Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France

Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France Author(s): J. H. M. Salmon Reviewed work(s): Source: The American Historical Review, Vol.
85, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 307-331 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1860558 . Accessed: 25/11/2012 11:26
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Ciceroand Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France

J. H. M. SALMON
model to humanIN EARLY SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Cicero seemed a perfect
both philosoembodying scholasticism through a rhetoric istswho challenged by a moralstyle was accompanied for Ciceronian phyand history. Admiration as thepurveyor and a respect for Cicero,thephilosopher, izingcivichumanism wisdom. At theend ofthecentury Tacitushad becomea moreimporofGreek orator and virtuous influence, whiletheideal oftheactivecitizen tantlinguistic the and withdrawal. had been replacedby one ofStoicfortitude Tacitus, histoofprivate and public ofliberty, emerged as theexemplar rianofthecorruption and a reinterpreted Cicerowas relegated to the roleof a minorpreprudence, in linguistic and This parallelshift structures cursorin prudential morality. warsin thestresses of thereligious result from moralideologies did notsimply ofthe ofthecentury. consequence It was also,in part,a long-term thelastthird fromItaly of a debate about the extentto whichCicero earlierimportation of in thecontext shouldbe imitated-a debatethatattaineda new dimension Otherelements to thedemiseof Ciceronian theReformation. thatcontributed apin the new historical implications humanism were not only the relativist proachto law but also the logicof PeterRamus,who,whilepleadingforthe rhetoric from itscomdisjoined unionofeloquenceand philosophy, effectively in reaction movement to rivalreligious As theneo-Stoic developed ponent parts. and the literary modelsof Tacitus and Seneca invadedLatinity enthusiasms, politics Ciofabsolutist In thenewclimate left their markupon thevernacular.'
prudentiae. yielded place to Tacitus, pater cero,patereloquentiae,
This article is based on a lecture delivered to the Mid-Atlantic branch of the Renaissance Society at Bryn Mawr College on October 21, 1978. My thanks are due to Felix Gilbert, Donald R. Kelley, and Arnaldo Momigliano for the helpful criticismsthey made of a revised draft. 'There is no easy way to find logical connections between the estheticsof style and the shiftingideological denies undRezeptiondsthetik assumptions of the French Renaissance. The Constance school of Rezeptiongeschichte to place it in dialectical relationsynchronicvalue and meaning to a literarywork and proceeds relativistically ship with the chain of works that preceded and followed it as well as with the interpretationsof suiccessive generationsof readers. The extent to which a work alters the thresholdof the reader's expectation provides the hrunig (Constance, criterion for esthetic appraisal; see Hlans Robert jauss, Kleine Apologieder dsthetischen ErJz als Provokation (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1974). As its practitioners have admitted, 1972), and LiteraturgeschiIchte there are problems in applying this approach to a period when the literature of classical antiquity was regarded as an absolute standard forimitation. Nevertheless,the veryintensitywith which a particular classical style is defended can provoke reaction when the image of its exemplar is altered to fitthe changed moral attitudes of a new age. Therefore, I will use a complementary method that traces tensions between rhetoric and
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This exercisein counterpointis not intended to explain more than a limited number of elementsin an exceedinglycomplex movementof modes and ideas.2 Yet in these termsthe juxtaposition of Cicero and Tacitus seems more suggestive than the many separate studies that have related Cicero to French humanism in the first two-thirds of the centuryand have traced connections between Tacitism and raison d'etatafterthe religiouswars. In particular,the use that is made of both Latin authors in the intervalbetween these two periods is imporof the shiftin emphasis fromone to the other.It may tant foran understanding also be that preoccupation with particular disciplines has impeded a grasp of the broader significance of the changing Renaissance view of the classical world. Concern with the role of Cicero in humanistscholarshiphas been more obvious in studiesof Renaissance rhetoric and philosophythan it has been in surveysof and politics.The reversehas been true of modern workson attitudesto history the influenceof Tacitus, where his relationshipto various strandsof Machiavellism has seemed of primaryimportance. Moreover, it is easy to find in Livy a historicalcounterpartto Ciceronianism and in Seneca a philosophical counterpart to Tacitism. The apparent connectionsbetween the stylistic revolutionand neo-Stoicismhave been tentatively explored,4and several scholars have examined the relativepopularityof Livy, Polybius,Tacitus, and otherclassical historians during the Renaissance.' What is attempted here is, on the one hand, more ambitious in its scope and, on the other,more eclectic in its exemplification.
MISCONCEPTIONS BORN FROM TIIE DESIRE TO SIMPLIIY
of literarymode. Cicero's styleis by no means as monolithicas the Ciceronianus debate might at times suggest.The easy discursiveness of the Epistolaead familiarescontrastsmarkedlywith the balanced rhythmsof De oratore. Within the
moral philosophy and links changes in linguisticstructureto shiftingmoral priorities.Unconscious and emotive assumptions preceding rhetorical utterance can be seen in such circumstances to affectformand content in historyand political thought. Generic changes are likely to occur both in periods of political crisis and in theiraftermath,whenianalytic thouight achieves new insightsand rhetoricbecomes formalized.These generalizations apply to Greece in the ages of Pericles, Thucydides, and Demosthenes and to Rome in the last throes of republicanism. They have been shown to be particularly relevant to Florentine humanism in the fifteenth in theRenaisrsance: century; see Nancy S. Struever, 7he Languageof History Rhetoric and HistoricalConsciousness in Florentine 1970). Here I have applied them to sixteenth-century hIumanism France. (Prinicetoni, ' Attemlpts to capture this conmplexity in full may be self-defeating; see, forexample, Jean Jehasse, La RenLEIssor de I'humanisme alssancede la critique: irudit de 1560 a 1614 (Lyon, 1976). s Andre Stegmann, "Un theme majeur du second humanisme franqais, 1540-1570: L'Orateur et le citoyen," in Peter Sharratt, ed., French Renai'ssance Studies,1540-1570: lHumanism and theEncyclopedia (Edinburgh, 1976), 213-33. On Tacitism, see Else-Lilly Etter, Tacitusin derGeistesgeschichte des 16. und 17.Jahrhunderts (Basel, von Stackelberg, Taci'tus in derRomania(Tuibingen, 1960); Andre Stegmann, "Le Tacitisme," in 1966); Jiurgen e Atntimachiavellici his Machiavelli.smo nel Cinquecento (Florence, 1969), 117-30; Etienne Thuau, Raisonditat et penseepolitique a l'epoque de Rishelz'eu (Paris, 1966), 32--54;and Giuseppe Toffanin,Machiavellie il 'Tacitismo'(Padua, 1921). For a recent survey,wider in period than its title suggests,see Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitusin Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago, 1976). t Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert 0. Evanis (Princeton, 1966). Peter Burke, "A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Hlistorians,1450-1700," IIistory and Theory, 2 (1966): 135-52; Arnaldo Momigliario, "Polybius' Reappearance in Western Europe," in Olivier Reverdin, ed., Polybe on Euro(Geneva, 1974), 347-72; and J. fH.Whitfield,"Livy > Tacitus," in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences A.D. 1500-1700 (Cambridge, 1976), 281-93. pean Culture,
readilyinvade discussion
Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France
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one should distinguish speeches themselves between the richAsianism of Pro Milone, the middle styleofAtticantithesis in ProCaelio,and the "lean and energetic" vigor of the Philippics." Like Cicero, Tacitus knew that the stylehe adopted for was quite unsuited to rhetoric.In the sixteenthcenturysome Tacitean history because it scholarsrefusedto accept Tacitus as the author of Dialogusde oratoribus seemed so out of characterwith the Tacitus theyknew.7Trained as an orator in his youth,Tacitus was just as concerned about the decay of eloquence since Ci: cero's age as he was about the decline of historyin the sycophanticclimate of alterimperial authority.Yet Tacitus, in his view of both oratoryand history, nated between indignationagainst the processof corruptionand decay and acceptance of change forits own sake: Aper, one of the charactersin the Dialogus, criticizesCicero and argues also that all thingsare relativeand each generation has its own fashions.8 Cicero's opinions on history were even betterknown than those of Tacitus on rhetoric.In De oratore he called upon the historianto tell the truth,the whole and nothingbut the truth.No one was betterqualified than the orator to truth, lightthe lamp of the past as a guide throughpresentdarkness,and yet the style of history was not that of rhetoric.9 In Brutus, of Roman oratory,Cihis history cero praised the simplicity of Caesar's Commentaries: "They are bare, simple and and devoid of all ornament. But, while Caesar wished to prestraightforward, serve the materials fromwhich others mightwrite history, he did a service for who burn holes in them by tryingto twistthem into new those clumsy writers shapes with curling tongs. So great is his achievement that it deterredmen of good sense fromwriting,for there is nothing in historymore agreeable than pure and shining brevity."'0Although Jean Bodin and Montaigne cited this passage, theytook less account of Cicero's descriptionof how otherkindsof historyshould be written, notably the dramatic account of a single event like Sallust's Conspiracy of Catilineand the high-flown Asianism of later annalist technique, a formthat Livy perfected.Together with Lucian's De scribenda historia and the appraisal of Thucydides by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero's remarkson history in his threemature workson rhetoric formedthe lociclassicifor Renaissance scholars who sought the views of the ancients on historyand its style." Cicero wroteno history, but fewwere ignorantof the privilegedplace he ascribed to it. Without history, men would remain forever children. Three paradoxes withinthe Ciceronian corpus were transmitted unrealised to the humanism of the Renaissance. First,although prudence was itselfa traditional virtue,temperingthe ideal to the practical demands of circumstancesand
