Petrarch, Vol. Petrarch, loc. It may, perhaps, prove interesting to the reader to see by what epithets Nero is referred to in the Octavia.
Seneca, De clementia , i, 11, While speaking of your clemency, no one will dare, in the same breath, to mention the name of the deified Augustus. As for me, I do not call exhausted cruelty mercy. This, O Caesar, this which you exhibit is true mercy—which conveys no idea of repentance for previous barbarity, which is immaculate, unstained by the blood of fellow-citizens.
And Nero, who could learn at least those sayings of his tutor that suited his fancy and served his purpose, thereupon replies in terms identical with those used by Seneca in De clementia , i, 11, Granted that the Octavia was written by Seneca, this discussion gives a very human touch to the relationship between the subject and his sovereign. It is very probable that Petrarch received the first suggestion of the friendship between the philosopher and the apostle from the statement of St.
Jerome, De viris ill. Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, disciple of Sotion the Stoic and uncle of the poet Lucan, was a man of the most temperate life. I should not place him in the catalogue of saints, were it not for those letters, which are read by so many, of Paul to Seneca and of Seneca to Paul. In these Seneca, though the tutor of Nero and the most powerful man of his age, says that he wished he held the same position among his fellow-men that Paul held among the Christians.
He was killed by Nero two years before Peter and Paul received the crown of martyrs. The correspondence referred to in the above is mentioned also by St. Augustine, Ep. It consists of fourteen letters, which are given in the Teubner edition of Seneca, Vol. The wish said to have been expressed by Seneca is to be found in Ep. The letter, however, which Petrarch seems to have had in mind—the one describing the persecution of the Christians in Rome—is Ep.
Greetings, Paul most dear. Do you suppose that I am not saddened and afflicted by the fact that torture is so repeatedly inflicted upon the innocent believers of your faith?
Let us bear it with equanimity, and let us persevere in the station which fortune has allotted, until happiness everlasting put an end to our suffering. Former ages were inflicted with Macedon, son of Philip, with Dareius and Dionysius. Our age, too, has had to endure a Caligula, who permitted himself the indulgence of every caprice. It is perfectly clear why the city of Rome has so often suffered the ravages of conflagration. But if humble men dared affirm the immediate cause, if it were permitted to speak with impunity in this abode of darkness, all men would indeed see all things.
It is customary to [Pg 68] burn at the stake both Christians and Jews on the charge of having plotted the burning of the city. As for that wretch, whoever he is, who derives pleasure from the butchering of men and who thus hypocritically veils his real intentions—that wretch awaits his hour.
Even as all the best men are now offering their lives for the many, so will he some day be destroyed by fire in expiation of all these lives. One hundred and thirty-two mansions and four blocks of houses burned for six days, and on the seventh the flames were conquered. I trust, brother, that you are in good health. Written on the fifth day before the Kalends of April, in the consulship of Frugus and Bassus.
The fourteen letters are today considered fictitious. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen [London, ], 4th ed. Thy rare integrity, thine activity, and the great splendor of thy name urge me to love and in fact revere thee. There are some, indeed, whom we love even after their death, owing to the good and righteous deeds that live after them; men who mold our character by their teaching and comfort us by their example when the rest of mankind offends both our eyes and our nostrils; men who, though they have gone hence to the common abode of all as Plautus says in the Casina [50] , nevertheless continue to be of service to the living.
Thou, however, art of no profit to us, or, at best, of only small profit. But the fault is not thine—it is due to Time, which destroys all things.
All thy works are lost to us of today. And why not? Thou didst dedicate thyself to the pursuit of knowledge with incredible zeal and incomparable industry, and yet thou didst not for [Pg 70] that reason abandon a life of action.
Thou didst distinguish thyself in both directions, and deservedly didst become dear to those supremely eminent men, Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Thou art deserving of great praise not only for thy genius and for thy resolve to keep both mind and body in unremitting activity, but also for having had the power and the wish to be of service both to thy age and to all succeeding ages. But alas, thy works, conceived and elaborated with such great care, have not been deemed worthy of passing down to posterity through our hands.
Our shameless indifference has undone all thine ardor. Never has there been a father ever so thrifty but that an extravagant son has been able to squander within a short time the accumulated savings of years. But why should I now enumerate thy lost works? Each title is a stigma upon our name. It is better, therefore, to pass them over in [Pg 71] silence; for probing only opens the wound afresh, and a sorrow once allayed is renewed by the memory of the loss incurred. But how incredible is the power of fame!
