Introduction: Cicero and the Decameron 1

NOTES Introduction: Cicero and the Decameron 1. For Boccaccio’s eulogy of Cicero, see De casibus, VI.xii. For another Boccaccian biography of Cicero and a listing of his major works, see Esposizioni sopra la Commedia, ed. Giorgio Padoan (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), Canto 4: litt. 327-31, pp. 251f.; English trans., Michael Papio, Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy (Toronto: U Toronto P, 2009), pp. 230-31. The sequence of chapters in Book VI of De casibus roughly follows the scheme of references in the opening of Cicero’s De legibus, with a chapter on Marius (VI. ii) followed by a chapter on Pompey (VI. ix) and one on Cicero (VI. xii). Both books link Marius and Cicero to the town of Arpinum. 2. Orator 78 was not available to Boccaccio in the original, but this senti- ment had been restated accurately by Augustine, De doctrina , IV. 10. 3. On copia, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Robert Grudin, On Dialogue (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), chapter 3 . 4. “ in hoc sumus sapientes, quod naturam optimam ducem tamquam deum sequimur eique paremus ” (I am wise because I follow Nature as the best of guides and obey her as a god), De Senectute , II.5, in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione , trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923), pp. 12f. Also see De officiis , I.xxix.100. 5. Cicero, De officiis [On Duties]; English trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913), I.iv.14, pp. 14–17: “Nec vero illa parva vis naturae est rationisque, quod unum hoc animal sentit, quid sit ordo, quid sit quod deceat, in factis dictisque qui modus. Itaque eorum ipsorum, quae aspectu sentiuntur, nullum aliud animal pulchritudinem, venustatem, convenientiam partium sentit; quam similitudinem natura ratioque ab oculis ad animum transferens multo etiam magis pulchritudinem, constantiam, ordinem in consiliis factisque conservandam putat cavetque ne quid indecore effeminateve faciat, tum in omnibus et opin- ionibus et factis ne quid libidinose aut faciat aut cogitet.” Subsequent citations of De officiis are from this edition. 6. Cicero, De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, English trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), De 152 NOTES inventione , I.ii.3, pp. 8f. See also De officiis, III.xvii.72. All subsequent citations from De Inventione are from this edition. 7. Respectively, in De planctu naturae and Le Roman de la Rose . See, e.g., De planctu, Prosa VIII, where Natura addresses Genius as “ sibi alteri similem ” (her other self) and Jean’s section of the Roman , where Reason, Nature, and Genius all appear as significant figures. 8. For an introduction to some of these Boccaccian sources, particularly in France, see Aldo Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages: An Essay on the Cultural Context of the Decameron (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), chapters 1 and 2 . On the fabliaux in particular, see Charles Muscatine, Medieval Literature, Style and Culture (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 164–70. Especially perti- nent is Muscatine’s comment that “the final preoccupation of the fabliaux is with engin (wit, cleverness) . Like other comic genres, the fabliaux are thus a mildly subversive literature . They favor the dispossessed, reward ingenuity at the expense of law and privilege, and suggest throughout that the conventional rules of morality and justice simply do not hold” (pp. 166f). Muscatine offers a more detailed survey of the fabliaux in The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 9. Giovanni Villani (1280–1348), Cronica , VIII. 10. Villani’s Chronicle , trans. Rose E. Selfe (London: Archibald Constable, 1906), pp. 312–13. Keys of the Tesoro is apparently a lost work. 10. Dante pays homage to Brunetto in Inferno XV, and Boccaccio acknowl- edges Brunetto’s achievements in his gloss on the same passage in Esposizioni sulla Commedia , as well as imitating the passage in De casibus , IX. On Brunetto’s accomplishments, see Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1979; rpt Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988), pp. 115–23; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics , vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 56; John M. Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 48f; Cary J. Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), esp. chapter 9: “Brunetto Latini’s Commercial Republicanism,” pp. 141– 59; and Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). Finally, the reader is forewarned that there are two works by Brunetto commonly referred to as Rettorica : a stand-alone version and the discourse comprising Book III of his Tesoro . Here we are referring to the stand-alone version. 