" R. G. M. Nisbet, "The Speeches," in T. A. Dorey, ed., Cicero(London, 1965), 47-49. 7Tacitus, Dialogue des orateurs: Dialogus de oratoribus, ed. Hlenri Goelzer (Paris, 1947), 4. o Ibid., xvii. '} Cicero, De oratore libritres, ed. Augustus S. Wilkins (Amsterdam, 1962), 2: 36 (p. 245), 62 (p. 258). Also See Pierre Boyance, Etudessur l'humanisme ciceronien (Brussels, 1970), 136. ed. A. E. Douglas (Oxford, 1966), 262, 75. "'Cicero, M. Tulli Ciceronis Brutus, " Michel Montaigne, Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols., 1 (Paris, 1962): theEasy 458; and Bodin, Methodfor Comprehension trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1969), 56; and Claude-Gilbert Dubois, La ConcepofHi'story, en Franceau XVI siecle (Paris, 1977), 72. tionde l'histoire
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weakadvocating the expedient,as Cicero did in the second book of De officiis,12 ened the moralityof the common good. Second, behind the active role that Cicero forthe most part commended to the citizen lay the alternativeconcept of the contemplativelife,which pervaded his philosophical worksat the end of his writtenin the same career and also appeared in the Stoic elementsof De offiejis, if it also maintained the virtue could not teach simply period. Third, history it was standardsof objective truththat Cicero recommended.To later historians apparent fromhis lettersto Atticus that Cicero had himselfat times allowed ambition to bend the path of duty. The methods of the legal humanists involved historical relativism,and they valued Cicero's speeches and lettersas sources forthe science of philologyand the understandingof Roman law in the Even so, it seldom occurred particularsocietyin which it had reached maturity. to them that this societyhad not always lived up to Cicero's ideals. Although,as philoloThere was a fourtharea in which vision was restricted. gists,the legal humanistswere sensitiveto neologismsand changes in grammathey oftenjudged them by fixed standards of eloquence. Thus tical structure, of legal humanist method and the severLorenzo Valla, at once the progenitor est criticof Latinity,was more indignant at the barbarismsin the language of Yet Valla, Bartolus than he was at the great commentator'slack of historicity. Quintilian in mattersof style,although no slavish admirer of Cicero, preferred Quintilian was himself generous in Cicero's praise. The wide popularity in aroused latinae contributedto the controversy linguae France of Valla's Elegantiae of Erasmus."3Valla feltno attractionto the styleof Tacitus, by the Ciceronianus century. who in any event was littleknown in the fifteenth The first legal humanist to referfavorablyto Tacitus in this respectwas Andrea Alciato, and even he once described the historian'sprose as "a thicketof thorns."Alciato published his edition of Tacitus's worksin 1517, declaring him to be the best of Roman historians.Moreover,he saw in Tacitus a guide to conduct in the face of evil princes, advocating a private prudence that complemented the concept of prudence Guillaume Bude found in Cicero. For all this,it is doubtfulwhetherAlciato, when he began to teach at Bourges in 1529, broughtwith him any enthusiasmforTacitus except as an importantsource for the historyof Roman law, and even there he made far greateruse of Cicero. Alciato's mentor,Bude, who embodied all the paradoxes of civic humanism in its French guise, had no time at all forTacitus, calling him "omnium scriptorum perditissimus"in the light of his denunciation by the Church Fathers, Orosius and Tertullian."4Bude admired Cicero without imitatinghis styleand
12 In the third book of De Cicero attempted to reconcile utile with honestum. Most modern comofficiis mentators have assumed that Cicero subordinated utileto the common good, which is in itselfa moral concept. A recent interpretation, however, reversesthese priorities.Whether or not this was Cicero's intention,it was certainly seen this way by some Renaissance writers.See Maria L. Colish, "Cicero's De Offciisand Machiavelli's Prince,"Sixteenth-Century Journal, 9 (1978): 81-93; and pages 323-24, below. '" Donald R. Kelley, Foundations ofModern Historical (New York, 1970), 26. Many of the Paris ediScholarship tions of Elegantiaewere produced by Bude's publisher,Josse Bade. On the role of Valla's textbook in the Ciceronianusdebate, see Augustin Renaudet, Erasmeet l'Italie (Geneva, 1954), 203. 14 Peter Burke, "Tacitism," in T. A. Dorey, ed., Tacitus(London, 1969), 149; and Schellhase, Tacitusin RenaissancePolitical Thought, 87.
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felt that, in introducingGreek philosophy to the Romans, Cicero had anticipated his own vocation in respectof the French. Bude filledhis Commentarii linguaegraecae with Ciceronian citations. du Prince, addressed to Francis I, Bude used Cicero to associate In his Institution rhetoricand history,observing that "the fatherof Latin eloquence" had deof human life,and mistress scribed history as the "witnessof time,lightof truth, messengerof antiquity." Bude recommended that the king make historyhis It was a mirrorin which the presentreflected the past: "great mistress."'5 By itsconsideration men can greatly acquireprudence and better deal withaffairs at hand in thecounsels of princes, as we see happening every more day. There is nothing for important menofdiscretion thanto understand thestateoftheworldand condition of humannatureand to foresee what may come to pass and how to provideforit or forestall it.This is whathistorians teach.Prudence is acquiredin thiswayby theman of in reading goodjudgment and reflecting about thepast and present of the government worldand how all kingdoms and greatmonarchies have met theirend and by what have fallen intodifficulty have longbeen preshortcomings they or bywhatmeansthey in powerand prosperity....Prudence and maintained served comesforthemostpart from experience and from observing thoseexamplesin thepast for whichhistory serves as register.' In the precedingpassage Bude had explained how rhetoricrequired knowledge of history, togetherwith "a stylegracefulthroughnature and ready invention, and the discretionand prudence to adapt what is said to the audience and the of the occasion."'7 Prudence in rhetoric circumstances was the abilityto take account of the particular,and prudence in history was to understandthe particularityof eventsand to apply to them general rulesof human behavior in the interestof the public weal. It was this aspect of Cicero that was seized upon and later in the century, distorted when Ciceronian stylewent out of fashionand the Tacitean mode gained ascendancy. Bude representedthe type of early French humanism that accepted authorityin the prince and preached virtuein the citizen. Rhetoric,philosophy,and historywere associated means to this end, and the worksof Cicero seemed its perfectinstrument. Tacitus, on the other hand, was distrusted and littleknown in France at this time.
THE PUBLICATION of Erasmus's satirical dialogue, Ciceronianus, in 1528 exposed
the tensionswithinthe French versionof civic humanism. It was not, of course, the initiationof a new controversy. about Cicero Following Valla's reservations in fifteenth-century Italy and his exchanges on that subject with Poggio Bracciolini, Poliziano had advised the reader to choose frommany models, whereas his critic,Cortesi,insistedupon the stylistic pre-eminenceof Cicero. Then Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had taken a stand similarto Poliziano's, while Barbaro had followedCortesi. In the next generationthe youngerPico, Gianfranl Bude, Institutzon du Prince(1524), ed. Claude Bontems, Le Prince dans la Francedes XVI' et XVIIP siicles (Paris, 1965), 87. This passage is a direct translation of Cicero; see his De oratore, 2: 36 (p. 245)-see note 9, above. I I Bude, Institution 17 Ibid., 89. du Prince, 90-91.
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cesco, supported his uncle, and Bembo earned a reputation as the archetypal Ciceronian.'8 In thesedebates, formand contentreceiveddifferent priorities, and rhetoricdrew apart fromphilosophy.The Ciceronianus transferred the quarrel to France at a time of religiouscrisis.Perhaps Erasmus, afterhis editingofJerome, recalled the dream in which the saint found his Christianityat odds with his worshipof Cicero.'9 In his preface Erasmus turned a northern knifein an open wound. "What a loss to scholarship,"he wrote,"if one began by sayingthat Cicero alone should be imitated. I suspect that under cover of his name another matteris at issue: I mean, to make us forget Christ and lead us back to paganism. But, formy part, no task is more necessarythan to consecrategood letters to the gloryof Christ,our Lord and Master." This was the same evangelismthat had moved Erasmus to declare in his Paraclesis that the eloquence of Cicero was far less to be preferred than that of the gospel.Y? It seemed a gratuitousinsult to couple this accusation in the preface with a slightupon the pious masterof French humanism,Guillaume Bude, who twelve years earlier had extravagantlypraised Erasmus's Greek New Testament to which the Paraclesis servedas introduction. Erasmus's last letterto Bude in 1528 was a sad piece, denyingany intendedslur upon French learning.He wrote also to Louis de Berquin, the translatorof Luther, to explain that,when the text of Ciceronianus had ranked the Parisian publisher,Josse Bade, before his patron Bude, the speaker had been the ridiculous arch-Ciceronian, Nosoponus, not Bulephorus,who represented Erasmus's own opinions in the dialogue.2' Circumstances destroyedthe point of this apology. A few months later, in April 1529, the bigots of the parlement finallyaccomplished the execution of Berquin for heresy,and not long afterthat Bude issued his Commentarii linguae graecae, where Cicero, Greek philosophy,and Christianhumanism were mingled withoutovert incongruity. Erasmus, the editor of De offiais in 1507 and Tusculanae in 1523, disputationes did not intend to denigrate Cicero but merelyto ridicule those fanatical worshippers who allowed no other standard of Latinity. While he was being denounced in France, Erasmus continued his amiable correspondencewith the Italian Ciceronians,Bembo and Sadoleto, and dedicated his 1532 edition of St. Basil to the latter.22 The most vicious of his French criticswas a then obscure Agenais physician named Jules-Cesar Scaliger, whose two invectives against Erasmus, published in 1531 and 1537,23 launched him upon his career as a scholar of internationalreputation. More importantto the presenttheme was
18 Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del Ciceronianismo (Turin, 1885), 25-50; Eduard Norden, Die antike vom Kunstprosa V. Chr.bis in die Zeit derRenaissance, VIJahrhundert 2 (Leipzig, 1898): 773-79; and Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Ciceroas a ModelforStyle(New York, 1910), 10-22. 19 M. L. Clarke, "Non Hiominis Nomen sed Eloquentiae," in Dorey, Cicero, 87. 2(1 Erasmus, De recta latinigraecique sernonis pronuntiatione: Dialogus Ciceronianus (Lyon, 1531), 150; and Emile V. Telle, L'Erasmianussive Ciceronianus d'EtienneDolet (Geneva, 1974), 32. 21 Erasmus, La Correspondance d'Erasmeet de GuillaumeBudi, ed. Marie-Madeleine de la Garanderie (Paris, 1967), 263-64. For the links between Erasmus and Berquin, see Margaret Mann, Erasme et les dibutsde la Riforme fran(aise(Paris, 1934), 113-49. 22 Renaudet, Erasmeet l'Italie, 218. 23 Scaliger, Oratio pro M. TullaoCicerone contra Erasmum Roterodamum (Paris [1531]), and Adversus Des. Frasmi ... Ciceronianum oratio dialogum secunda(Paris, 1537).