The name lives on, even though the works be buried in oblivion. We have practically nothing of Varro [52] , yet scholars unanimously agree that Varro was most learned. It is as if the splendor of thy name had dazzled him; as if, in speaking of thee, he had lost sight of the principles of his school. Among thy countless admirers, however, two stand out pre-eminently: one is he whom I have already mentioned, thy contemporary, [Pg 72] thy fellow-citizen, and thy fellow-disciple, Cicero, with whom thou didst exchange numerous literary productions, thus devoting thy leisure moments to a useful occupation, in obedience to the precepts of Cato.
Augustine, African by birth, in speech Roman. Would that thou hadst been able to consult him when writing thy books on divine matters! Thou wouldst surely have become a very great theologian, seeing that thou hadst so accurately and so carefully laid down the principles of that theology with which thou wert acquainted.
It has been written of thee that thou wert such an omnivorous reader as to cause wonder that thou couldst find any time for writing, and that thou wert so prolific a writer as to make it scarcely credible to us that anyone could even have read all that thou didst write. But I remember having seen some a long time ago, [60] and I [Pg 73] am tortured by the memory of a sweetness tasted only with the tip of the tongue, as the saying goes.
I am of the opinion that those very books on human and divine matters, which greatly increased the reputation of thy name, are still perchance in hiding somewhere, in search of which I have worn myself out these many years. For there is nothing in life more distressing and consuming than a constant and anxious hope ever unfulfilled.
But enough of this. Be of good cheer. Treasure the moral comfort deriving from thy uncommon labors, and grieve not that mortal things have perished. Even while writing thou must have known that thy work was destined to perish; for nothing immortal can be written by mortal man. Forsooth, what matters it whether our work perish immediately or after the lapse of a hundred thousand years, seeing that at some time it must necessarily die?
There is, O Varro, a long line of illustrious men whose works were the result of an application equal to thine own, and who have not been a whit more fortunate than thou. And although not one of them was thy peer, yet thou shouldst follow their example and bear thy lot with greater equanimity.
Let me enumerate some [Pg 74] of this glorious company, for the mere utterance of illustrious names gives me pleasure. With the exception of the first two, their very names are scarcely known today. Pray greet them in my name, but alas, with thy lips. I do not send greetings to the Caesars Julius and Augustus and several others of that rank, even though they were devoted to letters and very learned, and though I know that thou wert very intimate with some of them.
It will be better, I am sure, to leave the sending of such greetings to the emperors of our own age, provided they are not ashamed of their predecessors, whose care and courage built up an empire which they have overturned. Farewell forever, O illustrious one. Written in the land of the living, in the capital of the world, Rome, which was thy fatherland and became mine, on the Kalends of November, in the year from the birth of Him whom I would thou hadst known, the thirteen hundred and fiftieth.
Plautus, Casina , Prol. Varro may have been represented by either the De re rustica or the De lingua latina , or by parts of both. In a letter of thanks for this favor, Petrarch draws a parallel between the two authors which is well worth quoting Fam. No words that I might pen would prove equal to your kindness, and I feel sure that I should tire of expressing my appreciation much sooner than you of bestowing favors.
I have received yet another book from you, containing some of the excellent and rare minor works of both Varro and Cicero. Nothing could have pleased nor delighted me more, for there was nothing that I more eagerly desired. What made the volume still more precious to me was that it was written in your hand. Blush not at being classed with such illustrious men,. You express admiration for those writers who flourished in the period of classical antiquity, the mother of all our studies—and rightly so, for it is characteristic of you to admire what the rabble despises and on the contrary to disdain what it so highly approves of.
Yet the time will come when men will admire you perchance. Indeed, already has envy begun to signal you out. Men of superior intellect always meet with ungrateful contemporaries, and this ingratitude, as you are well aware, greatly depreciated for a time the works of the ancient authors. But fortunately succeeding generations, which at least in this respect were more just and less corrupt, gradually restored them to their place.
You showed, moreover, keen discrimination in gathering within the covers of one book two authors who, in their lifetime, were brought into such intimate relationship by their love of country, their period, their natural inclinations, and their thirst for knowledge. They loved each other and held each other in great esteem; many things they wrote to each other and of each other.
They were two men with but one soul; they enjoyed the instructions of the same master, attended the same school, lived in the same State. In short, they lived together in the best of harmony.