11. Stephen J. Milner observes, “The reason why Latini’s reading of Cicero was so close and so attentive to the latter’s moralizing tone lay precisely in the parallels between their respective political positions in relation to political conflict and the social ordering of their respective polities. At a time of extreme political turbulence and at the very origins of the popular guild-based Florentine commune, the adversarial dimen- sion of the Ciceronian rhetorical paradigm, with its clear association between the rhetorical commentator and the vir bonus , was ideally suited NOTES 153 to Latini’s own political vision.” See chapter 13 , “Communication, Consensus and Conflict: Rhetorical Precepts, the Ars Concionandi , and Social Ordering in Late Medieval Italy,” in The Rhetoric of Cicero , p. 384. See also Milner’s essay, “‘ Le sottili cose non si possono bene aprire in vol- gare ’: Vernacular Oratory and the Transmission of Classical Rhetorical Theory in the Late Medieval Communes,” Italian Studies 64.2 (Autumn 2009): 221–44. 12. On tencione , see Virginia Cox, “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Italy, 1260–1350,” Rhetorica: A History of Rhetoric 17.2 (Summer 1999): 239–88; and Paola Sgrilli, “ Retorica e Società: Tensioni Anticlassichi nella ‘Rettorica’ di Brunetto Latini, ” Medievo Romanzo III (1976): 380–93. 13. Cicero treats religion directly in two late works, De natura deorum (45 BC) and De divinatione (44 BC). Both works display strong currents of skepti- cism. On the other hand, as De legibus II attests, Cicero was an energetic proponent of public religion. Throughout De legibus I he uses the idea of divinity theopoetically to support his theses about genius, language, reason, and nature. 14. Cicero, De re publica , in De re publica, De legibus, English trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1928), III.xii.33, pp. 210–11. This is one of the few fragments of Book III to have survived, in this case via Lactantius, and to have been available to Boccaccio. The full text reads: “Est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna, quae vocet ad officium iubendo, vetando a fraude deterreat; quae tamen neque probos frustra iubet aut vetat nec improbos iubendo aut vetando movet. huic legi nec obrogari fas est neque derogari ex hac aliquid licet neque tota abrogari potest, nec vero aut per senatum aut per populum solvi hac lege possumus, neque est quaerendus explanator aut interpres eius alius, nec erit alia lex Romae, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac, sed et omnes gentes et omni tempore una lex et sempiterna et immutabilis continebit, unusque erit communis quasi magister et imperator omnium deus, ille legis huius inventor, disceptator, lator; cui qui non parebit, ipse se fugiet ac naturam hominis aspernatus hoc ipso luet maximas poenas, etiamsi cetera supplicia, quae putantur, effugerit . ” ( Lactantius Insi. Div . VI, 8.6–9). For similar ideas, see De legibus , I.vii.22–23 to viii.24–25. Subsequent citations from De re publica and De legibus , unless otherwise noted, are from the Keyes edition. 15. Michael Grant, Cicero: Selected Works (London and New York: Penguin, 1971), pp. 24, 27. On the manuscript history of De legibus in fourteenth- century Italy, see Andrew Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De legibus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 40–42. On its renewed influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero , pp. 34–37. 16. “E, avvedendosi le poetiche opere non essere vane o semplici favole o maraviglie, come molti stolti estimano, ma sotto sé dolcissimi frutti di verità istoriografe o filosofiche avere nascosti.” Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante , ed. Luigi Sasso (Milan, 1995), p. 14; “And seeing that the 154 NOTES works of the poets are not vain and simple fables or marvels, as the foolish multitude thinks, but that within them are concealed the sweet fruits of historical and philosophical truth . ” Life of Dante , trans. J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus, 2002), p. 12. 17. Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium , ed. V. Zaccaria, vols. 7–8, Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Milan: Mondadori, 1983); trans. Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogiae Deorum Gentilium (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Library of the Liberal Arts, 1956), pp. 48, 52–54. 18. The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993), pp. 57f. 19. Although Kirkham’s working definition of allegory may seem rather general, it is borne out by Quintilian’s definition of the term (Inst. VIII 6, 44). Discussing Quintilian, as well as medieval theories of allegory, James C. Kriesel writes that “‘allegor y,’ as understood in the Middle Ages, is that which can communicate beyond its literal sense or be interpreted beyond its literal sense.” “The Genealogy of Boccaccio’s Theory of Allegory,” Studi sul Boccaccio 37 (2009): 197–226.

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