France and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century Cicero
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temthe attack of Etienne Dolet, whose burning ambition and nonconformist perament involved him in one feud afteranother. Tainted with accusations of heresy,Dolet fled fromToulouse in 1534 aftera brush with the judges of the as "robed vultures"and "superstiwhom he labeled indiscriminately parlement, tious Turks."24At Lyon he was welcomed under the sign of the phoenix and Sebastien Gryphe,who published Dolet's winged orb of the bookseller-printer Gryphe had issued a new edition of the two discoursesagainst the magistrates. Ciceronianus correctedby Erasmus in 1531 and, in his anxiety to stirthe profittwo diarevocatus, Cicero had just printedCicero relegatus, able pot of controversy, logues by Ortensio Landi, an Italian exile in France. Dolet had in his possession a Ciceronian Latin counterpart latinae, linguae the manuscriptof his Commentarii to Bude's introductionto Greek letters.While Dolet went to Paris to obtain a privilegeforhis masterpiece(arrivingtherein the midstof the stormcreated by Protestantplacards), Gryphebegan to set up the textof the postingof extremist It apa new reply to Erasmus adapted fromseveral entriesin the Commentarii. Erasmum Desiderium adversus Ciceroniana peared in 1535 as Dialogus de imitatione Longolio.25 Roterodamum pro Christophoro Longolius, or Longueil, was a Ciceronian protegeof Bembo much reveredby Dolet. A new and posthumousedition of his worksin 1526 may have provoked His published lettershad accused the sage Erasmus to compose the Ciceronianus. of Rotterdam of Lutheranism and compared his scholarshipunfavorablywith that of Bude. AssumingLongueil to be the model forNosoponus, Dolet inserted into his own dialogue Longueil's friendand Dolet's masterat Padua, Simon de Neufville.Through the mouths of Villanovanus (Neufville) and his foil Morus of Erasmus's friend, Sir Thomas More, then awaiting exe(a deliberatetravesty cution in the Tower of London), Dolet vilified the character and works of Erasmus. Afterthe latter'sdeath Dolet also responded to an Italian defenderof to AlFloridus Sabinus, who, oddly enough, had been secretary the Ciceronianus, berto Pio, prince of Carpi, the anti-Erasmian. There was little but personal abuse in this polemic coupled with praise of Bude and Poliziano and a note of respectforthe shade of Erasmus.26 Dolet published his replyto Sabinus on the press he had recentlyestablished at Lyon, and in the followingyear, 1541, he issued his own edition of Valla's Elegantiae.It was almost as if Dolet, beset by foes among humanists of both camps as well as defendersof scholastic method, was tryingto shelterbeneath past authority.Scaliger pursued him with implacable hatred. Led by Jean Visagier and Gilbert Ducher, the circle of Latin poets also united against him, inand Antonio cluding Hubert Sussannee, the author of a Ciceronian dictionary, de Gouvea, who later opposed the Ciceronianismof Ramus. Nor did Dolet find support fromthe legal humanists,with whom in his early years he had shown an affiliation. Jean de Boyssone,the disciple of Bude and friendof Alciato who
Dolet (Paris, 1930), 56. Marc Chassaigne, Etienne Dolet, 40-42. d'Etienne Telle, L'Erasmianussive Ciceronianus 26 Ibid., 35-36; and Dolet, StephaniDoleti Galli Aurelliliberde imitatione Sabinum Floridum Ciceroniana adversus (Lyon, 1540), 7, 54. Dolet apologized for calling Erasmus "delirans senex batavus."
24 25
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had been expelled from his chair of Roman law because of accusations of to Boyssone,Dolet was probably his protectorat Toulouse. In his letters heresy, and he had once writtento Bude expressingthe had denounced the Bartolists, hope that he could study under Alciato.27But Alciato came to professimpapreoccupations,and Dolet in his last yearssided with tiencewith Valla's literary Valla, symbolizingthe growingdivorce between literaryand legal humanism. While Alciato became more concerned with historythan with philology and used literarytextspurely to exemplifyaspects of Roman society,Dolet turned excellence and into a grammarianwho subordinated historicaltruthto literary Christian to pagan inspiration. Dolet's device on the titlepage of the workshe published as a printerin Lyon consisted of a hand holding an axe to trim the branches of a fallen tree. The punning mottoread, "Scabra et impolita adamussim Dolo atgue perpolio" ("accurately,do I hack and level rough and unpolished pieces"). His axe sought to lop offFrench humanism fromits evangelical stem. Among the many classical As stories and Rhetorica. worksthat issued fromhis press were Cicero's Tusculans circulatedabout his unbelief,he put tongue in cheek and supportedhis vigorous an attempt,dedicated to a book as bizarre as CatoChristianus, denials by printing Sadoleto, to explain Christian doctrinewith the aid of an archpagan moral rea adfamiliares, former. Dolet also began to translateinto French Cicero's Epistolae task that, when completed by the historian Belleforestin 1565, was accompanied by the latter'swarning to the reader that his predecessorhad been "un contains a preface to imitateurtrop severe." Dolet's French edition of Tusculans in Lyon were falselyaccusing him of Francis I pleading that his fellowprinters competitor.Nonetheless,Dolet's version heresyin orderto eliminate a successful of the soul in this same of the text in which Cicero questioned the immortality volume contains added ambiguity.Here, too, are remarksabout Roman use of Doand Greek association of prudence and rhetoric.28 prudence in government not of was let's attitude to Cicero suggeststhat Erasmus's reproach paganism debate reveals the entirely wide of its mark. His involvementin the Ciceronianus tensionswithin the French humanism of the time. Erratic, perverse,and eternally enigmatic,Dolet met his cruel death in the Place Maubert in 1546, but it is not only forhis martyrdomthat he deservesto be remembered. The year of Dolet's execution was a turningpoint in Ciceronian scholarship for another reason. In 1546 Pierre de la Ramee (Ramus) published De studiis et eloquentiae quaeshis commentary on Brutus(Brutinae conjugendis, philosophiae which bears the name on the title page of and Dialecticaeinstitutiones, tiones), Ramus was in search of a singlelogical method Omer Talon, Ramus's acolyte.29 that he hoped to apply to all of the disciplinesof the liberal arts. Some of his
27 Lucien Febvre, Le Probleme de l'incroyance au XVI' siecle:La Religionde Rabelais (1942; Paris, 1968), 51-61; and Chassaigne, EtienneDolet, 23-29. de Latin en Francois. . ., trans. ... traduites 28 Cicero, Les Epistres de Marc Tulle Ciceron pered'eloquence familieres de M T. and Les Qyestions tusculanes au lecteur, Dolet and F. de Belleforest(Paris, 1566), unpaginated advertisement de la au mespris et contemnnement passiond'esprit, etparvenir tres utileet necessaire d toute vitieuse pourresister Ciceron: Oeuvre mort (Lyon, 1543), 2-20. 29 Walter J. Ong, Ramus-Method and theDecay ofDialogue: FromtheArtofDiscourse to theArtofReason (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 30.
and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France Cicero
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a fifdialectica, inspirationwas derived fromRodolphus Agricola's De inventione teenth-century treatiseon the logic of disputation aimed at scholasticism.But, ultimately,Ramus's systemprobably stemmed fromCicero's remarksin Brutus (discoveryof mateon the traditionaldivision of rhetoricinto fiveparts: inventio or (style), pronuntiatio (arrangement),elocutio rial or general arguments),dispositio actio(delivery),and memoria (memory).30 the first two elementsto The new method consistedessentiallyin transferring logic and using them as a means of proceeding fromthe general to the specific analysis. Only style and deliveryremained to rhetoric, by way of bifurcatory while recollectionor narration dropped fromconsideration.Although Ramus and rhetoric appeared to be might pretendto conjoin philosophyand rhetoric, his startingpoint, he advanced to a position in which dialectical logic became the queen of the sciences and rhetoricwas reduced to a matter of technique. Moving logic and dialectic back to philosophy thus recreated an essential element in the attitudes of the schoolmen. These changes reversedthe priorities that the Ciceronian humanistsheld dear-for rhetoricwas no longer the dominant discipline that could gather othersbeneath its roof-and Ramus accomplished it all in Cicero's name. In so doing, he changed the entireconcept of the union of citizen and orator.As Ramus gradually refinedhis method,he altered his stance fromedition to edition of his worksuntil the dialectical systemcame (or reto consistof fourparts:invention, and definition disposition, distribution, become that in his lecconstruction). So fixedin its final formdid thisstructure ture De logicae Ramus declared that,whateverthe part of the world in definitione and whatever the which men dwelt, whatever theircustoms and governments, rhetores, poetae,historici, divisions of knowledge they chose to admit (grammatici, arithmetici., all were obliged to follow"the musici, astrologi, physici, geometrici, ethici), one law and reason postulated in the dialectic."31 Ramus's dramatic flairand arrogantsingle-mindedness provoked intenseopfrom fellow all Ciceronians and of the followersof Aristotle,whom position Ramus had denounced. The resistancewithinthe Ciceronian movementto Dolet's attempt to isolate lettersfromother humane studies was carried over into the struggleto preventRamus fromimposingupon them a method supposedly derived fromCiceronian premises.Antonio de Gouvea, one of Dolet's critics, played the major part in the commission that resulted in the royal edict of March 1544, which censured Ramus for"temerite, arrogance, et impudence." While officiallysuspended from public teaching in the years that followed, Ramus continued to compose workson Cicero and Quintilian that exemplified his system,including many commentarieson Cicero's speeches and philosophiAfterthe advent of Henry II in 1547, the suspensionwas lifted,and cal treatises. Ramus, with strongsupport in the royal entourage,made new convertsin the of eloquence and and the university. His appointmentas joint professor parlement rephilosophyat the College Royal in 1551 enabled him to initiateinstitutional
3" Ramus, Brutizaequaestiones, orationes octoconsulares, ed. Freigius (Bain Ciceronis in his PetriRami praelectiones see Douglas, Introduction to sel, 1575), 472. For a list of Cicero's referencesto the five divisions in Brutus, xxxi. Brutus, 31 Ramus, Scholaein liberales artes(1569), ed. Walter J. Ong (Hildesheim, 1970), 30.