And believe me, you could bring together few such men [Pg 78] from all ages and all races. To follow common hearsay, Varro was the more learned, Cicero the more eloquent. However, if I should dare to speak my own say as to ultimate superiority, and if any god or man would constitute me judge in a question of such great importance, or rather would, without taking offense, deign to listen to a voluntary judgment on my part, I should speak freely and as my reason dictates.
Both men are indeed great. My love and my intimate knowledge of one of them may, perhaps, deceive me. But the one whom I consider in every sense superior is—Cicero. Alas, what have I said? To what yawning precipice have I ventured? Oh well, the word has been spoken, the step taken.
And may I be accused of great rashness rather than of small judgment. Without seeking them at all, the following have been encountered in the preparation of these notes. Augustine, De civ. The only variation between these two passages is that Petrarch has substituted for the simpler statement of St.
Augustine the figure of the dazzling light. Petrarch, however, did not have a first-hand acquaintance with the Ac. According to Ancona-Bacci Vol. Hence it results that Rer. I, 2 was based on St. Augustine, and Fam. Augustine distinctly says, De civ. Lactantius, Divin. Varro, quo nemo umquam doctior ne apud Graecos quidem vixit, in libris rerum divinarum quos ad C. Caesarem pontificem maximum scripsit. III :. And although Varro is less pleasing in his style, he is imbued with erudition and philosophy to such an extent that in every branch of those studies which we today call secular and which they were wont to call liberal, he imparts as much to him who is in pursuit of knowledge as Cicero delights him who is desirous of excelling in the choice of words.
This entire section VI, 2 is a panegyric, and proves St. Augustine a great admirer of Varro. Quintilian, Inst.
Petrarch Vol. But the words of the poet, although to a certain extent ambiguous, certainly do not warrant the interpretation generally assigned to them, nor does there seem to be any good foundation for the story that these and other works of Varro were destroyed by the orders of Pope Gregory the Great, in order to conceal the plagiarism of St.
And, to the opposite effect, J. Symonds, The Revival of Learning , Scribner, , p. With this sentiment compare the words of another enthusiastic humanist, John Addington Symonds, who writes Preface, op. I had formerly heard of thy name, and had read something of thine, wondering whence it was that thou hadst gained renown for keen insight.
It is but recently that I have become acquainted with thy talents. Thy work entitled the Institutes of Oratory has come into my hands, but alas how mangled and mutilated! O slothful and haughty Age, is it thus that thou dost hand down to us men of genius, though thou dost bestow most tender care on the unworthy?
O sterile-minded and wretched men of today, why do you devote yourselves to learning and writing so many things which it were better to leave unlearned, but neglect to preserve this work intact? However, this work caused me to estimate thee at thy true worth.
As regards thee I had long been in error, and I rejoice that I have now been corrected. I saw the dismembered limbs of a beautiful body, and admiration [Pg 85] mingled with grief seized me. In these books whose number I am ignorant of, but which must doubtless have been many thou hast had the daring to probe again a subject treated with consummate skill by Cicero himself when enriched by the experience of a lifetime. Thou hast accomplished the impossible. Thou didst follow in the footsteps of so great a man, and yet thou didst gain new glory, due not to the excellence of imitation but to the merits of the original doctrines propounded in thine own work.
By Cicero, the orator was prepared for battle; by thee he is molded and fashioned, with the result that many things seem to have been either neglected or unheeded by Cicero. Cicero guides his orator through the laborious tasks of legal pleading to the topmost heights of oratory.
He trains him for victory in the battles of the courtroom. Thou dost begin far earlier, and dost lead thy future orator through all the turns and pitfalls of the long journey from the cradle to the impregnable citadel of eloquence.
The genius of Cicero is pleasing and delightful, and compels admiration. Nothing could be more useful to youthful aspirants. It enlightens those who are already far advanced, and points out to the strong the road to eminence. Thy painstaking earnestness is of assistance, especially to the weak, and, as though it were a most experienced nurse, offers to delicate youth the simpler intellectual nourishment.
But, lest the flattering remarks which I have been making cause thee to suspect my sincerity, permit me to say in counterbalancing them that thou shouldst have adopted a different style. Indeed, the truth of what Cicero says in his Rhetorica is clearly apparent in thy case, namely that it is of very little importance for the orator to discourse on the general, abstract theories of his profession, but that, on the con [Pg 87] trary, it is of the very highest importance for him to speak from actual practice therein.
