THE FIRST CHRISTIAN DEFENDER OF STOIC VIRTUE? JUSTUS LIPSIUS AND CICERO’S PARADOXA STOICORUM Jan Papy* Know then this truth (enough for Man to know) “Virtue alone is happiness below”. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, 4.309-310. CICERO’S PARADOXA STOICORUM: A CONTENTIOUS ISSUE If Sabbadini was right to label Erasmus’s Ciceronianus, published in 1528, “a decisive work with respect to the long controversy over the imitation of Cicero as a writer and stylist”, Erasmus’s famous dialogue was, so it appeared, as deci- sive for a new sort of criticism addressed to the “philosopher Cicero”.1 For whereas Celio Calcagnini (Ferrara, 1479 - Ferrara, 1541), then professor at the University of Ferrara, called into question 25 places of Cicero’s De officiis in his Disquisitiones aliquot in libros officiorum Ciceronis of 1538,2 Marcanto- nius Majoragius (Ferrara, 1514 - Ferrara, 1555) published an open attack against Cicero as philosopher eight years later. His lively Christian Platonist dialogue, which purports to have been held in the suburbs of Milan in the gar- den of the Fannianus family – thus subtly echoing the setting of Cicero’s Tus- culanae disputationes – was entitled Antiparadoxon because of the fact that Majoragius had attacked Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum as invalid on two counts: they were not Socratic (in the way the Florentine Platonists Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Agostino Steuco understood “Socratic”), and they were not true since Cicero’s method of argument and argumentation was false, ignorant and unskilful.3 Once again Majoragius, stating that a rhetorician is not * Research for this article was facilitated by a “Joint Activities Grant” awarded by The British Academy (2001-2004). I wish to record my gratitude to Prof. dr Jill Kraye (The Warburg Institute, London) for helpful comments and suggestions. 1 R. Sabbadini, Storia del Ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterari nell’ età della Rinascenza (Torino, 1885), p. 60. 2 J. Papy, “Calcagnini, Celio (1479- 1541)”, in Centuriae Latinae II. Cent une figures humanistes de la Renaissance aux Lumières. A la mémoire de Marie-Madeleine de la Garanderie, ed. C. Nativel (Genève, 2006), pp. 161-166. 3 See Q. Breen, “The Antiparadoxon of Marcantonius Majoragius or, A Humanist Becomes a Critic of Cicero as a Philosopher”, Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958), pp. 37-48. 140 JAN PAPY likely to be a good philosopher, agreed with Pico’s celebrated letter to Ermolao Barbaro4: “You may have a great store of words, you may excel in the free flow of words, you may discharge whole wagonloads of trifles, but you should un- derstand that by so many tricks you conclude nothing”.5 Worse, according to Majoragius, however, was Cicero’s hostility towards the Platonists together with his attempts to insult the majesty of Plato and to pervert the truth: that is the reason why Majoragius’s Antiparadoxon was embellished with numerous Christian Platonist views on the divine mind as Christ, the body as prison of the soul, the freedom of man, and true riches. Moreover, those who deny a future life or say man can be happy only in this life, are condemned by Majoragius to be burned alive and in full consciousness (vivus vidensque).6 TOWARDS A “CHRISTIAN” READING OF THE PARADOXA STOICORUM: THE COMMENTARY TRADITION However much Sabbadini and Breen were right to see Erasmus’s Ciceronianus as a catalyst in this philosophical debate, it has to be emphasised that important traces of this discussion can equally be discerned in sixteenth-century editions and commentaries of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum. Whereas the editio princeps (Mainz, 1465) and the various subsequent fif- teenth-century editions had only offered Cicero’s Latin text and, in some cases, the explanatory notes by Petrus Marsus (Pietro Marso; Cesa 1442 - Rome 1512)7 – yet all these without any precise reference to ancient Greek sources – it was Franciscus Maturantius (1443-1518) who was the first to offer a true scholarly commentary. Moreover, in his commentary, which was first pub- lished in 1506, Maturantius explained the Stoic backgrounds to the text in greater detail. Indeed, he even quoted important elucidating passages from Cicero himself, Diogenes Laertius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Isocrates, Juvenal, Seneca, and Epicurus in the Latin or Greek original.8 4 See Q. Breen, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on the Conflict of Philosophy and Rhetoric”, Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), pp. 385-426. 5 Antonius Majoragius, Antiparadoxon, sive suburbanarum quaestionum libri sex, in quibus M. Tullii Ciceronis omnia paradoxa refelluntur (Lyon: S. Gryphius, 1546), pp. 158-159. Translation taken from Breen, “The Antiparadoxon of Marcantonius Majo- ragius” (as in n. 3), p. 47. 6 Majoragius, Antiparadoxon (as in n. 5), pp. 67-79; 187-199; 227-231. The passage on burning at the stake can be read at p. 76. 7 These were published in Cologne (1467), Rome (1469), Venice (1470, 1472, 1474, 1477, 1480, 1482, 1484, 1486, 1487, 1488, 1491, 1492, 1494, 1496, and 1498-1499), Milan (1474, 1476, 1478, 1480, and c. 1490) and Louvain (1483). See the survey offer ed by M. V. Ronnick, Cicero’s «Paradoxa Stoicorum»: A Commentary, an Interpretation and a Study of Its Influence (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 170-199. 8 We have not been able to consult the first edition published in 1506 in Venice by J. de Tridino. For this reason we have used the following later edition: Ciceronis De Offi- ciis libri III, Cato maior vel De senectute, Laelius vel De amicitia, Paradoxa Stoicorum .