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forms of the liberal arts and provoked new waves of opposition. Pierre Galland, the conservativerectorof the university and an early criticof the Brutinae quaesled the outcry, describing Ramus as "a harpy that fouls all that he tiones, touches" and "a viper vomitingforth floodsof poison."32Galland was followed by Ramus's most relentless enemy,Jacques Charpentier,who, togetherwith his friend, Marc-AntoineMuret, criticizedthe Dialecticae institutiones and resistedthe union of rhetoricand philosophy. Unlike Dolet, Ramus was careful not to mix religious speculation with his commentarieson Cicero's philosophical works. When he lectured on the SomniumScipionis and hinted, darkly enough, that the rest of Cicero's Republic was doubtlesskeptwell hidden by superstitious men, he used the occasion not to discuss problems of the afterlife but to apply his practical method to physical science. The verynomenclatureused in astronomy, he said, was the product of the scholastic mind and suited only for "altercationesscholasticae." But Ramus's colleague, Adrien Turnebe, did not object to metaphysical speculation in his criticismof the logician's commentarieson Cicero's De fato and De legibus but ratherto the distortions involvedin the applicationof Ramus's interpretative system. In thiscontextTurnebe branded Ramus with the epithetusuarius, meaning that he had exploited Cicero to illustratehis method and had no proprietary claim to the Ciceronian canon. Ramus seemed close to asserting such a demand. Afterrereadingthe Brutus on famous orators,he published in 1557 a number of his lecturesunder the titleCiceronianus. Here he identified himself with the father of eloquence and was so contemptuous of earlier controversiesand commentaries that he labeled them "patchwork quilts of rags" (panniculorum centones) .
In the religiouswars of the 1560s Ramus, a declared ifirregular Calvinist,fled fromParis, leaving the fieldto his enemies. Meanwhile, Denis Lambin, successor to Turnebe as professor of Greek at the College Royal in 1566, proceeded with his edition of Cicero's Operaomnia in unyieldingopposition to Ramist influence. Henri Estienne,whose revisedversionof the Ciceronian lexicon composed by his father,Robert, was completed by Lambin's index in 1568, returnedto the traditionof Poliziano and Erasmus and satirized Mario Nizzoli, the leader of the old-styleItalian Ciceronians. Estienne also drew attention to the rising star of Justus Lipsius, who with Marc-Antoine Muret, Charpentier's friend, inaugurated the age of Tacitean scholarship. Even Ramus, for whom Estienne had no sympathy,anticipated Lipsius in some respects. His angular Latin styleresembledthat of the great antiquarian, and his view of the virtueof
32 Charles Waddington, Ramus (Pierrede la Ramie): Sa vie,ses icrits, etses opinions (Paris, 1885), 50-52, 94. For a list of Ramus's commnentaries, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 38. Several of these commentaries, together with Brutinaequaestiones and De studiisphilosophiae et eloquentiae conwere published in 1575 in the posthumous collection edited by Freigius, Ramus's disciple at Fribourg; jugendis, see note 30, above. Scipionisex sextolibrode republica M. Tullii Ciceronis PetriRamri 33Ramus, Somnium Veromandue praelectionibus explicatum (Paris, 1546), 26v, Ad Tumebidisputatio ad librum Ciceronis defatoadversus quemdam qui nonsolumlogicus esse, verumetiaam dialecticus haberivult(Paris, 1554), 27, and P Ramri regiieloquentiae etphilosophiae professoris Ciceronianus ad Carolum Lotharingum Cardinalem (Paris, 1557), unpaginated dedication. For an account of the exchanges between Turnebe and Ramus, see Ong, Ramusand Talon Inventory, 289-94.
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prudence in the orator touched, as Bude had formerly done, upon a theme that Lipsius later expanded.34Ramus met his death in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day legend has it by Charpentier'sconniving-while Estienne continued a stylistic debate that became increasingly irrelevant.In the religiouswars the burden of intellectualdebate shifted and philosophyto politics fromrhetoric and Tacitus suddenly assumed a new dimension. and history, in Jean Bodin's Methodus hisadfacilemcognitionem in toriarum 1566: "It is truethat on account of his unpolished manner of speaking Tacitus is usually repudiated by those who prefer the lightertrifles of grammarians to the more serious accounts of those who have spent the whole of their lives in public affairs."Bodin reproached Alciato forquibbling about the style ofTacitus and remarkedthat thosewho criticizedTacitus forplain writingwere like Christians attackingJerome for being a Ciceronian. In contrast to Ammianus Marcellinus, Tacitus had "maintained the dignityof Roman speech." He ranked with the great historians of antiquity Polybius,Thucydides, Xenophon, and Caesar-for like them he revealed "the causes of things,the origins, the progress,the inclinations,all the plans of everyone, the sayings and the deeds at theirjust weight." Influenced by Ramus and disillusionedwith legal humanistattitudes,Bodin set out in his Methodus to deduce the principlesof governmentfroma comparativistapproach to history. If he differed fromBude in this respect,he repeated Bude's observationthat formen of affairs historywas the essentialmeans of acquiring political prudence. Cicero, however,did not appeal to Bodin. He accused Cicero of being digressive, refutedhis beliefin a governmentof mixed forms, and decried the republican and democratic values he discerned in Cicero's political thinking."Cicero's definitionof the state," he wrote,"as a group of men associated forthe sake of livingwell indicates the best objective indeed, but it does not indicate the power and nature of the institution." He also assailed another Ciceronian account of the commonwealth as "the union of several associationsunder an approved law fora common advantage." Bodin's preferenceforstrongmonarchy led him to distortTacitus's acceptance of the principateas the necessaryconsequence of the decay of republican virtue, and to see the historian as approving undivided authority by "It is not only salutary,as Tacitus wrote,but also necessaryin the preference: administration of greataffairs that power should restentirely with one man."35 Another admirer of Tacitus, and one who described him as "a good author, and as serious and reliable as any,"3" was Montaigne's friend Etienne de la Boetie. His Discoursde la servitude volontaire was completed about 1550 on the model of a classical indictmentof tyranny, but it was not published until after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when it was pressed into the service of
de la critique, 189-90, 330; Dubois, Conception de I'histoire en France,250; and Ong, 344Jehasse, La Renaissance Ramus-Method and theDecay ofDlialogue, 246. Henri Estienne's Pseudo-Cicero appeared in 1577, and his Nizoliodidasculusin 1578; see Scott, Controversies overtheImitation of Cicero,105. 3r Bodin, Method for theEasy Comprehension ofHistory, 70, 83, 73, 17, 158, 272. $' La Boetie, Discoursde la servitude volontaire (1574), ed. Paul Bonnefon (Paris, 1922), 83.
THE NEW TONE WAS EXPLICIT
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Huguenot propaganda against the monarchy.37 Although he esteemed Tacitus as much as Bodin, La Boetie interpreted him quite differently and cited him in condemnation of the many crimesof the Julio-Claudian dynasty.Interestingly enough, the passage where he particularlypraised the meritsof the historian was as scathingof theplebssordida as it was of Nero, who had so corruptedthem that theymourned his death. A more celebrated workthat used Tacitus against monarchical absolutism was Francois Hotman's Francogallia, composed largely in the late 1560s and first published in 1573. Yet among the greatestachievements of Hotman's early career were his massive textual commentarieson the orationsand letters of Cicero. His major collectionof observationsupon Cicero's forensic pleadings had appeared as early as 1554. The statureof his scholarship in thisrespectmay be judged fromthe pride of place given his commentsin the Cologne compendium of Cicero's speeches in 1685 and his remarkson the Episet ad Quintum tolaead Brutum in the composite edition of Gronovius in fratrem 1725.38Consciously or unconsciously,the political demands of the civil wars bent the objectivityof scholars. Hotman made selectiveuse of both Cicero and Tacitus as allies in his cause. The French situationresembledthat in Germany at the beginningof the century,when humanists such as Conrad Celtis and Ulrich von Hutten enlisted Tacitus's Germania in the cause of patriotismand resurrected Arminiusfromthe darkness of the Teutoberger Wald. The Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus had imposed a more scholarlyview with his edition of Tacitus's worksin 1532, which surpassedeven Alciato's in accuracy.39 Now the French began to examine Tacitus forthe light he might shed upon the political practices of theirancestors,the Franks, and such relevance as they might have forthe sixteenth-centuryconstitution. Although Hotman had made his name as a historianof Roman law, he came to see the tribal customs of the Germanic Franks as more importantto Frenchmen than Roman jurisprudence.When Bodin was writing his Methodus in the interval between the civil wars of the 1560s, Hotman was preparing both his Anti-Tribonian and, with the help of the Beatus edition of his Tacitus, earlyoutline of the history of the Francogallic constitution. The Germaniawas used by otherhistorians and polemicistswritingin thisperiod,such as Etienne Pasquier and Jean du Tillet, although their views of French government were verydifferent fromHotman's.Y Their argumentswere complicated by a debate about whetherthe Franks had been Teutons or migrantCelts and about the relative meritsof Gaulois and Frankish customs. When these controversies were initiatedin the previous decade Ramus had been a leading Gallicist and Charles du Moulin an early advocate of Germanism.4' Bodin and continued these opposing traditions. Hotman, respectively,
" The Discoursfirstappeared in the second of the Dialogi ab EusebioPhiladelphio(or Reveille-Matin) in 1574 and was reprintedin the various editions of Simon Goulart's Memoires de l'estatde Francesous CharlesNeufrsme (1576-79). 38 Hotman, Francogallia byFrancoisHotman(1573), ed. Ralph E. Giesey and J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge, 1972), 38-52; and Cicero, Marci Tullii Ciceronis orationum selecta(Cologne, 1685), and M. Tullii Cicecommentaria ad Quantum ronis epistolarum fratrem et ad Brutum (The Hague, 1725). '9 Schellhase, Tacitusin Renaissance Political Thought, 37-47, 61-65. 4 Hotman, Francogallia, 22. 41 Ibid., 13; and Ramus, Liberde moribus Gallorum veterum (Paris, 1559).