I have compared this magnificent work of thine with that book which thou didst publish under the title De causis. In such comparison it becomes plain to the minds of the discerning that thou hast performed the office of the whetstone rather than that of the knife, [67] and that thou hast had greater success in building up the orator than in causing him to excel in the courts. Pray do not receive these statements in bad part. Thou wert a great man, I acknowledge it; but thy highest merit lay in thy ability to ground and to mold great men.
If thou hadst had suitable material to hand, thou wouldst easily have produced a greater than thyself, O thou who didst so wisely develop the rare intellects intrusted to thy care!
There was, however, quite a jealous rivalry between thee and a certain other great man—I mean Annaeus Seneca. Your age, your profession, your nationality, even, should have been a common bond between you; but envy that plague among equals kept you apart. In this respect I think that thou, perhaps, didst exercise the greater self-restraint; for, whereas thou canst not get thyself to give him full praise, he speaks of thee most contemptuously.
I myself should hesitate to be judged by an inferior. Yet, if I were constituted judge of such an important question, I should express this opinion. Seneca was a more copious and versatile writer, thou a keener; he employed a loftier style, thou a more cautious one.
Furthermore, thou didst praise his genius and his zeal and his wide learning, but not his choice nor his taste. Thou dost add, in truth, that his style was corrupt, [Pg 89] and vitiated by every fault. For he passed away under Nero, whereas thou didst go from Spain to Rome under Galba, when both Seneca and Nero were no more. After many years thou didst assume charge of the grandnephews of Emperor Domitian by his express orders, and becamest sponsor for their moral and intellectual development.
I have nothing more to say. I ardently desire to find thee entire; and if thou art anywhere in such condition, pray do not hide from me any longer. Written in the land of the living, between the right slope of the Apennines and the right bank of the Arno, within the walls of my own city where I first became acquainted with thee, and on the very day of our becoming acquainted, [72] on the seventh of December, in the thirteen hundred and fiftieth year of Him whom thy master preferred to persecute rather than to profess.
Lapo di Castiglionchio gave Petrarch a copy of the Institutes in For further details see n. How very much like a prophecy this reads! In a footnote of the Latin edition Vol. The Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini, while attending the Council of Constance in the capacity of apostolic secretary, found this copy in an old tower of the monastery of St.
It is, perhaps, the same as the one now preserved at Florence—the Codex Laurentianus. The story of the discovery is well told in a letter by Poggio. This letter gives such a [Pg 91] faithful picture of the enthusiasm of the humanists, and is of such great interest that, although rather a long letter, it has been thought best to give a translation of it here in full from the Latin text of Jacques Lefant, Poggiana , Part IV, pp.
I am well aware that, in spite of your constant occupations, the receipt of my letters is always a source of great pleasure to you—so great is your politeness and singular kindness to all. I beg of you, however, to be particularly attentive in reading the present. I beseech you the more urgently, not because I am the possessor of that which even the most learned of men may be anxious to share, but rather out of respect due to that which I am going to tell you.
I feel certain, since you are so pre-eminently learned, that the news will bring no slight enjoyment to you and to the other scholars. For tell me, pray, what is there, or what can there be more pleasing, or agreeable, or acceptable to you and to others than the knowledge of those things by the study of which we become more learned and what is of even greater moment more discriminating in our likes and dislikes?
Our great parent, nature, gave to the human race a reasoning mind, which we are to consult as our guide in the conduct of a good and happy life, than which nothing better could be imagined. I am not so sure but that, after all, by far the most extraordinary gift of nature is the power of speech, without which the reason and the intellect were of no avail.
Speech, in giving external expression to the workings of the mind, is the one faculty which distinguishes us from other creatures. We should therefore consider ourselves under deep obligation to all those who have developed the liberal arts, but under deepest obligation to those who, by their patient and unremitting study, have handed down to us the rules of oratory and the norms of correct speech.
In short, although mankind is especially superior to all other living creatures through its use of speech, these scholars have striven that in just this respect men should excel themselves. Many illustrious Roman authors devoted themselves to the study and to the development of the human speech, as you know. Chief and foremost among them was M. Fabius Quintilianus, who describes the method for the development of the perfect orator with such clearness, and with such characteristic carefulness that, in my opinion, he lacked nothing as regards either the broadest knowledge or the highest eloquence.
Even if we possessed nothing of Cicero, the father of Roman eloquence, we should still attain to a perfect knowledge of correct speech with Quintilian alone as our guide.
