Helen ∵

3.1 From Theory to Practice

Speroni’s literary production displays several examples of arguments, rhe- torical strategies, and tropes that are variously related to ancient sophistry. The works that we are going to examine in this chapter show that Speroni was interested not only in recovering ancient but also in experi- encing a full exploitation of their art. The following pages are dedicated to the most representative works in these respects. Two types of texts are dis- cussed. The first type uses the Protagorean double argument as a model of argumentation and, in fact, applies ’ and theory of the human being as a measure of all things. The second type is the so-called paradoxical dialogue, in particular the Dialogo della Discordia (a dialogue on discord) and Dialogo dell’ Usura (a dialogue on usury), which, I argue, draws on ancient sophistry as one of its main sources and encompasses discussion on major sophistic themes, such as the persuasive power of language and the use of the encomium to prove it. The practice of sophistry in these works is not a mere reproduction of the classics. Rather, it represents an original ver- sion of sophistic rhetoric in vernacular stemming from the profound knowl- edge that Speroni had of the matter and from his literary brilliance. Ancient sophistry and its early modern version share one feature that made them suspicious: they challenge and undermine the bases of both Platonism and . With his trattatelli, letters, and early dialogues, Speroni en- dorsed this challenge and provided some of the most enjoyable literature of the Renaissance.

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3.2 Antilogies

The sophistic Double Arguments (Dissoi Logoi) are a collection of ancient texts by a single author who argues for and against several opinions. Most likely written in the second half of the 4th century BCE by a rhetorician close to Protagoras’ school, they concern a variety of topics. They explore the nature of opposite concepts, such as good and bad, fine and shameful, just and unjust, and true and false.1 They were likely meant to be exercises for demonstrating how a skillful rhetorician is able to persuade his public of the validity and falsi- ty of any opinion at the same time. The result of this practice is a new concept of truth and a substantial negation of the principle of non-contradiction, one of the three columns on which founded his logic. Aristotle acknowledged the risk involved in practicing double arguments and rejected the Protagorean theory implied in them in his Metaphysics (IV 5, 1009a, 7–16; IV 4, 1007b, 18–23), saying that it would bring a general confusion on both the epistemological and ontological level and result in the impossibil- ity of reaching any certainty. In other terms, Protagoras’ antilogies, like other aspects and consequences of his thought, strongly support a skeptical position, which explains why discusses Protagoras’ perspective in his Outlines of (I, 216–19) as well as in Against the Mathematicians (VII, 60–4). Both Aristotle’s attack and Sextus’ interest make Speroni’s practice of the antilogic method not only remarkable in itself but also for its distance from Aristotle and its affinity with skepticism. After a survey of early modern edi- tions, MacPhail argued that “the Dissoi logoi had one edition but no transla- tion or commentary in the Renaissance.” Indeed, the 1570 edition of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Philosophers published by Henri Estienne (c. 1528–1598) in- cludes the Greek Dissoi logoi without Latin translation.2 Perhaps Speroni read the double arguments in the Greek edition, or he knew them through Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus. This first part of the chapter aims to present three dif- ferent examples of double argument in Speroni’s oeuvre to shed light on a sig- nificant part of his sophistic production. The first example concerns the opposition of arguments on an inter-textual level. On the one hand, as we have saw, Speroni defends sophists and their rhetoric in his trattatelli entitled In difesa dei sofisti and Contra Socrate; on the other hand, as we shall examine, he attacks them in his Discorso dei lodatori, a

1 They are collected in J. Dillon and T. Gergel (eds.). The Greek Sophists (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 318–333. 2 E. MacPhail. The Sophistic Renaissance (Genève: Droz, 2011), 41.