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appeared in 1573 and went through massive revision When the Francogallia and expansion in subsequent editions,the scholarlyintentionsof the draftbegun in the 1560s took second place to the political needs of the later period. Tacitus and Cicero were invoked in tandem: the firstto reveal the primitive and chose kings ex nobilitate Franks as the authors of libertywho elected theirthe second to extoll the meritsof mixed government theirwar chiefsex virtute; taken by Cicero lexesto, and repeatedlyto stressthe doctrinesaluspopulisuprema For all his Ciceronian fromthe Twelve Tables and described in De legibus.42 scholarship,Hotman overlooked a vital referencethat would have helped his of the German Francones. The anticase, the mention in Epistolaead Atticum quarian Claude Fauchet took pride in pointing this out. He agreed with Hotof the Franks with the Sicambrians of Baman on the possible identification of to monarchical authority, he held the references tavia, but, more sympathetic on royal power than Tacitus to Germanic tribal kingshipto be less restrictive Hotman had claimed.43 Other Huguenot theorists of resistancemade less use of Tacitus than did HotTheodore de des magistrats cited Cicero. In Du droit man, but they frequently to a passage that Seneca had quoted fromthe missingbooks of De Beze referred to the effect that even under the early Roman kingsfinalappeals could republica be made to popular assemblies.Similar use of thisexample was made in Francoin Beze drew the attentionof his readers to a section describingtyranny gallia.44 Cicero's De officiis, where it was held that in the last resortit was the duty of a son to accuse a fatherwho threatenedthe safetyof the state through tyranny. on many occasions to demtyrannos cited De offJii's contra The author of Vindiciae respectthe law, and onstratethat those in authority had to protecttruereligion, As in Du droit act forthe welfareof the people who had placed them in office. des magistrats in definingthe nature of tyrCicero was invoked to greatesteffect anny. Rulers who betrayed their trustor broke theircontract with those who had created them to govern became enemies of the people, committedtreason politiques The Discours against the commonwealth,and ought to be punished.45 Du des diverses a Huguenot tract rather less known than Francogallia, puissances, droit desmagistrats, seems to have been inspiredby Cicontra tyrannos, or Vindiciae ceronian concepts in its attemptto adapt principlesof civic humanism to secuwas the workmost oftencited in the lar resistancetheory.Once again, De offwiiis
text.46
42
43 44
Hotman, Francogallia, 208, 294, 296, 300, 342, 414, 450. 1 (Paris, 1590): 29v, 30r. Fauchet, Oeuvres, Beze, Du droit des magistrats (1574), ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Geneva, 1971), 25; and Hotman, Francogallia,
300.
45 Beze, Du droit des magistrats, 47-48; and Cicero, De officiis, ed. H. A. Holden (Cambridge, 1899), 3: 23, 90 (p. 127). And [Mornay] Vindiciae contra ... Stephano Iunio BrutoCelta Auctore (n.p., 1580), 28-29, 75, 105, tyrannos 109, 121-22, 156, 179, 212, 215-16. Only one Ciceronian allusion in the Vindi'ciae contra was not drawn tyrannos fromDe officiis but came fromCicero's ParadoxaStoicorum instead; ibid., 179. 4 Discours politiques des diverses puissance establies de Dieu au monde (1574) in Goulart's Mbnoires de l'estatde France sous CharlesNeufiesme, 3 ("Meidelbourg," 1579): 147v, 213r. For some definitionsof tyrannyfromCicero often employed in resistance theory,see ibid., 165r, 167r (referencesto SecondPhilippics),168v (De officiis, 1: 8, 26 [p. that Beze cited in Du droit des magistrats; see De offciis, 3: 23, 90 [p. 127]; 12]), 177v (the passage fromDe offciis and note 45, above). The author also referred to Tacitus. I am indebted to Sarah H. Madden fordrawing my attention to the Ciceronian tenor of this important and neglected tract.
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generallyconfinedtheiruse of Tacitus Apart fromHotman, Huguenot writers Cicero seemed an appropriatesource forthe defito historicalexemplification.47 Those of moderate persuasion, nitionof tyranny and Tacitus forits illustration. were even more inand religioustoleration, who supportedboth royal authority clined to see Tacitus's Annalesand Historiaeas useful sourcebooks, especially and Machiavellians when they found themselves opposing alleged flatterers around the throne.Such was the case with the ProtestantmagistrateInnocent Gentillet,who, while he was no monarchomach,shared the xenophobic Huguenot view that the crown had been corruptedby Italian influencein general and made much of flatMachiavelli in particular.Gentillet'sDiscours contre Machiavel He quoted Tactery, deceit, and treasonunder Tiberius fromTacitus's Annales. itus's versionof the speech of the jurist Gaius Ateius Capito that the emperor should not pardon the technical treasonof Lucius Ennius because the "laws deto sire that in such crimesof treason the least suspicion and appearance suffice of the state that one convictthe accused, and it is in the greatinterest and utility who has attemptedanything, however slight,against the rulershould be rigorously punished."48Capito's words came close to genuinely Machiavellian reasoning, but Gentillet,who was so accustomed to distortingMachiavelli's prewhen he saw it, d'etat cepts that he' could not recognize a true instance of raison Gentillet never was concerned only to criticizea piece of hypocriticalflattery. accused Tacitus of being a precursorof Machiavelli. The Roman historian could still be seen in La Boetie's image of the exposer of tyrants, not the exponent of tyranny. Jean Bodin, as we have seen, was an admirerof Tacitus not merelyas a historian of causes and motivesbut also as an advocate of royal authority.His Six de la Ripublique, contre Machiavel, livres published in the same year as the Discours was also criticalof Machiavellians and was aimed, besides,at the Huguenot theoristsof resistancewho themselvescondemned the Florentine.At the beginning of his new book Bodin definedthe commonwealth as "a lawful governmentof several families and what they hold in common, together with sovereign cited fromCicero in the power." This sounded reminiscentof the definitions but the addition of sovereignty in the world. made all the difference Methodus, With sovereignty describedas absolute, with perpetual and indivisiblelaw-making power located in the French crown, Bodin went one betterthan the monarchomach collectivesovereignty of the people, exercised negativelyto restrain or disciplinethe king.49 Like Gentillet,Bodin saw no resemblancebetween Tacwithoutrecogitus and Machiavelli, and he, too, used passages fromthe Annales Tiberius was the subject of several critical nizing an affiliation with The Prince. in Six livres references de la RPpublique, while Bodin alluded to Sejanus as an example of the useful royal technique of diverting discontent toward a ty47For example, see [Mornay] Vindiciae contra politiques, 165r, 182v. tyrannos,141; and Discours 48 Gentillet, Discourscontre Machiavel (1576), ed. A. d'Ancrea and P. D. Stewart (Florence, 1974), 77; and Tacitus, Annales,3: 70. For other relevant allusions to Tacitus, see Gentillet, Discourscontre Machiavel,98, 101, 102, 163, 197. 49J. H. M. Salrnon, "Bodin and the Monarchomachs," in Horst Denzer, ed., Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung (Munich, 1973), 359-78.
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rannical minister."In this passage Bodin did not hesitate to call Tiberius himselfa tyrant, but he went on to cite Cicero, first, on the futility of abolishing the good with the bad in attemptingto erase a tyrant's memoryafterhis death and, a member of a tyrant'scouncil during the second, on the dilemma confronting considerationof some profitablelaw. Tacitus was also called in on many occasions in Six livres de la Republique to sustain erudite references to such miscellaneous issues as Roman paternal authority, the chastityof the ancient Germans, and the Parthian custom of swearingalliances in blood. Except fora new rebuttal of the theoryof mixed forms of government, Cicero was also employed more as a source of historicalillustration than of evaluativejudgment. His lettersand speeches, togetherwith De offiiis and De finibus, were cited over thirty times on matters such as the family,citizenship, usury, and the role of magistrates." Bodin was too conscious of his own originality to require authoritiesto buttress his theoreticalviewpoint.The architectof politique absolutism used Cicero and Tacitus indiscriminately as a grab-bag of information. de la Republique in French,although he turned it Bodin chose to writeSix livres into Latin in 1586, and the issues of Latin eloquence and literary stylewere irrelevantto his treatise.As more emphasis in political dialogue was placed upon the vernacular,a number of French translations of Tacitus and Cicero began to appear. Mode could still be important,however,to a translator. In 1575 Blaise de VigenZere published a composite volume in French containing part of TacHis declared purpose in placing thesethreeworksbetween one set of covers was to show how a diversity of Latin stylescould be faithfully in French. represented Vigenere,who had studied under Turnebe and Dorat, also translatedLivy and the dialogues on friendshipof Plato, Cicero, and Lucian. Claude Guillemot published a complete French versionof Germania in 1580, but it had evidently been prepared at the beginning of the Gaulois-Germanistcontroversy, for its dedication was dated 1551. The Agricola was translatedin 1574 by the Huguenot lawyer Ange Cappel, who also rendered several of Seneca's works into In 1582 Fauchet, the antiquarian, issued a complete translationof the French.53
"' Bodin, Les Six livres de la Rlpublique (Geneva, 1577), 2: 5 (p. 392). In another passage Bodin did not hesitate to follow Tacitus in observing that Tiberius took away fromthe people "l'ombre de la liberte"; ibid., 1: 6 (p. 83). " For Tacitus, see Bodin, Six livres de la Rlpublique,1: 4 (p. 47), 8 (p. 174), 5: 1 (p. 776); and, forCicero, see ibid., 1: 4 (p. 47), 2: 1 (pp. 338-39), 5: 2 (p. 802), 3: 5 (pp. 522-27). 52 Vigenere, comp., Le 7raictide Ciceron de la meilleureforme d'orateurs, le sixieme livre des commentaires de Caesar. .. et la Germnanie de Cornel'us Tacitus(Paris, 1575). Afterserving the duke of Nevers, Vigenere was employed in the French embassy in Rome and then in the officeof one of the secretariesof state. He was a prolificauthor, and among his more curious works are treatiseson comets, alchemy, and writingin cipher. Also see his translations of Plato et al., Troisdialoguesde laamitie: Le Lysis de Platon-le Laelius de Ciceron-et le Toxar's de Lucian (Paris, 1579), and of Livy, Les Dicades, 2 vols. (Paris, 1583). ' Tacitus, Discoursexcellent auquel est contenu l'assietede toute les moeurs, etfafondefaire les I'Alemaaigne, coustumes, habitans en icelle,trans. Claude Guillemot (Paris, 1580), and La Vie dejules Agricola, trans. Ange Cappel (n.p., n.d. [dedication dated 15741). Cappel's brotherGuillaume wrote a poem forthe Agricola in honor of Ange and addressed it to Theodore de Bze. Guillaume, who joined the Catholic League, was also a translatorof Machiavelli. Another brother,Louis, was a professor of theology at the new Universityof Leyden, where he was a colleague of Lipsius. A fourthbrother,Jacques, published a work in defense of Bartolus against Valla. Ange Cappel was an ardent reformerof legal procedures and a confidant of Sully. Descended from an eminent magistrate in the parlement of Paris, this extraordinaryfamilyseems to representall of the intellectual threads incorporated in this paper.
itus'sGernania, thesixthbookofCaesar's Commentaries, and Cicero'sDe oratore.52
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worksof Tacitus, incorporating that Etienne de la Planche parts of the Annales had already turned into French.54 Among the more remarkable translatorsof Cicero at thistime was the strangefigureof Guy le Fevre de la Boderie, remembered forhis Syriac New Testament, his Chaldean grammar,his refutation of Islam, and his translationsof Ficino and Giovanni Pico. Not surprisingly, he chose to publish Cicero's De natura in French in 1581.55 deorum