Hitherto, however, among us and by this I mean among us Italians Quintilian was to be had only in such a mangled and mutilated state the fault of the times, I think , that neither the figure nor the face of man was to be distinguished in him. A grievous fact, indeed, and an insufferable, that in the foul mangling of so eloquent a man we should have inflicted such great loss upon the domain of oratory.
But the greater was our grief and our vexation at the maiming of that man, the greater is our present cause for congratulation. Thanks to our searchings, we have restored Quintilian to his original dress and dignity, to his former appearance, and to a condition of sound health. See Sabbadini, op. Forsooth, if M. Tullius rejoices heartily in having secured the return of M. Marcellus from exile, and that too at a time when there were at Rome many other Marcelli who were just as good men, just as prominent and well known both at home and abroad, what are the learned men of today and especially students of oratory to do, seeing that this matchless glory of the Roman name because of whose loss nothing was left except Cicero , and that this work, which but recently was so mangled and fragmentary, have been recalled not merely from exile but from utter destruction?
By Hercules, unless we had brought him aid in the nick of time, he would have died shortly. There is not the slightest doubt that that man, so brilliant, genteel, tasteful, refined, and pleasant could not longer have endured the filthiness of that dungeon, the squalor of that place, and the cruelty of those jailors.
He was [Pg 94] dejected and shabby in appearance, like unto those who have been condemned to death. His beard was unkept, and his hair matted with blood. He seemed to stretch out his hands to me, to implore the assistance of the Quirites to protect him against an unjust judge. He seemed to be making an accusation, in that he, who once had been the means of safety to so many with his resourceful eloquence, could now find not a single patron to take pity on his misfortune, not one who would consult for his safety or prevent his being led out to an unmerited end.
Often by mere chance, things come to pass which we do not dare to hope for, as Terence says [ Phormio , 5, 1, vss. And so Fortune and not so much his as ours would have it that, when we found ourselves at Constance with nothing to do, a sudden desire should seize us of visiting the place where Quintilian was imprisoned—the monastery of St.
Gall, twenty miles away. And so several of us proceeded thither [among whom Bartolomeo da Montepulciano and Cencio Rustici: Sabbadini, op. There, among crowded stacks of books which it would take long to enumerate, we discovered a Quintilian, still safe and sound, but all moldy and covered with dust. For the books were not in the library, as their merit warranted, but in a most loathsome and dreary dungeon at the very foundations of one of the towers—a place into which not even those awaiting execution would be thrust.
I for one feel certain that if there were any today who would tear down these barbarian penitentiaries in which such men are held prisoners, and would submit them to a most careful search, as our predecessors did, they would meet with the same good fortune in the case of many authors whose loss we now mourn.
In addition to the Quintilian, we discovered the first three books and half the fourth book of the Argonauticon of C. Valerius Flaccus [books i-iv, Sabbadini, op. Asconius Pedianus, a very eloquent man mentioned by Quintilian himself. All these I transcribed with my own hand, and somewhat hastily [the Quintilian in thirty-two days, Burckhardt, p. You have now, my dearest Guarino, all that could be given to you, for the present, by one who is most devoted to you.
I wish I could have sent to you the book as well. But I had to please our Leonardo first. Still, you now know where it is to be had, so that if you really want to have it which I should judge to be as soon as possible , you can easily obtain it.
Fracassetti translates this passage, Vol. He says Vol. Non tamen ut ille [i. This work has sometimes been wrongly identified with the Dialogus de oratoribus , which was not known until the fifteenth century.
The De causis mentioned by Petrarch must be a reference to the collection of Declamationes which in the Middle Ages passed as the work of Quintilian P.
Horace, Ars Poetica , , These criticisms are to be found in Quintilian, book x. Since Petrarch uses almost the same words, and in fact quotes verbatim [Pg 97] in the last instance, the tenth book or at least this portion of it must have been part of the Quintilian given him by Lapo di Castiglionchio see n. Petrarch says Vol. Asprenas aut Quintilianus senex declamaverit: transeo istos quorum fama cum ipsis extincta est. Petrarch has simply confused the two, not being aware of the existence of the latter.
Furthermore, the elder Seneca died before or about the time that Quintilian was born. The Italian version wrongly gives Vol. Plutarch, Moralia ed. Gregorius N. Bernardakis , Vol. I therefore congratulate you upon your merits, and myself upon my good fortune, provided that in the exercise of your power you exhibit the same justice and honesty which have earned it for you.
Otherwise I am sure that you will be exposed to serious dangers, and that I shall be subjected to the criticism of my detractors. For Rome cannot tolerate worthless emperors, and men, in their gossiping, are wont to heap upon teachers the faults of their pupils. In consequence, Seneca is justly censured by those who detract from his Nero, Quintilian is justly charged with the rash acts of his wards, and [Pg 99] Socrates is justly accused of having been over-indulgent with his pupil.
For elsewhere, in speaking of the same occurrence, Fracassetti says Vol. I should wish if it were permitted from on high either that I had been born in thine age or thou in ours; in the latter case our age itself, and in the former I personally should have been the better for it. I should surely have been one of those pilgrims who visited thee.
For the sake of seeing thee I should have gone not merely to Rome, but indeed, from either Gaul or Spain I should have found my way to thee as far as India.
We know that thou didst write one hundred and forty-two books on Roman affairs. With what fervor, with what unflagging zeal must thou have labored; and of that entire number there are now extant scarcely thirty. Oh, what a wretched custom is this of wilfully deceiving ourselves!
I find, however, that even from these few there is one [Pg ] lacking. They are twenty-nine in all, constituting three decades, the first, the third, and the fourth, the last of which has not the full number of books.
Often I am filled with bitter indignation against the morals of today, when men value nothing except gold and silver, and desire nothing except sensual, physical pleasures. If these are to be considered the goal of mankind, then not only the dumb beasts of the field, but even insensible and inert matter has a richer, a higher goal than that proposed to itself by thinking man. But of this elsewhere. It is now fitter that I should render thee thanks, for many reasons indeed, but for this in especial: that thou didst so frequently cause me to forget the present evils, and transfer me to happier times.
It is with these men [Pg ] that I live at such times and not with the thievish company of today among whom I was born under an evil star. And Oh, if it were my happy lot to possess thee entire, from what other great names would I not seek solace for my wretched existence, and forgetfulness of this wicked age! Since I cannot find all these in what I now possess of thy work, I read of them here and there in other authors, and especially in that book where thou art to be found in thy entirety, but so briefly epitomized that, although nothing is lacking as far as the number of books is concerned, everything is lacking as regards the value of the contents themselves.
Pray greet in my behalf thy predecessors Polybius and Quintus Claudius and Valerius Antias, and all those whose glory thine own greater light has dimmed; and of the later historians, give greeting to Pliny the Younger, of Verona, a neighbor of thine, and also to thy former rival Crispus Sallustius. Tell them that their ceaseless nightly vigils have been of no more avail, have had no happier lot, than thine.
Written in the land of the living, in that part of Italy and in that city in which I am now living and where thou [Pg ] wert once born and buried, in the vestibule of the Temple of Justina Virgo, and in view of thy very tombstone; [77] on the twenty-second of February, in the thirteen hundred and fiftieth year [78] from the birth of Him whom thou wouldst have seen, or of whose birth thou couldst have heard, hadst thou lived a little longer.
Petrarch briefly relates the same story in Rer. In what rank, indeed, will Titus Livy be placed, whose great reputation for eloquence drew illustrious and admiring men from the remotest corners of the globe all the way to Rome? This is related by Pliny, and in later years it was repeated by St. Jerome in the beginning of his preface to the book of Genesis, placed thus at the beginning that no one might be excused for being ignorant of it. How great must have been the excellence of that work, when, over immense distances of land and sea, men rushed to the mistress of the world, to that city which held sway over conquered nations, not to accomplish any urgent business transaction, not because of a desire to see the city itself and that, too, such as it must have been under Caesar Augustus , but that they might see and hear that single one of its inhabitants.
Pliny tells the story in Ep. The reference to St. Jerome is Ep. Petrarch therefore must have had the letter of St. Jerome in mind, or before him. In his own letter to Livy, Petrarch mentions both Gaul and Spain. In Pliny there is mention of Cadiz only.
Both Gaul and Spain, however, are mentioned by St. Jerome, who, therefore, must have been the source for both the passage in the Rer. The passage in St. Jerome reads as follows, Vol. XXII, col. Migne :. Livium lacteo eloquentiae fonte manantem, de ultimis Hispaniae Galliarumque finibus quosdam venisse nobiles legimus; et quos ad contemplationem sui Roma non traxerat, unius hominis fama perduxit. Habuit illa aetas inauditum omnibus saeculis celebrandumque miraculum, ut urbem tantam ingressi, aliud extra urbem quaererent.