among French readers and the of theorists resistance, together with theircritics, managed to set him beside Cicero in supportof theircontentions, the two greatestTaciteans of the centuryMarc-Antoine Muret and Joost Lips, Muretus and Lipsius-were laying the foundationsfor the triumphof their idol. Both were concerned with elegance and accuracy in Latin style;both began as Ciceronians and, afterchanging the focus of their attention to Tacitus, returnedto Cicero with new insight; and both found the timesin which Tacitus had lived a betteranalogue forthe troubles the monarchiesof Europe were experiencingin theirown day than was the age of Cicero. It was in part because of their joint perceptionthat a new literary mode was to be accompanied by a shiftin the mode of political discourse. As a youth Muret was an admirerof Erasmus's critic Jules-CesarScaliger. His eruditionand the brilliance of his own Latin stylesecured him lectureshipsat several French universities, including Paris, where he was a member of Charpentier'santi-Ramist group, and Bordeaux, where he may have tutored Montaigne. Charges of heresyand sodomy caused him to take refugein Italy. At Venice in 1557 he dedicated to the doge a commentaryon Cicero's speeches against Catiline, and adopted so ultra-Ciceroniana stance that he addressed Mocenigo, "It is extraordinary to see how these men, who in our own and our father'smemorywanted to be called Ciceronians,could come out with so many barbarous expressionsand defectiveconstructions taken fromthe corrupt texts they consulted."56 Typical of Muret's academic showmanship was his laying a trap forhis rivals when theyattended his lecturesin the hope he would uttera phrase not in Cicero's canon. He put carefulstress on a number of words that he knew to be contained in Cicero's worksbut that had been inadvertently omitted fromthe great lexicon prepared by Nizzoli. Muret was a professor in Rome for twenty-one years,until shortly beforehis death in 1585. When he began his series of lectureson Tacitus in 1580 his enthusiasm for his subject was so great
WHILE TACITUS WAS INCREASING IN POPULARITY
5 Tacitus, Les Oeuvres de C. Cornelius Tacitus,trans. Claude Fauchet (Paris, 1582). Le Dialogue des orateurs was added to the edition of 1584-85. A third edition was published in 1594. Tacitus's Annalesalso entered France through Guicciardini's Storiad'Italia, which was deeply influenced by them. French editions of Guicciardini's historywere published in 1568 and 1577; see Vincenzo Luciani, Francesco Guicciardini e la fortuna dell'operasua (Florence, 1949), 32, 398. Guicciardini's Ricordi, containing allusions to Tacitus, appeared in French in 1576; see Guicciardini, Plusieurs adviset conseils de Franfois Guicciardin tant pourles affaires d'estatqueprivies(Paris, 1576). I am indebted to Lionel A. McKenzie for this point. Cicero, De la nature des dieux,trans. Guy le Fevre de la Boderie (Paris, 1581). In his Oriental interestsand his religious synchretismLa Boderie was a followerof Guillaume Postel. " Muret, M. Antonii Muretiad Leonardum Mocenicum Patricium Venetum, orationum Ciceronis in Catalinamexplicatio (Venice, 1557), iii.
France Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century
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to be the queen of the humanities.57 He had a utilitarthat he declared history ian historyin mind, and Tacitus was its high priest.The lessons that Tacitus taught applied to the currentage. While Muret was cautious enough to declare that Europe had no contemporarytyrantsto compare with Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero as described in the Annales, he believed "it profitableforus to know how good and prudent men managed theirlives under them,how and how far theytoleratedand dissimulatedtheirvices.... Those who do not know how to connive at such thingsnot only bringthemselves into danger but oftenmake the When the lectureson Tacitus had been completed,Muret veryprincesworse."58 turned back to Cicero and used Epistolae ad Atticum as his text.The Cicero that from now emerged the confidencesimparted to his closest friendwas a devious statesmanin whom ambition vied with prudence. The only use foreloquence in modern times,Muret concluded, was in the writingof letters.59 There is no space here to followin detail the academic peregrinations of Lipsius fromJena to Leyden to Louvain or his religiousapostasies among Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism. He was first known not only as a Ciceronian scholar but also as a supreme Ciceronian stylist. In later years he recalled his youthfulenthusiasm and continuing,if modified,affection for Cicero in a piece of Latin that is almost a parody of the Tacitean mode: "Ciceronem amo. Olim etiam imitatus sum: alius mihi sensus nunc viro. Asianae dapes non ad meum gustum,Atticae dapes."60 But, if Lipsius altered his estimateof Cicero's he remained consistent in his beliefthat Cicero's principal meritin politics style, was the advocacy of prudence. This was the virtuehe commended when dedilectureson Cicero to Cardinal Granvelle before settingout for cating his first Rome in 1567.61 In Rome he met Muret and began his careerof Tacitean scholarship, in which the concept of prudence developed into a kind of short-hand forpolitical necessity, guarded by the moral reservations of the individual. The two aspects of prudence,the privateand the public, and the two fieldsof its exemplification, historyand rhetoric, had been leftdisjoined by Bud'e. Now public and privateprudence were directly associated, and politicsreplaced rhetoric as the second area in which prudence could be learned and applied. The connectionshad already been implicitin Cicero and the Stoic contextof the orator's thought.The intellectualclimate of the religiouswars in France and the Netherlands had at first encouraged the application of Ciceronian rhetoricto political debate, but as the wars intensified the Ciceronian emphasis upon the active participation of the citizen no longer seemed appropriate. The helpI (Leyden, 1789): iii. For Muret'sshowmanship, 5 Muret,M Antonii Mureti opera also see J. E. omnia, A History ofClassical Scholarship Sandys, (Cambridge, 1908), 150. 38 Croll,Style, andRhythm, 152. Rhetoric, Mureti 9 Muret, opera omnia, oratioxvi, 318-25. DespitehisnewviewofCiceroand hiscontempt forultraMuretpaid tribute Ciceronians, to Sadoleto,Bembo,and Longueilin thislecture. "0 "I loveCicero.Formerly I even imitated him.Now as a man I have othertastes. Asian feasts are not to myliking. Attic onesare." Lipsius, as quotedin Clarke,"Non HominisNomensed Eloquentiae," 95. For brief of Lipsius'slife, outlines withcomments together upon his ideas,see V. A. Nordman, "Justus Lipsiusals Geschichtsforscher und Geschichtslehrer," Suomalainen tiedeakatemia Toimituksia Academiae Fennicae), ser. B, (Annales 28 (1932): 1-101;JasonLewisSaunders,justus Lipsius: ThePhilosophy ofRenaissance Stoict'sm (New York,1955); and Knud Banning,Justus Lipsius (Copenhagen, 1975). La Renaissance 6' Jehasse, dela critique, 208. LipsiuscitedCiceroand Tacitus together on prudence; see Lipsius,Politicomum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex(Leyden,1589),212.
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lessnessof the individual in face of forceshe could not controlsuggestedresignation or withdrawal,and the tenetsof Senecan neo-Stoicismprovided the moral that enabled him to preservehis dignityand integrity. fortitude In thisway neoStoicism conjoined the two kinds of prudence, encouraged the politicsof necessity,and elevated historyas the record of pragmatic realism and the source of individual consolation. The transformed Cicero still had a role to play in this new structure, but among classical authors Tacitus now occupied the center of the stage. Lipsius personified this intellectualshiftand popularized the change in literary mode throughwhich it was expressed.In France he had his counterparts or disciples in Montaigne, Guillaume du Vair, and Pierre Charron. Despite his desireforscholarlywithdrawal,Lipsius could not ignorethe blood bath in his own countryand across the bordersto the south. When he lectured on Tacitus at Jena in the year of the St. Bartholomew'sDay Massacre, he compared the Duke of Alba with Tiberius.6" Three yearslater appeared the first version of his masterlyedition of the worksof Tacitus, which he refinedand improved in subsequent editions until his death in 1606. Also published in 1575, Lipsius's Antiquae lectiones confirmedthe revisionof his view of Cicero, although here he turned to Plautus and Seneca, ratherthan to Tacitus, forliterarymodels. In the next decade came his neo-Stoic De constantia (1584) and his political handbook based extensivelyupon Tacitus, Politicorum librisex (1589). A statement of expediency in the latterwork-that the tolerationof two religionsinside one state was inconceivable and that one of them must be exterminated ense etigne-caused indignationat Leyden but was evidentlyignoredby Calvinists at La Rochelle, who printed a French translationthere in 1590.63Lipsius continued to publish studies of Roman antiquities and earned equal rank with Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger in the scholarly"triumvirate" of the age, though Casaubon and Scaliger did not see eye to eye with Lipsius in his role of Sospitator Taciti. Casaubon denounced Tacitus as a specialist in shame and slighted his commentatorby saying that anyone who thoughtTacitus a guide to practical politicswas eitheraccusing kingsof being tyrants or teaching them how to become so. Scaliger,with an acerbityreminiscent of his father, wrotethat "Lipsius is the cause that many have now littlerespectforCicero, whose stylehe esteems about as much as I do his own." Yet in literarymattersLipsius became something of a relativist. One of his most readable pieces was a satire,published in 1581, in which he described a dream where he witnessed the Roman senate prosecutinga group of audacious philologistswho sought to correct ancient textsby theirown standards.64
62 Arnaldo Momigliano, "The First Political Commentary on Tacitus," in his Essays in Ancient and Modem Historiography (Oxford, 1977), 222-24; this essay was firstpublished in theJournalof RomanStudies,37 (1947): 91-10 1. The later version includes as an appendix a reprintof Momigliano's review of Jose Ruysschaert,Juste Lipse et les Annalesde Tacite (Louvain, 1949), itselfa valuable work on the editorial methods of Lipsius. In the review Momigliano discussed whether the oration in question was actually delivered by Lipsius at Jena in 1572 and pointed out that Lipsius also remarked in the oration that Tacitus was more relevant to his own times than were Sallust and Livy. Also see Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique, 213. (B Lipsius, Les six liures des politiques, ou Doctrine civilede IustusLipsius,trans. Charles le Ber sieur de Malassis (La Rochelle, 1590). "" Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique, 394-96; Saunders, JustusLipsius,65; and J. Ijsewijn, "Neo-Latin Satire: and SatyraMenippea,"in Bolgar, Classical Influences Sermo on EuropeanCulture, A.D. 1500-1700, 49.