Finally, that this passage from St. Jerome was the source used by Petrarch is proved also by Sen. Jerome records having read that certain prominent men undertook the long journey from the furthermost limits of Spain and the two Gauls to Rome merely to see Livy. Do you for a moment suppose that there was [Pg ] insufficient cause, not merely for these few men, but indeed for the whole world to rush thither, that they might see the man with their own eyes and hear him with their own ears?
I shall here omit styling him a pure fountain of eloquence, as St. That we can easily believe of so great a man. But why, then, were you so friendly with Augustus? What answer can you give to Brutus? If you accept Octavius, said he, we must conclude that you are not so anxious to be rid of all tyrants as to find a tyrant who will be well-disposed toward yourself. Now, unhappy man, you were to take the last false step, the last and most deplorable.
You began to speak ill of the very friend whom you had so lauded, although he was not doing any ill to you, but merely refusing to prevent others who were. I grieve, dear friend, at such fickleness. These shortcomings fill me with pity and shame. Like Brutus, I feel no confidence in the arts in which you are so proficient.
What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions? How much better it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to have grown old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself have somewhere said, upon the life that endures for ever, and not upon this poor fragment of life; to have known no fasces, yearned for no triumphs, found noCatilines to fill the soul with ambitious longings!
All this, however, is vain. Farewell, forever, my Cicero. Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of the Adige, in Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy; on the 16th of June, and in the year of that God whom you never knew the th. If my earlier letter gave you offence-for, as you often have remarked, the saying of your contemporary in the And a is a faithful one, that compliance begets friends, truth only hatred-you shall listen now to words that will soothe your wounded feelings and prove that the truth need not always be hateful.
For, if censure that is true angers us, true praise, on the other hand, gives us delight. You lived then, Cicero, if I may be permitted to say it, like a mere man, but spoke like an orator, wrote like a philosopher. It was your life that I criticised; not your mind, nor your tongue; for the one fills me with admiration, the other with amazement.
And even in your life I feel the lack of nothing but stability, and the love of quiet that should go with your philosophic professions, and abstention from civil war, when liberty had been extinguished and the republic buried and its dirge sung. See how different my treatment of you is from yours of Epicurus, in your works at large, and especially in the De Finibus. You are continually praising his life, but his talents you ridicule.
It is from this memorable year that modern knowledge of Cicero dates. To previous ages he had been superhuman, 'the god of eloquence', free from all mortal weakness. Petrarch now found that his idol was a mortal man, weak, timorous, and vacillating. He wrote a famous letter, dated June , from 'Franciscus Petrarcha among the living' to Cicero in which he records his emotions.
He says:. I heard thee speaking at length, making many complaints, oft changing thy tone, Marcus Tullius. Long ago I had known thee as the counsellor of others, now at last I know what thou wert unto theyself.
Listen in thy turn, wheresoever thou art, to this lament, I will not call it counsel, prompted by true love, which one of thy posterity, devoted to thy name, pours forth amid his tears. Thou ever restless and anxious, or to quote to thee thine own words thou headstrong and ill-starred elder, what hadst thou to do with all this strife and with feuds which could not profit thee? Why did the false glamour of glory entangle thee when old in the battles of younger men, and after a stormy career drag thee to a death unworthy of a philosopher?
Alas, forgetful of thy brother's advice and all thy own sound maxims, like a wayfarer at night bearing a lantern in the darkness, thou didst shew a path to them that were to follow, and didst thyself stumble in piteous fashion. He winds up by saying: 'I grieve as a friend for thy sake. I am ashamed and sorry for thy errors, and, like Brutus, I set at nought the accomplishments for which I know thee to have been 'so remarkable.
What good is it forsooth to teach others, 'to speak ever in flowery language about the virtues, if thou dost not meanwhile listen to thyself? How much better it would have been, for a philosopher above all men, to have grown old in the quiet of the country, thinking, as thou thyself sayest somewhere, of the eternal life, not of this short one here; never to have held the fasces, to have coveted triumphs, to have been puffed up with the thought of Catiline? But this is now too late.
Farewell for ever, dear Cicero. Written among the living, on the right bank of the Adige, in the Italian city, Verona, beyond the Padus on the 16th of June, in the year after the birth of the God whom thou knewest not. Image Source: upload.
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