BEFORE TIHE NEW CURRENT
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had become firmly established in France a curious echo of that phase of Huguenot resistancetheorythat had enrolled Cicero and Tacitus togetherunder its banners sounded in the propaganda of the Catholic League. The most weightyideological opponent of the last Valois and the first Bourbon kingswas Jean Boucher, doctor of the Sorbonne and associate of the revolutionarygroup of the Sixteen. His De justa HenriciTertiiabdicatione appeared in 1589,just afterthe monarch it soughtto depose had been assassinated by a Leaguer fanatic.To illustrate the nature of tyranny Boucher cited Tacitus's judgment of Sejanus together with some of the extractsfromDe officiis, Pro Milone, Ad Brutum, and Tusculanae disputationes that formedthe corpus of humanist sources on the subject. From De amicitia he repeated Cicero's words on the climate of tyranny: "Under it therecan be no trust, no love, no kind of enduring good will: suspicion and unease lurk everywhere, and there is no place for friendship.""5 This, Boucher maintained, was precisely that atmosphere surrounding Henry of Valois and his would-be successor,Henry of Navarre. Boucher's pseudonymous colleague, "Gulielmus Rossaeus," published a better reasoned and less personal treatiseto the same effect: De justa reipublicae Christianae in reges ethaereticos impios (1590). Rossaeus cited one of Cicero's letters to Atticus and, a littlelater, the second book of De offwii's, beto establish the difference tween a king and a tyrant.Each reference to Cicero was associated with a quotation fromTacitus on the reign of Tiberius.""Another enemy of Navarre was the Leaguer publicistand parlementaire Louis Dorleans, whose humanist inclinations had been shaped by Dorat and whose first polemics forthe League were writtenin the guise of "the Catholic Englishman." Like Boucher, Dorleans fled to the Netherlandswhen Henry IV recoveredParis in 1594. He returnedin later years aftermaking his submission,and he eventuallyissued his Novaecogitationes Annalium in libros Taciti.Here Tacitus was represented not as the criticof imperial tyrannybut as the ultimate guide to prudent kingship.During his exile Dorleans had evidentlybecome a disciple of Lipsius. Formerly, he argued, it was customary"to praise the declamation of Cicero, but Tacitus is more deserving in our age." To Dorleans Tacitus had become "a floweramong authors and a prince among historians.""7 The first separate political commentaryon Tacitus was published in Paris in 1581, threeyearsbeforeNavarre had become the next heir to the French throne and the League had been revivedto oppose his claim. It was issued with the text of the first fourbooks of the Annales, and its author was a Piedmontese,Carlo
65
[Jean Boucher] De iustaHenriciTertii abdicatione e Francorum regno (1589; Lyon, 1591), 258 (mispaginated as
66 Rossaeus, De iustareipub. Christianae in reges impios ethaereticos authoritate (Paris, 1590), 17r, 18v, 22r, 22v. On the identityof Rossaeus, who used the pseudonym only in the 1592 Antwerp edition of the work,see J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis:Francein theSixteenth Century (London, 1975), 274; and FredericJ. Baumgartner, Radical The Political Thought Reactionaries: CatholicLeague (Geneva, 1975), 145-47. The use by Rossaeus of oftheFrench is very like that of the French monarchomachs; see pages 318-19, above. He is probably Cicero's De officiis on several directlyindebted, however, to the Scottish monarchomach, George Buchanan, to whom he referred occasions with surprisingrespect. Rossaeus's citation fromDe officiis is the same as Buchanan's: Buchanan, De iureregni apud Scotos(1579; n.p., 1680), 28. And see Cicero, De officiis, 2: 12, 41 (p. 75). 67 Dorleans Novaecogitatrones in libros Annalium (Paris, 1622), unpaginated dedication. Corneli Taciti qui extant
266).
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Pasquale.68 He was a protegeof the statesmanand man of letters, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, a widely respectedpopularizer of Seneca. Pasquale turnedto Seneca in his prefaceto the reader when he wished to commend those who, as Tacitus had shown, knew how to respond to unexpected adversityand even to death. He used Seneca, too, to defend the enigmaticbrevity of the historian'sstyle,remarkingthat language responded to changes in public attitudes.69 Lipsius was popularizing gnomic political utteranceson the Tacitean model, and when Passeu axquale republished his commentaryin 1600 he chose to retitleit Gnomae iomata politicaex Tacito.70 No single writer better illustrates the shift in moral attitudes, the new and the altered relationship mode of discoursethat displaced humanistrhetoric, two books of his between Cicero and Tacitus than does Montaigne in the first Essais, which were published in 1580, and then in theirrevised form,together with the third book, in 1588. Montaigne developed his own early Stoicism through Seneca and Plutarch quite independentlyof Lipsius, and only after Lipsius praised his essays in 1583 did they begin to correspond.Indeed, apart fromtwo mentionsof Lipsius in the thirdbook, Montaigne's acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to Sospitator Tacitiwere included only in the revisionsof the essays made after1588.71 By his own account Montaigne first paid close attentionto Tacitus soon afterthe time that Bodin praised the historianin the to Tacitus in the essaysof 1580, inMethodus. mostof the references Nevertheless, cluding even the passage on the death of Seneca, were indirectlyacquired throughBodin's work and othersources.Montaigne was in Rome when Muret lectured on Tacitus in the winter of 1580-81. He reread Tacitus when composing the thirdbook, and he offered his most important judgments upon him in "De l'art de conferer."He noted how Tacitus revealed the effects that the crueltyof the emperors produced upon their subjects, and declared that this kind of material offeredmore insightsthan standard accounts of battles and high mattersof state: "This type of history is by far the most useful:public affairsdepend more upon the whim of fortune, private ones upon our own conduct." Montaigne found more preceptsand judgments than narrationin Tacitus: "It is a seed-bed of ethical and political discoursesforthe use and ornament of thosewho have statusin the management of the world."72 As Bodin and Muret had done, the essayistdefended Tacitus forhis adherence to the state religion. Like Lipsius, Montaigne held it to be the duty of a citizen to follow the
"t Momigliano, "The First Political Commentary on Tacitus," 205-29.
`9 Pasquale, "Genus dicendi, ut ait Seneca, imitaturpublicos mores," in Tacitus, C. ComeliiTacitiEquitis Romaniab excessu Divi Augusti Annalium libriquatuor priores et in hos observationes Caroli Paschali cuneatis (Paris, 1581), unpaginated preface to the reader. 70 See Lipsius's own collection of Tacitean and other political axioms, IustiLipsii monita etexempla politicalibri et vitiaprincipum duo,qui virtutes spectant (Paris, 1605). Once again, civilis is representedas the governing prudentia concept in this volume. ' The section that followsis heavily dependent on Pierre Villey's Sources et l'ivolution des Essais de Montaigne, vol. 1: Les Sources et la chronologie des essais (Paris, 1908), 224-26 (Tacitus), 98-103 (Cicero), 214-16 (Seneca), 198-99 (Plutarch), 161-62 (Lipsius). " Montaigne, Fssais, 2: 377-78 (3: 8). (Book and chapter numbers in these and subsequent referencesto Montaigne appear in parentheses.)
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religionestablishedby law, and, while he was more toleranttoward the individual conscience than was the scholar of Leyden, he agreed with Lipsius that lack of religiousuniformity was an invitationto civil strife. Montaigne developed a stronginterestin the personalityof Tacitus, and offereda fewcriticisms, largelyin the revisionsforthe 1595 posthumousedition of the essays. Tacitus was said to conceal himselftoo much fromthe reader and even fromhimself.His judgment of individuals was occasionally at fault, and to frankness and therewere timeswhen he wronglypreferred the rulesof civility truth. Nevertheless,he was "a great personage, upright and courageous, endowed not with a superstitiousnature but philosophical and generous." The value of his history was never in doubt. No one else had managed to blend considerationof manners,attitudes,and particularmotiveswith a recordof public events.His opinions were sound, and he had taken the rightside in Roman politics.His role had been "proper in a sick and troubledstate,as ours is in the present age."73 As it might be expected fromMontaigne's humanist background,the essays to Cicero, but, on nearly every occasion where Monabounded in references taigne offered personaljudgments in the versionsof 1580 and 1588, theywere of a negativesort.Montaigne admitted that Cicero deservedhis reputationforeloquence, but that was not the author's concern in the essays. His main interest lay in moral ideas, and Cicero's were not to his taste. He made considerable use of such worksas De amicitia, De senectute, and Definibus, but he apparentlydid not study Cicero's speeches or his treatiseson rhetoric;Montaigne's references to such workswere stockones borrowedfromothersources,including the Dialogus de oratoribus of Tacitus. As a man, Montaigne found Cicero vain and untrustworthy.His harshestcomments,however,were reservedforCicero's style,which he described as "lasche et ennuyeuse."74 Cicero's work was filledwith prefaces, and digressions definitions, withoutreachingthe substance of his discourse.One could read him for an hour and come up with no more than a bag of wind. Montaigne despised both the subtleties of the grammarians and the logicchopping of the Aristotelians.Cicero, he declared, might be suitable for the schoolroomor the bar-or, indeed, to the kind of sermonwhere one could go to minutes and awake to find the same thread of argument. Cisleep for fifteen cero's artificenegated the point he wished to make. If Montaigne wanted to hear a speech on love of liberty, he preferred Brutus to Cicero, and, ifhe wished to cultivate disdain fordeath, he read Seneca beforeCicero.75 After1588, however,Montaigne's view of Cicero changed in the last respect. in metaphysicalquestions led him to see Seneca and CiHis developing interest cero as complementary, and he made considerable use of Cicero's philosophical works,especially Quaestiones academicae, Tusculanae disputationes, De natura deorum, De oficiis, De divinatione, and Definibus. Much of the scepticismof the Apologie pour
7:$ Ibid., 380, 378 (3: 8). Ibid.,1: 454 (2: 10). (The 1595 version omits lasche.) 71 Ibid., 1: 455 (2: 10), 2: 121 (2: 31).
74
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J.H M Salmon
Raymond Sebond had dropped away, and Montaigne renewed his earlier interest in the temperedand resignedStoicism of Seneca. There were aspects of Cicero, especially in De finibus, which could easily be reconciled with this stance, but Montaigne never varied his view of Cicero's rhetoric. Like Pasquale, he remembered what Seneca had writtenon the adaptation of linguisticstructure to the concerns and moral conventionsof the age. His own opinions resembled the moral and political attitudesof Seneca and Tacitus, and his mode of discourse in the vernacular was the counterpartof the new Latinity of Lipsius. Guillaume du Vair shared the attitudesof Montaigne and Lipsius on the inefficacy of the individual to affectthe capricious twistsof fortune, on the need for a resolute demeanour in personal conduct, and on the disastrous political consequences of religiousinnovation. He served in the parlement of the Catholic League, where his patriotismand his dislikeof the revolutionary element in the Catholic factionmoved him to oppose the suggestionthat the Spanish Infanta should become queen of France. Du Vair composed his treatiseon constancy during Henry IV's siege of Paris in 1590 and published it when the king finally enteredhis capital fouryears later. His workwas inspiredby Seneca and, more immediately,by Lipsius. Du Vair had writtenon Epictetus and on Stoic moral philosophyin general,but he was also an admirerof Cicero, whom he adapted to fitthe neo-Stoic mood. The futurekeeper of the seals was the author of De where he provided Cicero's ProMiloneas an example foremul'eloquencefranfaise, lation, and explained the decay of French rhetoric in termsof the loss of the old Ciceronian ideal of the union of the orator and the citizen. Despite his lament about presentevils and the powerlessness of the individual to hold back the tide, Du Vair continued to plead forthe active life.In thisvein he wroteExhortation a la viecivile, which became attached to his tracton constancy.Moreover,he was an advocate of political prudence who despised a priori political theorists: "They want to reduce political government,which depends upon particular prudence,to the general rulesof some universalscience,and in applying rules in this way where theyought to be applying exceptionstheyhave distorted judgment in everything."76 Editions of Cicero were stillbeing produced and read, based upon the Aldine versions, especially that of Paulus Manutius, and those of French scholars such as Charles Estienne and Denis Lambin.77 Yet even in the editorial process a change was evident. In 1588 thejurist Denis Godefroypublished at Lyon a revised text of Cicero's Operaomniaas prepared by Lambin. In his preface Godefroycriticizedhis predecessorforbeing too concerned with trivalities of language at the expense not only of philosophical issues but also of practical mattersof politics and individual conduct. "I have always thought,"he wrote, "that we should rather pay attention to what concerns the mores of our own
7'" Du Vair, Traiti de la constance et consolation es calamitez publiques, ed. Jacques Flach and F. Funck-Bretano (Paris, 1915), 201. The other works mentioned are Du Vair's De l'eloquencefran(ai'se (Paris, 1590) and La Saincte philosophie, la philosophie des Stoiques,manueld'Epictete, civileconversation, et plusieurs autrestraictez de pieti (Lyon, 1600). On Du Vair in general, see R. Radouant, Guillaume du Vair: L'Hommeet lorateur(Paris, 1909); and L. Zanta, La Renaissance du Stoicisme au XVF siele (Paris, 1914). 77 Villey, Sources et l'lvolution des Essais de Montaigne, 102-03.
329
than wear away childishlythis fleeting, country,familylife,and government, with the formsof letters:it is more imporbrief,and miserable lifein wrestling tant to live well and wiselythan to learn to speak too scrupulouslyand exactly." In consequence, Godefroyomitted many of Lambin's philological notes. Godefroyhad been trained at Louvain as a Ramist and had later become a Calvinist.ImmediatelyaftereditingCicero, in his Genevan place of exile, he set to work on the textual emendation of Seneca's philosophical works,not by the comparison of manuscriptsbut ratherby conjecture.Like his edition of the Corin later genhis edition of Cicero went throughmany reprintings pusjuris civilis, erations.It was dedicated to Elector FrederickWilliam IV, who became Godefroy'spatron. He was invited by the jurist to pay less attentionto examples of Cicero's elegance than to Cicero's practical precepts,which should be applied to and the reformation of public morals.78 government Times were indeed changing. Montaigne and Pasquier both remarked that Ciceronian eloquence could only apply wherethe vulgar had power: it was irrelMenippe'e, the Politique riposte to the quasi-demoevant in France. The Satyre cratic propaganda of the league, had its mostseriousspokesman,Daubray, refer to a page of Tacitean historyand to Tacitus himself as "an evangelist to There was a hinthere that Tacitus could be a source of amoral counsel, some."79 which was also the view of Giovanni Botero,a Savoyard diplomat who had viswork directly ited Paris in 1585. Botero's Della Ragiondi Stato(1589) was the first to associate Tacitus with Machiavelli, and it was published in French translation in 1599.8? Such an opinion long remained uncommon in France. The Theodore-Agripped'Aubigne, who upheld an inHuguenot poet and historian, maitre.81 moral positionin his lateryears,describedTacitus as mon Scipione tensely Machiavelli's republicanismand composed AmmiratoinvokedTacitus to refute on Tacito(1594) as a counter to Machiavelli's Discourses his Discorsi sopraCornelio Livy.Ammiratosaw Tacitus as the supremeadvocate of political prudence.Jean Baudouin, who provided a new French version of the works of Tacitus, also translated Ammirato's Discorsi.Evidently he did not expect his readers to be shocked by the Italian's personal explanation: "If I gave here preceptsand lesfor me to record the words of holy sons on how to dissimulate,it is sufficient where it is said that even God dissimulatesthe sins of men so that they scripture may be converted."82 Even ifMachiavelli was stillregardedwith some suspicion in France, political was becoming an accepted prudence, soon to be linked with reason of state,83
78 Cicero, M Tull/iCiceronis operaomnia, praeter hactenus vulgatam DionysiiLambinieditionem, accesserunt D. Goth1 (Lyon, 1588): unpaginated dedication and preface to the reader. ofredi, 7 Menippee,1 (Ratisbon, 1726): 146-47. On the background of the Satyre see J. H. M. Salmon, Menippee, "French Satire in the Late Sixteenth Century," Sixteenth-Century 6 (1975): 57-88. Journal, 80 Schellhase, Tacitusin Renaissance Political Thought, 124. 81 Thuau, Raisond'etat etpens&e politique a l'epoque de Richelzeu, 35; and Tacitus, Les Oeuvres de C. Corn.Tacitus... avecdes discours politiques by Ammirato, ed. and trans. Jean Baudouin (Paris, 1628), Discours(separately paginated), 10. On Ammirato, see Schellhase, Tacitusin Renaissance Political Thought, 142-45. 82 Botero, Raison et gouvernement d'etat(Paris, 1599). 8 On the affiliation between such termsas prudence, interest, and reason of state, see Anna Maria Battista, "Morale 'privee' et utilitarismepolitique en France au XVIIV siecle," in Roman Schnur, ed., Staatsrason: Studien
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part of the ideology of monarchical absolutism. Pierre Charron, the disciple of Montaigne, representsthe completion of the shiftin moral philosophy. The third book of Charron's De la sagessediscussed "the fourmoral virtuesof prudence,justice, strength, and temperance." Strength(force) had been substituted for the traditional fortitude, and prudence had replaced wisdom. Prudence, indeed, had become "the general queen, superintendent, and guide of all the othervirtues," and Cicero was cited as the interpreter of the two complementary kinds,private and public.84In actuality Tacitus and Seneca dictated the manner in which Charron interpreted Cicero. They were cited togetherto demonstratethat sovereignty requiredequity in its exerciseand should not be confused with a tyranny in which the princewas above the law. Yet the world was fullof malicious men whose treachery was wont to subvertthe state unless the prince mixed prudence withjustice and composed his cloak of both the pelt of the fox and the skinof the lion. It was in thiscontextthat one acted forthe public welfare and cited the Ciceronian maxim saluspopulisuprema lex esto.85 Cicero had counseled the statesman to be watchful,to believe nothing and guard against all eventualities,and Seneca had taught the necessityof dissembling. As Tacitus had indicated in Agricola, the prince must keep himself informedof all that happened, must never relax, and must constantlyemploy dissimulation.Many references of this kind played fastand loose with the texts they purported to cite, and the names of Tacitus, Seneca, and Cicero in the margins of Charron's book did not necessarilyimply a just reflection of what these authors had actually written. Tiberius and Vespasian joined the ranks of "great princes and wise statesmen" with Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines. Tacitus had taught that evil princes were the instrument of God's justice and must be suffered, and when Cicero had cited Greek opinions about tyrantshe had referred to those who had usurped authority, not to legitimate princes. Seneca, forhis part, had instructedthe counselor of rulersto trim his sails to fitthe wind, while Tacitus had taught him discretionnot to pry into royal secretsthat should be kept hidden.86Piety,honor,and equity were words that Charron employed at intervals, but they,like everything else, were twisted to conform with the new linguistic mode in which wisdom had become the slave of prudence.
the alternatingfortunes of Cicero and Tacitus was merelythe by-productof the religious strifeand social dislocation experienced in sixteenth-century France. Certainly,the personal lives of those whose allusions to Cicero and Tacitus have
zur Geschichte einespolitischen (Berlin, 1975), 87-119; and J. H. M. Salmon, "Rohan and Interest of Begriffs State," in ibid., 121-40. 84 Charron, De la sagesse:Troislivres (1601; Paris, 1604), 477-78, 482. On Charron in general, see J. B. Sabrie, Pierre Charron: De I'humanisme au rationalisme (Paris, 1913); and H. Busson, Le Rationalisme dans la litteraturefran,aise de la Renaissance, 1533-1601 (Paris, 1957). 85 Charron, De la sagesse,488-89. The image of the lion and the fox was not necessarily from Machiavelli: Charron could have found it in De officizs; see Cicero, De offieis,1: 13, 41 (p. 17). 86 Charron, De la sagesse,497, 526, 504.
IT WOULD BE EASY TO ASSUME that the linguisticand ideological shiftevident in
Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Centugy France
331
been traced in these pages were profoundlyaffectedby persecutionand civil war. Dolet and Ramus met violent deaths. Muret and Lipsius accommodated theiroutward creed to the places in which theyfound refuge.Among the opponentsof absolutism,Hotman and BZeze were intimately concernedwith the conduct of the Protestantcause, and Boucher and Dorleans with that of the Catholic League. Those whose opinions were in some sense Politique-Gentillet, Bodin, Du Vair, and even Montaigne were to a greateror lesser degree involved in negotiationsor administrativeresponsibilities in time of civil faction and religiousconflict. Undeniably, the emergenceof Tacitean prudence and the of Cicero owed much to the triumphof Politique compromise reinterpretation and the mutual exhaustion of Catholic and Protestantenthusiasts. Yet the wave of humanistculturein the early part of the centuryand the determinationof its Epigoni to give it practical expressionin the higher levels of the royal administrationcontained undercurrents of intellectualchange, whatever the political environment.Ciceronian rhetoricembraced too many disciplines. The debates among the philologists, the dialecticians,and the defenders of eloquence forits own sake destroyedthe unityof humanistendeavor and fostered the advance of new theoriesof politicsand history. This was the malaise afterthe reignof Francis I, which Bodin recalled as "the bitterest sense of grief that those brilliant flashesof talent which shone throughoutall France have been extinguishedin desolation and want."87Ultimately for this reason Montaigne came to professhis contempt forthe grammariansand the logicians. It was also true that war and fanaticismhad caused the humanists eitherto apor to adapt theirmoral and political ideas to inappropriateends. pear irrelevant Disillusionmentresultedin the triumphof the least virtuousof the virtues.Prudence, the art of particularity and dissimulation, emerged in both its public and its private aspects, the one to shield the arcana of the absolutiststate, the other to shelterthe citizen in the fortress of the individual mind. Attitudesto Cicero and Tacitus in sixteenth-century France reflectedthe destructionof that humanist ideal whereby a highlyeducated elite might participate in an enlightened administration.State and societystood in antithesisto one another, and the French varietyof Renaissance humanism disappeared fromintellectuallife.
87
7. Bodin, Methodfor theEasy Comprehension ofHistory,

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Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France Author(s): J. H. M. Salmon Reviewed work(s): Source: The American Historical Review, Vol.

Ciceroand Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France

model to humanIN EARLY SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Cicero seemed a perfect

MISCONCEPTIONS BORN FROM TIIE DESIRE TO SIMPLIIY

Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France

Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France

THE PUBLICATION of Erasmus's satirical dialogue, Ciceronianus, in 1528 exposed

France and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century Cicero

and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France Cicero

Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France

THE NEW TONE WAS EXPLICIT

France and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century Cicero

Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Centuwy France

itus'sGernania, thesixthbookofCaesar's Commentaries, and Cicero'sDe oratore.52

France Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century

Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century France

France and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century Cicero

France and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Century Cicero

IT WOULD BE EASY TO ASSUME that the linguisticand ideological shiftevident in

Cicero and Tacitusin Sixteenth-Centugy France

7. Bodin, Methodfor theEasy Comprehension ofHistory,

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